New Funding Follows Scotland’s Looked After Children Into Adulthood

The University of Stirling has £700,000 to follow every child who entered care in Scotland in 2012-13 through their teens. Permanently Progressing? is the largest UK study of its kind, built on all 1,836 children aged five and under who became looked after in those two years.

Phase 3 began on 1 February 2026 and runs to 31 January 2030, a stretch in which the cohort will be aged between 12 and 23. That is also the last stretch of Scotland’s Promise to care-experienced children.

A Whole Scottish Intake Is Heading Into Adulthood

Most care studies sample a slice of a system. This one took the whole year-group. Between 1 August 2012 and 31 July 2013, 481 of those children were looked after at home and 1,355 were looked after away from home. Stirling and Lancaster University have followed the full 1,836 since 2014, with the Association for Fostering, Kinship and Adoption Scotland (AFKA) as a partner.

That design is why the new money matters more than a campus headline. If a placement collapses, if a sibling link dies, if a young person leaves school with almost no passes, the team can set that against a national intake rather than a volunteer sample. Phase 1, from 2014 to 2018, found that a third of the children were still not in a permanent placement after four years. Phase 2, from 2020 to 2024, went back in middle childhood. Phase 3 now walks the same people into the years when looked after children typically leave school, leave care, and fall out of official sight.

Dr Helen Whincup, senior lecturer in social work at Stirling and the study lead, said the first two phases had already changed policy and practice. The team wants to see the young people, parents and caregivers it met before, and to recruit new participants for the teen years.

Nuffield Is Putting £484,496 Behind the Teen Years

Stirling said the project had been awarded £700,000 for a new phase on 8 January 2026. Almost £500,000 comes from the Nuffield Foundation, which has listed its grant at £484,496. A philanthropic donor is adding £200,000. That donor paid for Phase 1 and part-funded Phases 2 and 3. Nuffield part-funded Phases 2 and 3.

Nuffield lists its own funded window as February 2026 to January 2028. Stirling is running the phase for four years, to 31 January 2030. The difference is the grant period against the project period, not two rival end dates.

THE PHASE 3 PACKAGE

• Stirling total: The university put the new phase at £700,000 over four years.
• Nuffield grant: The foundation’s project page lists £484,496, with a funded window from February 2026 to January 2028.
• Donor share: A philanthropic donor, unnamed in the public papers, is putting in £200,000.
• The award: Phase 2 was named Research Project of the Year at the 2025 Herald Higher Education Awards.

The working hypothesis has not changed. Wellbeing, belonging and identity, the team says, are shaped by what happened before care and after it, including how long permanence took, legal status, ties to important people, and the quality of support over time. Phase 3 is the first chance to test that hypothesis once the children can speak as teenagers and young adults, and once some of them can legally leave care.

It Took 32 Months to Find a Permanent Home

Phase 2 reported on 10 September 2024. By 31 July 2022, most of the 1,836 were in homes meant to last. The wait to get there, and the share who still had not, is the number the new phase is walking into.

WHAT PHASE 2 FOUND BY JULY 2022

Whincup said it was heartening that permanence had been achieved for most of the children, and worrying that for many it took over two years, a long time in a child’s life. One in ten had five or more placements, and more than one in ten were still, or again, in impermanent homes a decade after becoming looked after. “This is not what we would want for any child,” she said.

Decisions made early still showed in 2022. Children who became looked after under the age of one were more likely to be adopted. Compared with 2016, fewer of the cohort were with their parents, and more were on Section 11 / Kinship Care Orders, Permanence Orders, or had been adopted. For almost a third of those looked after away from home in 2012-13, Phase 1 had found no evidence that legal permanence had been achieved by 2016.

Sibling contact was thinner than the law aims for. Among the 98 children whose caregivers completed a Phase 2 questionnaire, almost half had no contact with brothers or sisters they lived apart from. The team interviewed 19 children and young people, travelling across Scotland to do it.

What the 1,836 Young People Face Between 12 and 23

National figures for everyone still in the system show the cliff this intake is now approaching. On 31 July 2025, 11,824 children were looked after in Scotland, down 23% from 15,400 in 2014-15. Kinship care was the most common placement at 35%, ahead of foster care at 28% and living at home at 20%.

THE CARE-LEAVER CLIFF, 2024-25

• Continuing care: Of 958 young people aged 16 or over who ceased to be looked after and were eligible, 38% (367) entered continuing care.
• Aftercare take-up: 4,545 of 9,386 eligible young people (48%) were receiving aftercare on 31 July 2025.
• Work or study: 54% of those in aftercare were in education, training or employment.
• School passes: 39.9% of looked after school leavers had at least one qualification at SCQF level 5 or better, against 84.1% of all learners.

Those are not the Permanently Progressing children counted one by one. They are the system that cohort is growing into. A looked after leaver is far less likely to hold a level 5 pass, and far less likely to be in higher education, than a classmate who was never in care. Attendance for looked after pupils sat at 83.8% against 91% for all learners in 2024-25.

