Educational outcomes of children in contact with social care in England: a systematic review

Abstract

Background In England, the state intervenes in the lives of children through Children’s Social Care (CSC) services with the aim of supporting and maintaining their welfare. It is known from government cross-sectional data that children who experience these CSC interventions (such as state care) have consistently poorer educational outcomes than the general population. However, these data are limited in providing crude estimates of association and in ignoring longitudinal histories. This systematic review aimed to appraise the extant research evidence from longitudinal studies and answer the question: how do educational outcomes differ between children in contact with CSC and the general population in the UK? Methods According to a pre-defined protocol, we searched 16 health, social care, education and legal databases for population-level quantitative studies conducted on UK children with exposure to CSC, a general population comparison group and an educational outcome. We also conducted snowball searches and searches of Google Scholar and grey literature. Data on whether each study met inclusion criteria were extracted, and findings of included studies were synthesised narratively. Risk of bias was assessed using the National Institutes of Health Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies. Results In total, 5482 sources were screened which resulted in seven studies being included in the narrative synthesis. Only three were published in peer-reviewed journals. All but one used administrative education data and five used administrative data from CSC services. In all studies, exposure to CSC interventions was measured crudely, ignoring heterogeneity in the experiences of children. All agreed that children in contact with CSC services perform worse than their peers on all outcomes (variously: exam results, absences, exclusions, school moves, being missing from school, higher education aspirations and quality of school). Conclusions Despite employing a search across 16 databases supplemented with additional searches of other online sources, we found only seven studies that met our inclusion criteria. This review throws into sharp relief the urgent need to conduct more population-level research into the educational prospects of children in contact with CSC services. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42018089755 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13643-019-1071-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Educational and health outcomes of schoolchildren in local authority care in Scotland: A retrospective record linkage study

“…Compared with peers, looked after children had more school absences and exclusions, greater SEN, poorer examination grades, and increased unemployment postschool. Previous studies report similar patterns around absenteeism, exclusion, and attainment [17][18]. Our findings regarding unemployment and SEN are novel but not surprising given reports of poorer physical and mental health [7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…Looked after children exhibit poorer educational outcomes including lower attainment, increased absenteeism, and exclusion [2,17,18]; however, Scottish analyses were not adjusted for confounders including poorer health [2]. A recent systematic review recommended more population-wide research into educational outcomes of looked after children [17].…”

“…Looked after children exhibit poorer educational outcomes including lower attainment, increased absenteeism, and exclusion [2,17,18]; however, Scottish analyses were not adjusted for confounders including poorer health [2]. A recent systematic review recommended more population-wide research into educational outcomes of looked after children [17]. Most studies comparing educational or health outcomes with peers have used small samples with larger ones focusing on absenteeism, academic attainment, or mortality [18][19][20][21][22].…”

PRISMA 2020 explanation and elaboration: updated guidance and exemplars for reporting systematic reviews

“…Finally, we updated the database search on 7 May 2019, and the snowball and additional searches on 10 May 2019 as detailed in the Additional file. We used the same search method, except that we narrowed the searches to 2017 onwards.”172…”

“…The table displays for each database consulted its name (such as MEDLINE), the interface or platform through which the database was searched (such as Ovid), and the dates of coverage (reproduced from Jay et al172 ) …”