The chair of the body set up to monitor the delivery of The Promise is calling for a renewed focus on collecting and collating data on outcomes for Scotland’s care experienced and looked-after people, to fill a gap in understanding of what interventions actually work. It comes amid calls for the Scottish government to commit to publishing the premature death rates of all care experienced young people.

Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP Duncan Dunlop, a former youth worker and Chief Executive of Who Cares? Scotland, used his maiden speech in the Scottish parliament this month to highlight how care experienced young people have, he says, been failed.

He followed up with a letter to the Scottish government asking them to commit to publishing the premature death rates of all care experienced young people, with a mechanism to monitor progress in reducing the numbers.

In his letter, Mr Dunlop says:

“I have seen first-hand the trauma experienced by the young people in our care system. The tragic reality is that people who have been in the care system disproportionately struggle in life.

“Transforming the care system is at the root of reducing the prison population, tackling homelessness and ending the drug deaths emergency. Indeed, it is impossible to fix any of these problems without also fixing the care system.”

Earlier this year, before being elected to Holyrood, Mr Dunlop had supported MSP Willie Rennie to introduce a clause in the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill requiring Scottish ministers to lay before the Parliament an annual report on the deaths of looked-after children and those up to the age of 26 who are in receipt of a continuing care service or an aftercare service.

Lacking the evidence needed

Now, in an open letter, the chair of the Oversight Board for The Promise, David Anderson, has put forward a series of recommendations that the board believes could fill the knowledge gaps and prevent future harm for care experienced babies, children, young people and adults.

In his letter, Mr Anderson says:

“As an independent body, the Oversight Board reports on progress towards keeping The Promise, identifies barriers, and issues calls to action where further change is required. From that perspective, the discussion about premature deaths highlights a wider issue that has featured repeatedly in our work: Scotland still lacks some of the evidence needed to understand outcomes properly and drive the action required to keep The Promise for care experienced people.”

Understanding outcomes

The letter explains that the key issue is not how much data Scotland collects, but how it can be linked effectively – not least by having a single definition of what constitutes a premature death – analysed and used to improve outcomes.

“The challenge therefore is not simply one of mortality,” says Mr Anderson in the letter. “It is part of a wider question about how Scotland understands outcomes for care experienced people.

“For several years, the Oversight Board has highlighted gaps in the evidence available to assess progress and understand outcomes. Those gaps affect scrutiny, but they also affect decision-making. If Scotland cannot clearly identify what is working, where outcomes are improving and where people continue to experience disadvantage, it becomes harder to target support, assess impact and determine whether change is reaching those who need it most.”

The Oversight Board points to particular gaps in understanding of long term outcomes for children looked after at home, who are or were in the care system but remaining with family members.

It also says the role of drug harms would be understood better if the National Drug-Related Deaths Database were routinely to record whether a person had care experience.

The Oversight Board recommends Scotland should:

• Review what information is already collected regarding premature deaths and serious harms experienced by care experienced people and identify where genuine gaps remain.
• Be clear about definitions, including whether the focus is children and young people, care leavers, adults, preventable deaths or premature deaths more broadly.
• Explore the incorporation of care experience status into existing national datasets where there is a clear rationale, including drug-related deaths and other areas of known vulnerability.
• Improve data linkage and analysis across existing systems to support learning, accountability and prevention.
• Commission the long-called-for longitudinal study of children looked after at home.
• Ensure any new data collection is linked to decisions, interventions and accountability, rather than simply producing further evidence of known failure.

David Anderson’s letter concludes:

“Behind every discussion about data are babies, children, young people and adults whose lives matter, and families, carers, friends and workers who are left trying to understand what happened.

“If Scotland is going to ask those questions, it has a responsibility to make sure the answers lead somewhere useful.”

In response to the letter’s publication, Siobhian Brown, the minister for The Promise, said:

“Every premature death of a care experienced person is a tragedy. This year we introduced a law requiring Ministers to report annually on the deaths of looked after children, to help us learn from each case and reduce the risk of premature death.

“We have made significant progress towards keeping The Promise by 2030, having overseen a reduction of more than 17% in the number of children identified as ‘looked after’ between 2019 and 2025.”

 

Full text of David Anderson’s letter on behalf of the oversight board.

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