Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, there is plenty to welcome in this Bill, particularly the steps that the Government are taking to strengthen our social work profession to make this a valued and world-class service. Standing back for a moment, more families than ever seem to be functioning so badly that they and their children need the attention of social workers. We must therefore attract an escalating number of top graduates and others to join their ranks, yet it is a time when they have never been so vilified, beleaguered and hard pressed, as we heard earlier in the debate. As well as this legislation to bolster the remedial work that they do, surely preventing more families from getting to the point of breakdown has to be a similarly high priority. I will return to that point of the end of my speech.

I could also talk at length about several of the excellent corporate parenting principles, such as the need to promote high aspirations for our looked-after children. That cannot start early enough. Teesside University aims to attract care-experienced young people on to its courses shortly after they enter secondary school and give them dreams and ambitions to shoot for long before they are post-16, by which point it can be far too late.

Additionally, there is much potential merit in plans to provide all care leavers who want one with a personal adviser or PA until the age of 25, not only those who were still in education as previously. As parents know, all young people need supportive relationships way beyond the point when they formally cease to be looked after at the age of 18, so this is a distinct improvement. However, only a year ago the Centre for Social Justice highlighted the patchy effectiveness of personal advisers. The point of a PA is to ensure that care leavers will always have a link with the local authority and that there will be at least one mentoring relationship in place. The key word here is “relationship”. The CSJ found that, although some leaving care teams provide excellent support to young people, PAs are often simply too busy to build relationships with them.

Freedom of information requests have found that on average the caseload of a PA is 23 young people, and in some local authorities it can be as high as 49. A third of the care leavers the CSJ surveyed had struggled to contact their PA and frequent personnel changes meant that they could have several different PAs in one year. When noble Lords recently met the Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson, we were assured that much more was being done to improve the relevant systems and personnel than appears in this Bill. Will my noble friend the Minister inform us today how the department will ensure that the existing problems with PAs are not simply replicated in the new offer?

Will the Minister also make it clear how this legislation and the other reforms hinted at will build a durable network of all-important relationships around young people in care? Again, a CSJ survey found that three-quarters of care leavers admitted difficulties with feeling lonely or isolated when leaving care, with almost half saying that they found it very difficult. This is not just a transitional problem. The Care Leavers’ Association has said that one of the biggest obstacles that care leavers face in later life is in forming relationships. When one relationship after another is severed, whether with birth families, foster carers or other supportive adults, the pain of separation can be intense. The learned behaviour is often to shy away from forming emotional attachments, yet supportive and stable relationships with a variety of people are vital for developing resilience—the ability to overcome challenging odds and to cope with adversity.

Resilience is a make or break attribute for care leavers because they have to learn how to live healthy, independent lives and succeed in education and employment. Stein and Morris have found that care leavers who successfully transition to independence tend to have developed strong attachment relationships, perhaps with foster carers or family members. The sobering truth is that many young people who leave care have no reliable person to whom they can turn and no one they feel they matter to.

The penultimate corporate parenting principle which this Bill says local authorities must have regard to is the need for,

“children and young people to be safe, and for stability in their home lives, relationships and education or work”.

This is the only place in the Bill where relationships are explicitly mentioned, apart from once in relation to adoption, and I will return to that point later. I understand that the department might not want to be prescriptive about how stable relationships are fostered, but it appears that hopes are disproportionately pinned on PAs. Will my noble friend confirm whether these PAs will be local authority employees allocated to young people shortly before they leave care, or will it be possible for them to be “person-specific” PAs, which regulations provide for in Northern Ireland? Those regulations state that:

“It may also be the case that a young person asks … a person who is already providing him or her with support ... These requests should always be considered seriously and the young person’s wishes accommodated, where practicable”.

Edward Timpson has previously stated that the PA needs to be a flexible role, not necessarily a local authority employee. Will my noble friend confirm whether forthcoming guidance on PAs will make this personalised, flexible approach more explicit, as the House of Commons Education Select Committee has also recommended?

