Growing Up in Kinship Care

For the first time, a body of data about Scotland’s children and young people with experience of care has been brought together to better understand the picture of kinship care in Scotland.

The information is in a new report – Growing Up in Kinship Care – published recently by CELCIS, the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection, for SCADR, the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research.

The research team brought together anonymised records for ‘looked after’ children, and linked these to records for the same children across education, Children’s Hearings, child protection, and health visiting datasets. Combining and analysing the data has given a much clearer picture and a greater understanding of the experiences and needs of these children and young people. The researchers found that:

• While many children and young people living in kinship families thrive, kinship carers are often supporting children with complex needs, and it is important that tailored support is in place for the children and their carers.
• Despite substantial improvements in the educational outcomes of children who had lived with kinship carers over the years studied, this remains an area where many children and families would benefit from additional support.
• There is substantial regional variation in terms of how likely children are to live with kinship families, with higher numbers seen in areas of high deprivation.
• There are many children in Scotland living with kinship families who are not ‘looked after’ by their local authority, however there is far less data available on their experiences.