Contact Group responds to looked after children statistics

Sept. 28, 2011 - PRLog -- Following the Government’s release of the Children Looked After by Local Authorities in England statistics today (28th September 2011), which reveal an increase of two per cent in the number of Looked After Children in the UK since 2010, Stephen Clarke, Managing Director of Contact Group (www.the-contactgroup.com), comments:

“The Government’s latest guidance for Local Authorities: ‘Promoting the Educational Achievement of Looked After Children’ states that the duty of a Local Authority is to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare of a child looked after by them including, in particular, a duty to promote the child’s educational achievement,’ including ‘those placed out-of-authority.’* Local Authorities have an obligation to monitor every child in their care across multiple boroughs; when a child moves out of a Local Authority area, they still need to be monitored. However, Local Authorities are also tightening their budgets and, with the education secretary announcing plans to make it easier to take children into care, must look to technology to provide the best possible monitoring service and the best value for money.

“The gap between the attainment levels of looked-after children and those of the rest of the pupil population remains huge. Our work with schools has proven a direct correlation between attendance and attainment - If children are not in school then, essentially, they are missing out on vital learning opportunities. Local Authorities can use automated technologies, such as Looked After Call, as a means of dealing with low attendance and therefore low attainment, while also reducing their expenditure and time to be reinvested in taking care of vulnerable children.

“Looked After Call provides in-depth, online reports on each child’s attendance in a daily, weekly or monthly format. It makes reporting more efficient by automating the process and helps maintain reporting but at a lower cost than outsourcing. It enables Local Authorities to quickly report back figures on looked-after children and identify absenteeism. Schools and LAs can also easily access real time attendance data of looked-after children anytime, simply by logging on to a website. They can then call or send a message to a parent/guardian to alert them and keep them in the loop.”

*Promoting the Educational Achievement of Looked After Children: Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities, March 2010: www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/AllPublicationsNoRsg/Page10/DCSF-00342-2010