Who are Care-Experienced people?

Care-Experienced people are those who are or have been looked after by their local authority, having been deprived of parental care for any reason, or due to concerns about their wellbeing.

“We use the term care-experienced to include anyone who has been or is currently in care or from a looked after background at any stage of their life, no matter how short. This care may have been provided in one of many different settings such as in residential care, foster care, kinship care or looked after at home with a supervision requirement.”

Scottish Funding Council (2019)

The care population

There are currently 14,897 young people in care in Scotland.

This represents 1.4% of the 1.2 million young people aged under 18. This is similar to the entire population of Troon, Broxburn or Port Glasgow.

A graph showing the total number of looked after children in Scotland
Scottish Government 2018
Graph 1 The total number of looked after children in Scotland
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This is a bar chart showing the number of looked after children in Scotland between 2007 and 2017. The image shows that between 2007 and 2012, the number increased from just over 14,000 children to around 16,250 children. This number gradually fell in the second half of the 10-year period, to show that there were just under 15,000 looked after children in Scotland in 2017.

Graph 1 The total number of looked after children in Scotland

The care population figures give a snapshot of children and young people who are currently looked after. The Care-Experienced population is much larger as it includes everyone who has been looked after at some point in their lives but we do not have accurate data for this group.

The National Ambition for Care-Experienced students

Different types of care experience