How can we help young people with a social worker to thrive in education?

• Analysis by What Works for Children’s Social Care (publication forthcoming)

Despite substantial investment in trying to narrow attainment gaps, they continue to persist – family background, and ethnicity, are two strong predictors of educational attainment, of access to the professions, and ultimately of social status later in life. Gaps in attainment between rich and poor students persist even within the same school.

• Read more from CYP Now's Evidence and Impact Special Report

In 2011, the government established the Education Endowment Foundation, with an endowment of £125m, to fund high-quality research into how the attainment gap between rich and poor students might be closed. Since then they’ve funded more than 150 randomised control trials – one of the best ways to identify whether a new intervention is having an effect. These studies have made a considerable difference, producing 18 promising interventions so far that have been shown to have substantial positive impacts on the grades of young people. These interventions have been evaluated for both whole cohorts, and for young people eligible for free school meals.

These results represent the culmination of hundreds of years worth of work, both by the people who have designed and implemented the interventions, and the evaluators who have studied them. They establish Britain as one of the world leaders in education research, and provide policymakers and teachers with invaluable insights into how to spend their time, energy and pupil premium money to best effect. Yet, the data from these trials is an underutilised resource.

Young people with a social worker – those being assessed by children’s services, the subject of a child in need or child protection plan, or who have been taken into kinship or foster care – have lower educational attainment on average than children outside the social care system, and even their peers in receipt of free school meals. That some of these young people have different needs in education is in some ways recognised – for example, by the supplemental pupil premium money available for looked-after children, and administered through local virtual schools.

Yet, if the evidence base around how best to support young people in their education is still fairly sparse, it is entirely lacking in how we can help boost the grades of young people with a social worker, according to the Department for Education’s review of this.

For us at What Works for Children’s Social Care, this presents an opportunity – we have a huge gap in our evidence, and a huge amount of underutilised data, which, thanks to archiving and merging, can be put to use. Over the last few months, we’ve been working to re-analyse all of this data. Although the work is not yet complete, the potential is clear. This is an opportunity for us to turbo charge the evidence base in this area, where it’s badly needed.

We haven’t got all the results yet – we’ll be publishing those in early 2020 – but what we’re already finding is striking. We’ve seen that we cannot simply assume that what’s going to raise attainment for everyone will work to raise attainment for young people with a social worker. The emerging evidence suggests many interventions may be less effective for this group. However, excitingly, some things do work better for young people with a social worker – both boosting grades overall, and narrowing the attainment gap.

Implications for practice

Even as findings emerge, there are some clear implications for practice, including:

• Teachers and school leaders can’t assume that what works overall will work for young people with a social worker.
• The majority of interventions that boost attainment overall will also help young people with a social worker, but might run the risk of widening the attainment gap.
• Some interventions, which backfire for this group, should either not be delivered to them, or effort should be taken to ensure that they are not left worse off.
• Schools, children’s services departments and virtual schools can and should invest in interventions that particularly benefit young people with a social worker.