The Hook

Things are getting better for children in British Columbia, according to a new report from the representative for children and youth and the provincial health officer, but there is still a large contingent of vulnerable children in the province that are falling through the cracks.

The most comprehensive report on child outcomes in the country, according to the representative, Growing Up In B.C. was released yesterday morning at the 2010 Champions for Children and Youth Summit in Vancouver. The report measures the outcomes of children in six categories: child health, child learning, child safety, family economic well-being, family, peer, and community connections, and child behaviour. In addition to collecting data and consulting independent experts in these areas, children from all over the province were asked for their opinions and observations on these areas.

“It’s important to know as much as we can, not to guess, about how children and youth are doing in B.C. It’s especially important for those children in vulnerable groups, like children in care or Aboriginal children and youth who don’t traditionally get heard or are as well supported for us to know how they’re doing,” says Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the province’s representative for children and youth.

“This report is really a realization of what Justice Ted Hughes called for many years ago in his initial report on the child welfare system, which was using data and evidence to improve the system, to really setting a baseline and understanding if it’s improving, or how it needs to improve.”

The report contains data commonly known about the connection between child vulnerability and educational outcomes, including the poor graduation rates of Aboriginal children in the province. But it also focused on the outcomes of children in the care of the ministry of children and family development, of which there were 10.1 per every 1,000 children in B.C. in 2007/08. Some of the statistics include:

• - The gap in education performance for kids in care is equal to or even wider than the gap for Aboriginal kids.
• - Aboriginal kids in care score the lowest marks on provincial achievement tests out of any group in the province.
• - Kids in the Vancouver Coastal Health Region consistently perform better than kids in any other district, especially the Vancouver Island and Northern Health regions, which continue to perform poorly. Thirteen per 1,000 kids in those regions are in care.
• - Only 36.1 per cent of girls and 20.4 per cent of boys in care complete high school within six years of finishing Grade 8, compared to 82.1 per cent of girls and 76.1 per cent of boys who are not in care. The rates for Aboriginal kids in care are even lower.

Other findings included how safe kids felt in school, with less than 50 per cent reporting that they always felt safe in school, especially those just entering high school. The situation is worse for Aboriginal kids, who reported seven per cent more incidences of being bullied and picked on in school than non-Aboriginal kids.

There are plans in the works to update this report, which took three years to complete, in two years, when Turpel-Lafond hopes concrete and measurable improvements will be seen for children and youth in the province.

“I think as the representative for children and youth, what it says to me is, we’re beyond the arguing about circumstances stage into the ‘let’s get on the same page and work together’ stage,” she says.