Scotland’s Disgrace
is the name often attributed to the unfinished replica of the Parthenon in
the centre of the city . I think there is a contemporary disgrace in Scotland more immediate , all the more appalling because we have not made much of an impact on this despite
many years of effort.
That contemporary disgrace is how we handle what are now
called ‘Looked after Children ‘ ; or as a major government publication put it: ‘These are our
Bairns ‘ [ children ].
This is not just a Scottish problem, not even a UK problem. I
am willing to bet that whatever country you read this blog in things are no
better there – perhaps much worse – for those children whose live chances are
smashed at a young age because of the loss of their parents , or because those
parents fail their children .
I don’t often think of myself as easily shocked . I’ve lived
and worked in various places, posher and
poorer ; I’ve worked overseas; I’ve had
various forms of employment and self-employment , including working in prison; I
have been a city councillor for a mixed area. Through all of those experiences
I have read, watched, listened, and my reaction has rarely been that mixture of
surprise and rage that some people seem to demonstrate a lot of the time and
which decorates the front page of various newspapers every day.
Within the past few weeks I’ve filtered through my mind some
figures that came to me from very different sources and which did shock me – to
the point of outrage – is that I have been part of this failure.
The numbers above? Well first they come with a health
warning because I can’t track them down and source them in the way I would always
hope to. One set came to me from listening to an academic speaker whose work I
admire [ but these figures are contradicted by differently categorised official
data] ; the others from a BBC report that
I can’t verify.
So; these come with health warnings, and they refer to:
53 % of children in Scotland who get a set of good passes at Standard Grade
[ age 15/16 examinations ];
5% of children in care* who get the same level of passes;
2% proportion of adult population [UK ] that has or will
have some engagement with the prison system .
25% that is the proportion of people in the prison system who
have been in care.
The difficulty I have had is that consistent, comparable and
good time series data are hard to find. But the information that is officially
available and recorded tells a similar picture of bleak misfortune.
In 2009-2010 in Year 1 of our primary school system [that’s
5 year old children – remember ] we excluded from school 10x as many ‘Looked
after Children ‘as we did children from the general population and that kind of
exclusion ratio continues through each of the Primary years. It is only if they
make it into the later years of secondary that such youngsters see their prospects
of being slung out of school reduced to
as marvellous a ratio as 8:1 compared to
their peers with families.
It’s not surprising then that such children leave school
with overall outcomes [in terms of accumulated grades] at about 40%- 50% of
their peers who have family homes.
There have clearly been lots of heroic and imaginative efforts
to do something about this, particularly in the past decade. Who
cares? Scotland shows some of these efforts
But’s for us it’s not yet working and it’s not been working
through successive governments: Conservative or Labour in the UK; and here in Scotland, Lab/LibDem and Scottish
National Party governments .
We should all be ashamed and embarrassed about that, because
when the worst of circumstances arise it’s the council where we live that becomes
the Corporate Parent. It’s not just social workers – who get much of the blame –
and teachers who struggle to cope with seriously messed up kids [ even at 5 …]
it’s the entire council . And we elect them to do this for society as well as empty
our bins and maintain street lights .
If they’re failing ; so am I – and you.
*In Scotland we now use the term ‘Looked after
Children’; a classic example of renaming or recategorising a phenomenon in the hope that things will
improve.
