Youngsters in care are left to live with Nicola Sturgeon's broken promise - Susan Dalgety

Young people in care deserve far more than the empty rhetoric

There are 10,000 children in care in Scotland. Most live either with foster carers or members of their extended family – kinship carers to use the social work vernacular. Only a relatively small number – 13 per cent, or around 1,300 young people – are in residential care.

Nearly a third (30 per cent) of school leavers who were in care when they left school in 2021-22 disappeared into a jobless void. Nine months after leaving school they were not in further or higher education, employment or training, compared to just 7 per cent of all school leavers. As adults, many will end up homeless or in prison.

They are the most vulnerable children in our country, a point recognised by Nicola Sturgeon when she made a promise to them in her 2016 conference speech where she laid out her vision of Scotland under her leadership.

“We have to get it right for every child,” she said, before going on to describe in harrowing terms how vulnerable children in care are: “…this breaks my heart – a young person who has been in care is twenty times – twenty times – more likely to be dead by the time they are 25 than a young person who hasn’t.”

No leader, no matter which party they represent, nor on which side of the constitutional divide they sit, could absorb that statistic without wanting to do something about it. Sturgeon promised a “root and branch review of the care system”, from the laws that underpinned it to its culture and ethos. We will build “a system that supports them to become the people they can be…let’s come together and make this commitment: to love our most vulnerable children and give them the childhood they deserve.”

When in 2020 she unveiled The Promise, the flagship policy she said would revolutionise the care system, opposition politicians queued up to offer their support to the Chief Mammy, as she now identified. It even had its own hashtag, #KeepThePromise, and a glossy website which emphasised that “All children in Scotland’s care system will have a good loving childhood. They will feel loved. They will have their needs met...” In her resignation speech last February, Sturgeon renewed her commitment to young Scots in care, saying it would be “lifelong”. She even hinted she may foster a child.

Eight years after that carefully staged conference speech, the full extent of Nicola Sturgeon’s con-trick was revealed this week in a BBC Radio 4 interview. Speaking to Louise Casey in her Fixing Britain series, she admitted she had broken her promise. Little has changed for children in care since 2016. “There is an implementation gap” she said, blaming not herself, but “very, very vested interests” for the failure. But she reassured listeners she was still “emotionally invested” in improving care.

Frankly, who cares? Young people in care deserve far more than the empty rhetoric of a failed politician desperate to shore up her legacy. As Maggie Mellon, a social work expert with 40 years’ experience says, the whole sorry exercise has achieved “precisely nothing for children or their families.” Speaking as a member of Parents Advocacy and Rights (PAR) – a parent-led group that supports parents with children in the care system – she suggests the government’s approach to vulnerable children is wrong. “We have known for years, if not forever, that the costs of care would be much better spent on supporting families, particularly mothers. Social workers can take a child into care, but don’t usually have the authority to provide a new bed or a warm coat.”

And she points out that the many known risks of care are ignored. “We need real and lasting change, and it will only start with a commitment to do everything possible to keep children with their families, unless there are exceptional reasons. That would push money out of the care system and into the support families and children need.”

Sturgeon’s mea culpa, likely as carefully scripted as any of her pronouncements of the last decade, came in the same week it was revealed that in the last seven years, 1,300 babies in Scotland were born dependent on drugs. There is nothing in the baby box – another of Sturgeon’s performative policies – to deal with that terrible start to life. How many of those babies are already in the care system, or will end up there?

And what of her “national mission” to reduce Scotland’s drugs deaths, the highest in Europe? There were 600 suspected drug deaths during the first six months of 2023 – 7 per cent higher than during the same period in 2022. Or her “defining mission” to close the attainment gap between children in affluent areas and those from the poorest homes? Government statistics published last month showed modest progress on the ‘attainment gap’ for literacy and numeracy in primary schools. Yet according to Save the Children, this narrowing is “not statistically significant and the reality is that very little progress has been made to shift the dial on the school attainment, despite it being a Scottish Government priority.”

For nearly a decade, Nicola Sturgeon convinced people that she was a progressive, left of centre, can-do leader. The reality is that she was a confection. A mediocre politician who perfected the art of performance. Does it matter now that the truth has been revealed? Of course it does, because there are 10,000 children trapped in a care system that she promised to fix. She revelled in the acclaim her promises brought her. Now Scotland’s most vulnerable people have to live with the consequences of her negligence.