The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
As is conventional, I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson) on securing this debate on a vital subject that is too little aired in this House. I also congratulate him on one of the best-informed Adjournment debate speeches that I have heard in this place. The quality of his speech was not surprising. I am something of an amateur on this subject compared with him, because he has vast experience. As he said, he is no stranger to the experiences of looked-after children; I know that he grew up with many of the prolific number of children whom his parents fostered over a period of 30 years and with his adopted siblings. He understands first hand the challenges that they face and he is leading a cross-party inquiry into their outcomes, as he mentioned. My hon. Friend’s choice of subject comes as no surprise, and I am grateful to him for raising it.
I am aware of the time limitations, so if I do not reach the end of my speech, I will be happy to provide my hon. Friend with an annotated version of it and also respond to the additional points that he has raised specifically.
It is absolutely right to keep the outcomes of looked-after children firmly in sight. My hon. Friend has reminded us of some of the horrific statistics and I agree that they are completely unacceptable. There has been a modest improvement in some outcomes, including attainment, but it is not nearly good enough, as a chasm still exists, as he mentioned. There are no quick fixes in this area. A top-down approach has not produced the results that we all desire. However, the approaches that he spoke about—improving accountability, trusting professionals and sharing best practice—offer the hope of such results.
It is absolutely right that central and local government listen very hard to the voices of looked-after children and those who have left the care system. As my hon. Friend kindly said, since becoming a Minister—and indeed before—I have placed great importance on finding ways in which we can sharpen accountability, rather than tick-box compliance, and on ensuring that we take this subject much more seriously. For example, in partnership with the children’s rights director and A National Voice, we are supporting quarterly meetings of the chairmen of children in care councils, and I have enjoyed those meetings thus far. I have also set up reference groups with foster children, with Roger Morgan, on a quarterly basis and a further group comprising young people who have been through the care system. They have expert first-hand experiences and are not shy in coming forward with their invaluable views.
We want to see the children in care councils drive local change by helping looked-after children to ask challenging questions of local authorities about the services they provide. That is one way in which we hope to bring best practice to all local authorities—my hon. Friend mentioned that that is crucial. Foster carers are the bedrock of the care system. We need to listen to them, and be clear about what they can expect and what is expected of them. The charter for foster carers that we are developing is intended to bring that clarity in an accessible way, and I look forward to launching it in just a few weeks’ time.
My hon. Friend rightly said that early intervention is key. I agree that the case for it is compelling. If we are to provide cost-effective services in the long term, early intervention must be a top priority. The evidence shows that early interventions, such as multi-systemic therapy and multi-dimensional treatment foster care, work, even where children already have very serious emotional needs. Properly targeted, such programmes can make a real difference. According to current audit data, 95% of young people on multi-systemic therapy programmes for children on the “edge of care” remain at home at the end of the intervention. For children in care, local authorities can save on an expensive residential placement later by investing in multi-dimensional treatment foster care at the right time. When faced with difficult choices about funding, it is natural to focus on the immediate priorities, such as, of course, keeping children safe. It is right to do so, but too often education for looked-after children has then been an afterthought, and that is a false economy.
Like any good parent, the best local authorities have high aspirations for the children they look after. The virtual school head model, embraced by almost all local authorities, has done much to emphasise that education for looked-after children and care leavers is absolutely vital. If local authorities act as corporate parents to looked-after children, then perhaps central Government are the “corporate grandparent”. In that capacity, we have extended the pupil premium to include looked-after children, as my hon. Friend has mentioned. The premium is not the same as the personal education allowances that local authorities provide to support education in its broadest sense. The pupil premium is about focusing hard on raising attainment through extra one-to-one tuition, and it will benefit all children who have been looked after for six months. The overall funding for the pupil premium will go up from £625 million in 2011-12 to £2.5 billion in 2014-15 and the looked-after children premium will rise in line with increases to the deprivation premium.