Education data on the 1,836 themselves has been patchy. After Phase 2, former MSP Roz McCall told Holyrood that more than 60% of those involved in the study had not been linked to key education records, and argued that The Promise cannot be judged without that join. The study did use education administrative data for additional support needs and exclusions. Phase 3 explicitly plans to follow care, education and justice pathways through longitudinal administrative data, which is the join McCall said was missing.

The Promise Runs Out in the Same Year

In February 2020 the Independent Care Review published The Promise, drawn from more than 5,500 voices, and the Scottish Government committed to delivering it in full by 2030. Permanence, sibling relationships, and a childhood that feels safe and respected sit at the centre of that pledge. Phase 3 ends on 31 January 2030. The overlap is not a metaphor. It is a shared calendar.

Plan 24-30 sets out who must act, and by when, if Scotland is to keep that 2020 commitment. On 29 September 2026, the independent oversight board said too much of the pledge remained on paper rather than in people’s lives, and asked those with power to move faster. Siobhian Brown, minister for the Promise, said the board still judged that the 2030 deadline could be met if the scale and pace of work increased.

Phase 2 had already put numbers under two of The Promise’s most repeated lines: brothers and sisters should live together unless that is not in their interest, and a child should not wait years for a stable home. The 32-month average and the sibling-contact finding landed in 2024, four years after the pledge. The new phase will show whether those patterns held as the same children became old enough to leave.

Phases 1 and 2 of Permanently Progressing? have already had an impact on policy and practice and we are so pleased to have secured funding for a third phase of this important study. The team and I are really looking forward to revisiting the young people, parents, and caregivers who we previously met, and to recruiting new participants.

Dr Helen Whincup, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University of Stirling

Impact on policy is the claim universities make when a grant is renewed. The harder test sits with the 1,836. If time to permanence, sibling contact and school results do not move for this intake, Scotland will have a complete national cohort whose teens were documented in the same years it said the system would change.

Kinship Carers, Siblings and Birth Parents Stay in Frame

Kinship is now the typical placement in the live national count, at 35%. The study was built around kinship carers, foster carers and adoptive parents from the start, not as a footnote. Phase 3 keeps them in the design, with surveys of caregivers and young people, and interviews with caregivers, young people and birth parents. Focus groups with professionals sit alongside that.

Birth parents are easy to drop from a “looked after” story. The team is not dropping them. Ten birth parents were interviewed in Phase 2 about contact, loss and support. Phase 3 asks, in plain terms, what contacts and connections young people still have with important people, including siblings and birth parents, and how those relationships have been supported over time.

One child in an earlier phase described being moved with no explanation, as if they were a piece being shifted around a board. That is the voice Phase 3 is trying to hear at 16, 18 and 21, when the person can answer without a play session and when the legal status of the home may finally be tested by a choice to stay or go.

Dr Paula Jacobs, a research fellow at Stirling who interviewed children and caregivers, said connections across different families are complex, and that so many children having no contact with brothers and sisters they live apart from should not be shrugged off. The Promise restated that siblings should live together unless that is against their interest, and that contact should be nurtured when they do not. The caregiver survey suggested that nurture is still missing for a large share of this intake.

How Phase 3 Will Track Them Out of Childhood

Nuffield set six questions for the new phase. They are the spine of the next four years of fieldwork, not a brochure list.

THE SIX QUESTIONS FOR PHASE 3

• Household: Where and with whom are young people living, and what shaped those pathways?
• Security: Has legal permanence, and a sense of security, been achieved or held, and what made a difference?
• Wellbeing: How are they getting on, and has wellbeing risen or fallen across the three phases?
• Support: How are young people, and the people important to them, supported, or not?
• Ties: What contact remains with siblings, birth parents and others, and how has that been helped?
• Adulthood: How are moves toward adult life understood and supported, and what do the young people want next?

The method mixes the national Children Looked After Statistics with surveys, interviews and professional focus groups. Stirling’s research hub says that mix is how the study avoids a snapshot and instead watches continuities and breaks for the same people. Justice pathways are in the data plan as well as school, which means custody and hearings can sit beside exam results rather than in a separate silo.

THE COHORT CLOCK

1. 1 August 2012 to 31 July 2013: All 1,836 children aged five and under who become looked after in Scotland form the cohort.
2. 2014 to 2018: Phase 1 maps pre-care lives and early routes, funded by the philanthropic donor.
3. December 2020 to September 2024: Phase 2 returns in middle childhood, part-funded by Nuffield and the same donor.
4. 10 September 2024: Phase 2 reports the 32-month wait, the 12% still in temporary homes, and the sibling-contact gap.
5. 2025: Phase 2 is named Research Project of the Year at the Herald Higher Education Awards.
6. 8 January 2026: Stirling announces £700,000 for Phase 3.
7. 1 February 2026: Phase 3 begins; it runs until 31 January 2030, the year The Promise is due to be kept.

The 1,836 will not all still be in care. Some will be adopted, some will be with kin, some will be back with parents, and some will already have left. The study’s bet is that following the whole intake, rather than only those who remain looked after, is the only way to see whether an early permanence order actually held when adolescence arrived. Nuffield and the donor have paid for that bet through 31 January 2030. The Promise uses the same year as its finish line.