Examining Potential Inequalities in the Outcomes of Care Experienced Children
Beth Lee-Shield, University of Edinburgh, is doing this research project. Her aim is for her research to explore journeys of children who do well, and care journeys that may negatively impact outcomes, including not achieving in school and having poorer mental health.
What is this research about?
Care experienced children are children who are or have been in care such as foster care, residential care or kinship care. Children with care experience are at risk of poorer outcomes in different areas of their lives compared to children without care experience. However, we know that many care experienced children do not have poor outcomes.
One possible reason for differences in outcomes among care experienced children are their care journeys. Care journeys vary greatly, including experiencing different types of placements, the number of placements they may have and different amounts of time in care. There is not yet a good understanding of the relationship between these care journeys and outcomes in Scotland. We hope our research will fill this gap.
The data
This project will use securely linked, anonymised administrative data from organisations in Scotland, including:
· children’s care data (from the Scottish Government)
· education data (from the Scottish Government)
· health data (from Public Health Scotland and the Scottish Ambulance Service)
How it will help
The linking together of these datasets will enable better evidence about the relationship between care journeys and health and education outcomes for care-experienced children. This can provide more rounded insights into the lives of care-experienced children.
The findings have the potential to inform the work of The Promise Scotland and help policymakers and practitioners to understand how to best support care-experienced children and ultimately help to improve children’s lives and outcomes.
Research team
Beth Lee-Shield; Professor Morag Treanor and Professor Susan McVie
