Call to send children in care to boarding schools

Children taken into care should be sent to boarding schools, a top government adviser said today. Such a policy would be "dramatically" cheaper than keeping the children in residential homes, said Sir Cyril Taylor, a key adviser to the education secretary, Ruth Kelly.

Sir Cyril said children from "broken homes" were often among the best pupils at boarding school.

Sir Cyril, who is the chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), said there were about 70,000 children in public care in the UK on any given day.

About 42,000 of these children are living with foster carers, with the rest in public and privately run residential children's homes.

Sir Cyril told the SSAT annual conference in Birmingham: "Sadly there is little stability in the lives of these children as there are frequent changes in both their foster parents and their school.

"It cannot be right that a young child is moved around in this way."

The average cost of a child in foster care was £15,000 to £20,000 a year, and could run to as much as £50,000 a year, he said.

"A particularly cost-effective measure would be to place more children in care in boarding schools.

"The cost of a state boarding school is only £7,000 per year."

"Yet despite the substantial cost benefit which boarding school provision has over the cost of either foster parent or children's homes, only some 3,000 or so of the 70,000 children in public care in the UK are placed in boarding schools," he said.

"I ask today for specialist schools with the land available for boarding provision to consider applying to provide such provision.

"It costs about £30,000 per bedroom to build a dormitory, or £3m for 100 beds.

"Even with the running costs of £7,000 per year per child, the cost of boarding school provision would be dramatically less than in a residential home."

Polly Curtis
November 24, 2005

http://education.guardian.co.uk/publicschools/story/0,12505,1649999,00.html