Sir Alasdair MacDonald, Dr Emily Lowthian, Deborah Williams and Michael Bettencourt call for an implementation strategy to scale up support for all care experienced learners across Wales.
Care-experienced children face educational injustice. This is a well-evidenced, persistent reality both internationally and across the UK. Care-experienced children consistently underachieve across every measure: attainment, attendance, exclusion and wellbeing. They are more likely to be excluded from school, identified with additional learning needs, and to move schools at different points in their education journey. Wales has the highest rate of children in care in the UK, meaning more children are affected here than anywhere else.
The research literature points towards promising interventions. Increasing evidence from Wales, Scotland and England identifies shared common features of what works: senior leadership with the status and mandate to advocate for children, multi-agency working across education and social care, and an unwavering focus on the individual child. The Virtual School Model brings these features together in a coherent, proven approach. The question for Wales is not whether this approach works. It is how the Welsh Government supports the adoption of the Virtual School Model in a way that is local, flexible, yet consistently implemented, across the nation.
Care-experienced children face educational injustice.
Wales has demonstrated real ambition for care-experienced children. The Raising the Ambitions strategy of 2016 set a clear direction: we understand the injustice, we understand the inequity, and these are the things we are going to do. The Welsh Government’s decision to pilot the Basic Income scheme and to remove profit from children’s care homes reflects a genuine commitment to improving children’s lives, and that commitment is to be welcomed. These are not small things.
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However, whilst individual and isolated moments of good practice have been realised, they have not yet come together into a renewed, comprehensive strategy for care-experienced children’s education. The landscape has changed profoundly since 2016 — with a global pandemic, new additional learning needs reforms, a new Curriculum for Wales — and none of that has been factored systematically into how we support care-experienced young people. Sir Alasdair’s 2020 Integrated Approach report called for progress. The subsequent Virtual School Model pilot demonstrated improved working and outcomes for children and young people. Wales does not need another review. It needs to act on what it already knows.
In December 2025, the Welsh Government took a significant step and proposed that the Virtual School Head Teacher role is made statutory. This matters. It is a direct acknowledgement that care-experienced children deserve dedicated, senior educational leadership in every local authority. As leaders, practitioners and researchers, we welcome that decision unreservedly.
Where children live in Wales still determines the quality of support they receive.
But a proposed statutory decision and a functioning system are not the same thing. Across Wales, six of twenty-two local authorities currently operate the Virtual School Model. A coordinated implementation strategy is now needed to scale up the approach across the country as a whole. There is a need for a common goal; a national network of virtual school practitioners, a shared framework, and consistent monitoring of outcomes for children. Where children live in Wales still determines the quality of support they receive. That is the territorial injustice we are asking the new Welsh Government to address. The decision to make the role statutory has been made. Now Wales needs a legislative timetable, alongside an implementation strategy, to build an infrastructure to support a national roll-out of a role that can make a real difference.
The Virtual School is an organisational framework that appoints a team or person to provide additional support to care experienced children, as if they belong to a single school. It is led by a Head Teacher with a specific remit and mandate to improve their attendance, attainment and wellbeing. Virtual School Heads work across the system around a child – connecting people and services in a way that would not otherwise happen.
Wales now stands alongside Scotland and England in recognising that care experienced children not only deserve, but need, dedicated, senior educational leadership.
Virtual School Head Teachers work at every level of the system. They work directly with individual children and their carers, they support and advise schools and forge relationships with a range of services, including education and social care. They follow children throughout their educational journey, co-ordinating support across home, school and social care from the early years through to adulthood. The evidence from Wales, Scotland and England is consistent: where Virtual School Head Teachers are in place, attendance improves, exclusions reduce and attainment rises. These gains are not accidental. They come from a coordinated effort, sustained relationships and a relentless focus on the individual child. Virtual School Heads are equally focused on how children experience education, whether they feel safe, have a sense of belonging and enjoy learning – because without that foundation, no academic gain is possible.
Wales now stands alongside Scotland and England in recognising that care experienced children not only deserve, but need, dedicated, senior educational leadership. That consensus across three nations, built on a growing body of research and practitioner evidence, is significant.
But a statutory decision is a beginning, not an end. Colleagues in Scotland have learned that the work of implementation is where ambition is either realised or lost. A role can be named without being understood. It can be funded without being properly resourced. It can be established in policy without being embedded in practice. Wales must now ensure that the decision to make the role statutory is followed by a renewed national strategy for care experienced children’s education, one that positions the Virtual School Head Teacher within a coherent, well-resourced system, rather than leaving it to take shape differently in each local authority.
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That strategy must reflect the Wales of 2026, not 2016. It must account for a new curriculum, additional learning needs reform, the lessons of the pandemic and the full breadth of what care experienced children need academically, vocationally and in terms of their wellbeing. It must establish a national network so that Virtual School Head Teachers are not working in isolation, but are connected, supported and able to learn from each other and from colleagues across the UK so that they are empowered act collectively as advocates for care experienced children.
The evidence is in. The policy decision has been made. We are asking the new Welsh Government to act now.
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