I agree with my hon. Friend’s general argument that more support needs to be given to those children who have been looked after on a voluntary basis and who enter custody. They can no longer be looked after when they receive a custodial sentence, but I accept that they will be as vulnerable and will have the same range of needs as any other young person from care while in custody. We do not propose to amend primary legislation so that those children retain their looked-after status, as that would not fit with the coalition Government’s view about setting new burdens on local authorities. However, from April 2011 revised regulations and guidance will include explicit requirements on local authorities to minimise offending by looked-after children. Most importantly, they say that whenever a child loses their looked-after status as a result of going into custody, the local authority must appoint a representative to visit them.
The purpose of those visits will be to meet the young person, assess their needs and make recommendations to the local authority that had been responsible for their care about how best to respond to their needs in future. Where necessary, local authority children’s services will have to be involved in release planning so that clear arrangements are in place to support the child and their family in the community on their release. For some young people, that will mean being looked after again. So, in future, when a young person who is looked after by the local authority is given a custodial sentence, the authority’s responsibility will not stop at the gate of the secure training centre or the young offenders institute. I hope that reassures my hon. Friend.
My hon. Friend mentioned unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who have the same needs as any other looked-after child but face particular challenges. We have been explicit in our care planning statutory guidance to local authorities that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have the same entitlements to support as all other looked-after children. In recognition of that principle, our revised suite of statutory guidance on care planning and transition from care goes much further than previous guidance in setting out how local authorities should support that especially vulnerable group of young people.
I recognise that the children placed in residential care are among the most vulnerable of all looked-after children. My hon. Friend also raised this issue. Children are often placed in children’s homes only after other arrangements for their care have broken down, and they might find themselves living many miles from their home community. In September, as part of a wider review of all departmental contracts, I decided to cancel the contract awarded to Tribal under the previous Government to support and challenge children’s homes. I took the view that, in the current financial climate, contracting out that important work did not represent the best use of available resources. Instead, I have instigated a new programme of work, led by my Department, to support and challenge children’s homes to identify the challenges faced by the residential sector in order to promote much-improved outcomes for looked-after children in residential care and to see whether it could be used more extensively.
That programme will support children’s homes in learning from the best practice that certainly exists and in developing approaches to supporting children in their care, so that residential care staff understand and are able to use interventions based on solid research evidence about how best to respond to children’s needs in order to nurture them, promote stable care and improve their educational attainment. The programme has already embarked on a wide range of activities, including piloting learning sets for residential care staff in several regions. My staff have also scheduled a programme of visits to regions with high numbers of children’s homes to meet social workers, the staff of children’s homes and a wide range of others to understand their views about the support required by children’s homes. I hope to report on some of that work and research in due course. Of course, that will include consultation with those children, which is so important, as my hon. Friend has said.
Our commitment to raising the quality of residential care has been demonstrated by the overhauling of the national minimum standards for children’s homes. I hope that my hon. Friend will take that as some assurance. I agree that it is extremely important that local authorities learn from each other in order to improve their services. I am concerned that there is not more sharing of knowledge and effective practice. Why is it, for example, that in one local authority no care leavers go to university whereas another manages to support no fewer than 41? The Department’s streamlined regulations and statutory guidance on care planning and leaving care should help as they are more coherent, rooted in best local practice and provide a clear framework for achieving greater consistency. My hon. Friend mentioned some very good examples of best practice in Hackney and Ealing with which I am familiar and which Eileen Munro is certainly taking on in her review. However, that will not be sufficient on its own and we are therefore working with local government colleagues on the development of a sector-led improvement support system.
Central to improved outcomes is the ability of social workers to do their job. We need confident, autonomous professionals who spend more time with children and less time on over-complex recording systems. That is at the heart of the Munro review, which my hon. Friend has mentioned, and is why we recently announced the expansion of social work practices. Placement stability and high-quality care planning, particularly—