The number of children in the care of local authorities is rocketing - up from 64,500 in 2010 to nearly 84,000 today. But local authorities, strapped for cash, have cut back their services. Our country’s boarding schools are keen to increase the important role they are playing ,as Alistair Lexden pointed out in a Lords debate on children in care on 18 April.
I have just one purpose in contributing to this important debate. It is to commend in the strongest terms the work which is being done to enable more children in care to find places in our nation’s boarding schools - schools which provide for so wide a range of achievements, including in sport, music and other arts subjects.
I declare my interest as President of the Independent Schools Association, one of a number of organisations in the independent sector whose members include schools with boarders.
It is important to remember that there are a number of fine, flourishing boarding schools in the state sector of education. As I have often pointed out in your Lordships’ House, this is a time of ever increasing collaboration between schools in the two sectors.
Huge encouragement is to be drawn from the enthusiasm with which, to a greater extent than ever before, they are working together to their mutual benefit, and our country’s gain.
Experience shows that some children in care thrive in boarding schools, loving the wide range of opportunities which they provide. It is equally clear that other children would not profit from a boarding education.
So local authorities need to identify those children who would benefit, and to make suitable provision for them.
In carrying out this aspect of their work, they have had in recent years growing encouragement and support from this Government, offered not in any spirit of dictation, but out of a desire to ensure that advice and guidance are available for local authorities to draw on when they wish.
A highly regarded charity, backed by the Government, stands ready to assist local authorities in the discharge of their duty. It is called the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation.
In its own words, the Foundation “works with Local Authorities in England and Wales to identify children who are looked-after or in need of care who might benefit from a boarding school education, to broker placements in schools best placed to meet their academic, social and pastoral needs, and prepare and support them to thrive throughout their bursary placements.”
Is this not a service that everyone whatever their political views should welcome and encourage?
The Foundation’s work over the last four years has enabled over 200 children in care to secure fully funded places in independent and state boarding schools.
This has been achieved as a result of the Foundation’s involvement with over 50 local authorities and more than 200 boarding schools, which have committed themselves to giving priority to children in care when filling up bursary places.
These are important developments which should be noted by all those concerned to ensure that the varying needs of children in care are properly addressed.
Last year, the Foundation got Nottingham University’s education department to provide an independent assessment of how children for whom boarding school places had been provided were doing.
The university’s exercise showed that such children were four times more likely to achieve good GCSE grades in English and Maths than other vulnerable children. They were five times more likely to study successfully for A-levels and go on to university.
Interviews conducted with the young people themselves showed that “in their view such opportunities can be life-changing.”
As for the cost, the Nottingham researchers estimated that “savings to the public purse from sending 210 children in the study to boarding schools were in the region of £4.47 million.”
Can there possibly any argument against expanding these cost-effective, life-changing opportunities for children in care?
Heads and their staff in our country’s boarding schools take pride in guiding these children sensitively to academic success and personal fulfilment, drawing on the high standards of professional advice provided to them as members of the Boarding Schools Association.
