What the School Doesn't Know: Education, the Virtual School Head, and the Home's Responsibility

There is a gap between children in care and their peers in education that is one of the most documented and least resolved inequalities in English social care. In any given year, children looked after by local authorities are around four times less likely than their peers to achieve five good GCSEs. Persistent absence rates — a proxy for the degree to which a young person is not in school at all — are significantly higher for looked-after children than for the general population, and higher still for young people in residential placements. A substantial proportion of children who arrive at children's homes come with histories of exclusion, school moves, missed provision, and unmet special educational needs. Some have not attended school regularly for years. The losses compound: a young person who misses the foundational years of primary education in the turbulence of a placement history, who arrives at a residential home at thirteen unable to read fluently, and who leaves at eighteen without qualifications, carries a disadvantage that shapes housing, employment, health, and every other long-term outcome. Given the consistency and scale of this evidence, what is striking is how rarely educational progress appears as the central concern of a residential placement. Therapeutic progress is tracked. Attachment indicators are noted. Incident frequencies are measured. Whether a young person is in school, engaged while they are there, receiving provision that meets their assessed needs, and making actual progress against a realistic educational baseline — these questions receive far less sustained attention, in practice, than their importance would demand.

The statutory framework designed to address this is more specific and more demanding than many residential workers appreciate. The Virtual School Head (VSH) — an office created by the Children and Families Act 2014 and strengthened by the Children and Social Work Act 2017 — is a statutory requirement in every local authority. The VSH holds responsibility for championing the educational achievement of all children looked after by that authority, and the role is not a passive coordination function. Statutory guidance requires VSHs to monitor and actively challenge the educational progress of looked-after children, to hold schools to account where provision is inadequate, and to oversee the allocation of Pupil Premium Plus — currently around £2,570 per year per pupil — the additional funding that follows every looked-after child into their school placement. The 2017 Act extended the VSH function to include previously looked-after children (those who have left care via adoption, special guardianship, or child arrangements orders), and the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2025 further strengthens obligations on local authorities regarding the registration and provision of looked-after children in education. Every looked-after child is also entitled to a Personal Education Plan (PEP) — a statutory document that must be in place within 20 school days of the child becoming looked after or joining a new school, reviewed at least twice yearly, and designed to capture a young person's educational starting point, their specific needs, and what is being done to address them. Every school must additionally appoint a designated teacher for looked-after and previously looked-after children, whose role is to be the internal advocate and expert. These provisions represent a specific infrastructure built through successive legislation to address an inequality the system itself has generated. Whether they deliver depends almost entirely on whether the relationships and conversations that underpin them are actually happening — and that is where the residential home enters the picture.

The gap between the statutory framework and lived experience is wide, and the reasons are structural. VSHs carry caseloads that have grown as looked-after populations have grown, and the capacity for genuine engagement with every young person's PEP is often stretched. The quality of PEPs varies enormously: in the best cases, a well-constructed PEP is a living document that records educational baselines honestly, identifies needs with specificity, creates accountability for what has been committed to, and tracks progress in a way that genuinely informs decision-making. In the worst cases, it is a meeting that occurs at the required frequency and produces a document that says much the same as it said last time — without challenge, without change, and without consequence for anyone. The designated teacher function is equally variable: a skilled designated teacher can be transformative for a young person in a mainstream school, building a bridge between the school and residential home, ensuring staff understand what the young person's history means for how they learn, and advocating internally when the young person needs something the school is not automatically configured to provide. An under-supported designated teacher may fulfil the role in name only. Across all of this sits the persistent problem of school exclusions, which occur at roughly four times the national rate for children in care. Some of those exclusions follow a placement move that disrupted a school relationship just beginning to stabilise. Some occur because schools are managing needs they are not equipped for. Some occur because no one has communicated enough to the school about the young person's history to enable a different response. The residential home is rarely the decision-maker in any of this. It is, almost always, the entity closest to the young person when the exclusion happens — and the one with the most relevant information to contribute to preventing the next one.

What a residential home can do to support educational engagement — day to day, practically — is more substantial than it is sometimes given credit for. The basics matter, and they are not trivial: getting young people up and supported in the morning, making sure they leave with food in them and in a state that makes arriving at school possible, maintaining reliable transport, ensuring that whoever is on shift knows about the young person's school day enough to ask about it when they come home. A young person who leaves the home late, dysregulated, and hungry arrives at school already behind; a young person who leaves calmly and on time begins the day from a position where learning is at least possible. The home's culture around education shapes what young people believe about their own capacity. A home in which school attendance is treated as negotiable, in which nobody asks what happened in school today, in which homework is not supported, and in which young people's academic progress is not a subject of genuine interest in keywork, communicates something specific about where education sits in the hierarchy of things that matter. Young people with disrupted educational histories have often already concluded that school is not for people like them. A home that does not actively counter that message — with its own interest, its own advocacy at PEP meetings, its own communication with the designated teacher — reinforces it by omission. The most effective homes treat the PEP meeting as a core professional engagement rather than an administrative obligation: keyworkers attend, bring specific observations about the young person's current state and needs, ask hard questions about provision, and follow up on commitments that were made and not honoured.

The harder practice question is what the home does when current provision is not working, or is actively harmful. School exclusion, unmet EHCP needs, a placement many miles from any school the young person knows, an education health and care plan that describes a level of support the placed school cannot or will not provide — these are not exceptional scenarios. They are common, and in each of them the residential home is in the strongest position to advocate effectively. Effective advocacy here is specific and evidenced: it means documenting what is and is not happening educationally, communicating that to the placing authority and the VSH with clarity and without minimising it, challenging decisions that prioritise administrative convenience over the young person's educational needs, and refusing to normalise the absence of education in a way that allows the system to treat it as a settled state rather than a crisis requiring resolution. The VSH has legal levers available — challenge to exclusions, reallocation of Pupil Premium Plus, escalation within the local authority — but those levers are only pulled when someone has made the case that the current situation requires it. For most young people in residential care, that someone is most likely to be a keyworker who has taken their education seriously enough to know the detail. The quality of the relationship between a children's home and its young people's Virtual School Heads — whether there is a genuine, working, honest relationship in which problems are identified promptly and addressed collaboratively — is one of the most practically significant features of a residential placement. It is also one of the least routinely examined by inspection, commissioning, or management oversight. Homes that take it seriously do not simply comply with the statutory requirements. They treat education as part of what the placement is for — and for young people whose care-experienced trajectories will be shaped heavily by what qualifications and capacities they leave with, it unmistakably is.