Adopted children performed better at GCSE level across all attainment measures than their looked-after peers, latest statistics published by the government show. New Department for Education data was added to the outcome data for children looked after by local authorities in England, to include children who have left care through an adoption, special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO).
These pupils achieved an average Attainment 8 score of 31.1 in 2018 compared with 18.8 for looked-after children. Attainment 8 measures the average achievement over eight GCSEs with extra weighting given to English and maths.
Their results were also better than those for children in need (19.0) but did not match those of non looked-after children (44.4).
Further details are available here.