The state as parent

Andy Sawford, head of the Local Government Information Unit, has given out some revealing information on children in care. This was from the LGIU blog.

In particular what stands out is:

At a time when the government is expanding higher education and aiming for 500 in every 1,000 to go to university, the number of children in care who are achieving this is seven in every thousand. (In fact a higher proportion of children in care go to prison.)

In Denmark 70% of children in care attend university, that is a hundred times as many as in the UK, which suggests that Denmark is better at organising care than we are. (It should be remembered that in Denmark 13% of children attend fee-paying schools, compared with 7% here. Denmark has a system not so dissimilar to the Swedish system advocated by Michael Gove.)