Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, this Bill rehearses a number of themes with which we are all very familiar because we know they are important to improving the outcomes for children in care, and it revisits those themes with further measures. While we would all welcome the opportunity to improve the system even further, it is at the same time dispiriting that we need to return to these issues because the outcomes for so many children are still not good enough.

I want to touch on a number of themes that the Bill addresses. The first is education. The Bill rightly stresses the importance of educational attainment to improve the life chances of looked-after children. I welcome the measures to extend the remit of virtual head teachers and designated teachers in maintained schools and academies to children and young people who have previously been looked after. However, is it not time that we stopped tinkering with the system by adding small measures here and there and instead had a relentless, end-to-end focus on education for these children with proposals that go much further in spanning the education needs of looked-after children and care leavers right from the early years through to, as the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, said, higher education and beyond?

Early years is particularly important. There is a great paucity of data about the youngest looked-after children’s access to their free entitlement, but the indications are that those three and four year-olds who are looked after in care are much less likely to be in early years education and, where they are, are more likely to be in poor-quality education. Some limited data have been put forward by FACT, the Family and Childcare Trust, about Kirklees Council, which decided to look into this and found that only 37% of its three and four year-olds who were being looked after were actually accessing their free entitlement to early education, so it put a big focus on that group of young children and increased the proportion to 95%. Because we here know what an impact good early years education can have, particularly on the most vulnerable children, I am sure that we all agree that we want to ensure that they access that provision. Giving responsibility for their educational progress to virtual head teachers as well would be a way of trying to achieve that.

Why do the proposals for virtual heads and designated teachers in schools not include FE colleges? Many looked-after children and care leavers tend to leave school and go to college, so it seems right that the virtual head teacher should be able to help with that transition, follow those young people into colleges and include them in the focus on their educational attainment.

We know that those young people in care and leaving care are much less likely to go into higher education—or, if they do get in, to complete their course successfully. Despite the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, this morning, which sounded very positive, the numbers nationally of looked-after children going to university are pitiful. I would like much stronger leverage on universities to focus on looked-after children and care leavers. The data are currently so poor—I declare an interest; I speak as the chair of a university council in the north-west, and this is something that I am pressing there—that many universities do not know how many looked-after children they have. They cannot track their progress, so they do not even know if a looked-after child is dropping out. We need to consider requirements on universities to do much better on both recruiting and retaining young people who have been in care. I would like the Government to consider the proposal from TACT, The Adolescent and Children’s Trust, to consider free university tuition or a guaranteed apprenticeship for every child in care. That is something that every parent would try to achieve with their own child, so it should be good enough for us as corporate parents to aspire to.

The second theme is one that the Minister mentioned: the need for stability and continuity for these children. We know that that is often impaired in a very damaging way because of successive placements, changes in social workers, changes in living situation and so on. I welcome measures in the Bill to improve the stability and continuity for children in care, particularly the provision of personal advisers up to the age of 25, in Clause 13. I am a bit concerned about that provision, though, in that the onus is on the young person to request that personal adviser rather than on the local authority or the social workers to make that provision known and facilitate it.

However, there are other barriers, which we have debated here before, that are still in the system and threaten the stability and continuity for children in care. I hope that during the passage of the Bill we will remove them once and for all. For example, we should abolish the requirement for foster children to claim housing benefit at 18 in order to stay in their own foster home. That cannot be right. It does not happen with our own children and it should not happen with foster children. I would like to give foster carers a role until their foster children are 25. Foster carers should be able, for instance, to continue in the role of a personal adviser. It makes no sense to appoint a different person to do that from the age of 21 to 25 if the foster carer is willing to continue and the young person wants the continuation of that contact. As my noble friend on the Front Bench has said, it would be very welcome to have an equal drive in the Bill to improve foster care, as well as ensuring that those children who would benefit from adoption get it. Also, young people should be able to stay in residential care if they need and want to beyond the age of 21, to help with that transition. At the moment these barriers in the system tend to mean that as soon as the child gets to sometimes 16, 17, 18 or 21, they are moved on. We can do some things here to make that less likely.

The third theme is of course the importance of support services and the proposal that the local authority consult on and publish a local offer for the services that will be provided for care leavers. This approach was deployed, as we know, in the Children and Families Act 2014 with regard to children and young people with a special educational need or disability. I recall the debates then, especially about whether such a local offer, determined wholly by the local authority—it could say what it would offer—could be effective without any teeth. Before we replicate that provision with regard to this group of young people, it would be helpful to know what evidence there is about the effectiveness of the local offer and the views of young people and families about it with regard to disabled children and those with SEN.

However, the Explanatory Notes make it clear that the Bill, in Clause 2, removes the existing requirement in the Children Act 1989 to publish more generally information on services for looked-after children and care leavers, and instead proposes this new duty to consult on and publish a local offer for care leavers only. This seems a retrograde step. Why not publish a local offer as well if this is of benefit not only to care leavers but to children in care, adoptees, foster carers and adoptive families? Why does this apply just to care leavers?

The local offer needs to include services provided by other organisations. We know the importance of health and dental health, and there has been much debate about the paucity of mental health services. It is important that other organisations are bound by the services they can add to the local offer and have to deliver it.

On Clause 15, the power to test different ways of working, the Government are right to look for different ways of working and achieving better outcomes but there is something contradictory about the measures in Clause 15 and the mechanism proposed. On the one hand we have extensive legal obligations on local authorities and others already—and we are considering more in the Bill—precisely to try to improve the outcomes of children in care, yet if Clause 15 is enacted it will suspend those obligations to improve outcomes for children in care. That does not seem to make sense, and the Minister will have to explain why suspension of the obligations and the possible impact on the rights of children is necessary.

I will make two points that are not in the Bill but which are important. The level of resources has been mentioned already, and the cuts that local government has had to sustain—40% in revenue funding, which has cut some £10 billion over the last three years, and the same level of cuts are being looked for again—are having a huge impact on preventive services and on the thresholds defined for social work intervention, and must have implications for the Bill. Finally, I wish that there was more on training in the Bill. Regulation itself, although it could have a positive effect on status, reputation and standards, will not of itself improve practice, supervision and leadership in social work, which is the way to improve outcomes for children in care.