Further afield than Northern Ireland, there are other, international examples of authorities enabling young people to make the most of their existing relationships with supportive adults as they transition out of care. The family finding and engagement model in the United States, much praised by President Obama and George W Bush before him, works on the basis that, as well as blood connections with extended family, care leavers greatly value the supportive and nurturing relationships they have developed with adults such as teachers, youth workers or the parents of friends, while in care. Even if they have lost touch, many of these relationships are potential lifelong connections.

Practitioners in the USA draw on this resource to build, intentionally, a network of support around young people before they leave care. Family finding and engagement looks for at least 40 adults with whom the young person feels positively connected, as well as upstanding family members with whom the young person may have had little or no previous contact. Typically, out of this number a small number of adults will emerge who are reliable and willing to be involved in the young person’s life—one or two who will have the attitude, “I’ll keep in touch with him or her whatever happens”, and follow through by demonstrating unconditional acceptance and care. Consequentially, in California’s Orange County family finding project, 97% of the young people had somewhere to go on Christmas Day or for Sunday lunch. Potentially, a highly suitable personal adviser could emerge from such a process. If the Department for Education was able to provide model contracts, local authorities would be able to include such people in care leaving teams with confidence.

Returning to the lack of mention of relationships in the Bill, I draw attention to Clause 2(2), which itemises services that may assist care leavers in, or in preparing for, adulthood and independent living. While young people’s well-being depends on them knowing how to form and maintain safe, stable and nurturing relationships, the latter are not mentioned anywhere in this list. Surely we owe this cohort of young people, many of whom will have already experienced devastating loss and damage in their relationships, some guidance in this area. When Frank Field conducted his review of poverty and life chances in 2010, he found that young people’s top ask from their schools was that they prepared them to be good parents and gave them some guidance in how to form lifelong relationships, with friends as well as lovers.

In addition, Clause 8 refers to the need for Section 31A plans to set out how the child has been impacted by the harm they have suffered, or will likely suffer; the needs arising from that impact; and how the long-term plan will meet current and future needs. Kinship carers are referred to in this clause as being potential permanent carers of the child, but my understanding is that Section 31A plans set out in accordance with the clause could effectively disqualify kinship carers who have strong bonds with the children concerned but are not deemed capable of providing the therapeutic and restorative care they need. While I obviously appreciate how very important it is that children receive that therapeutic and restorative care, there is no mention of support or training for kinship carers to bring them up to scratch, as it were. Yet all prospective adoptive parents are given help to boost their parenting skills in readiness for the challenge of raising children who may be deeply damaged by what they have experienced.

I am proud of what this Government and the previous coalition Government have done to take adoption numbers and support to a whole new level, and to raise the profile and value of adoption in the nation’s eyes. However, many more children are looked after in kinship care arrangements than are placed with adoptive parents. Yet this “family and friends care” seems to be falling further and further behind in policy attention and support, and some placements are breaking down unnecessarily. This goes against the corporate parenting principle of stable relationships, yet the Bill appears to have very little teeth with which to defend that principle. Will the Minister confirm that the guidance which will follow will lay out how relationship stability can be best achieved where a child or young person is in kinship care?

Finally, I know the Bill is very much focused on the sharp end—on the children who have to be taken into care, and the families in which social workers have to intervene. However, to return to my first point, many social workers are desperate for a far greater emphasis on prevention and early intervention. This would not only spare more children the horrors of broken and abusive relationships and the pain of separation from parents, but also make their professional responsibilities more manageable. I recently visited the Isle of Wight to see how the way in which social services there function has been radically reformed after they were taken into special measures as a failing local authority. The successful whole-system reform there has depended largely on effective early intervention in families, stemming the flow of families across social work thresholds. If this Bill is not the place to achieve this emphasis on early intervention, then I suggest we urgently need a complementary prevention of family breakdown Bill to be brought forward as part of a life chances strategy.