Children: Looked-after Children

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

I start by declaring an interest because my husband and I provided foster respite care for a brother and sister to whom, 11 years ago, we then became formal guardians. Their experience is very different to many of the experiences that I am sure that we will hear about, in that they came just to one placement—us.

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for bringing forward this vital topic for debate in your Lordships’ Chamber. We often say those words but here it is particularly pertinent. Looked-after children, especially those in residential childcare, are the responsibility of each and every one of us, but sadly the catalogue of child protection failures just continues, and we do not seem to learn the lessons from the individually tragic cases, whether they are Victoria Climbié or the young girls so horrifically abused—and ignored by social services and others involved in their care—in Rochdale.

This week is National Care Leavers’ Week, and it is good that looked-after children can now get proper transitional support, rather than being dumped by the state at the age of 18. Transition to independence is vital, but it is shocking that less than 4% of care leavers stay on with their foster carers past the age of 18, with well over a third living on their own. Only a handful—8%, as we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Listowel—go on to higher education, which is often, I am sorry to say from my experience working in the university sector, not supporting them appropriately and ill prepared to give them the support they need. This situation results in a much higher drop-out rate from among looked-after children than from the average student body.

I commend the Prince’s Trust’s From Care to Independence project, which will provide 1,000 care leavers with one-to-one support, and will form the basis of a much-needed long-term research study. We need to understand exactly what support these young people need. Advocacy is critical to successful transition. I ask the Minister if the Government will consider giving all children in care a statutory right to independent advocacy as a part of care reviews and placement planning, not just as part of the complaints process.

The incidence of children running away from either foster homes or residential care homes is shocking. In fact, it is three times more likely than for other children. These children are the most vulnerable in our society. Many have been through repeated placements that have not worked for a variety of reasons. Regardless, each placement breakdown further compounds the child’s lack of sense of worth and esteem, and is more likely to bring further disruptive behaviour. These children are often scared and angry—a potent mix. It is estimated that 10,000 looked-after children go missing every year. These children are much more likely to be sexually or physically abused, involved in substance misuse or resort to stealing and begging to survive: a fast-track route into the criminal justice system or, worse, self-destruction.

I said that the number of children going missing was an estimate, because we have a serious failure of information-sharing at present. When Ofsted publishes reports of residential homes, it does not automatically send copies to either the local authority with direct responsibility for the child or the local authority where the home is based, and these days the number of out-of-borough placements are increasing. It is vital that this happens, not least because the receiving local authority may not be aware of all the out-of-borough children placed in its area and so cannot alert other important local services, such as education, health and particularly the police, to provide the appropriate support.

I ask the Minister whether that error can be rectified. It is a simple matter of adding one or two local authorities to the circulation list, rather than relying on the authorities to peruse the Ofsted website as reports on individual homes come out. It seems to me that this is part of the joined-up thinking that every inquiry into the failure of safeguarding cases talks about. Let us make it easier for them. Can the Minister also report on the DfE task and finish group looking at out-of-borough placements and say when the Government will publish its findings?

Another problem is that the Department for Education data on missing children is collected differently from the police data. ACPO’s definitions make a distinction between missing and absent children and often do not trigger searches until a child has been away for more than 24 hours. Frankly, that is too long. I know that there is frustration with children who repeatedly go missing from residential homes but, as the Rochdale case showed us, 24 hours is too long away: the abuse can happen within a very short timescale. The child then returns to the residential home and may disappear again. The Children’s Society’s Still Running survey shows that 52% of looked-after children in the survey had run away overnight on at least one occasion.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency and UK Missing Persons Bureau report on children missing from care highlighted the problem of the difference in the way that data are collected. Can the Minister encourage the DfE, the Local Government Association and ACPO to agree on a standard definition, and please can it be collected consistently? We need to know the scale of the problem. The Still Running survey gives a much higher level of running away than the figures supplied by the police, and it is suspected that many of the police data are under-reported, whether by them or by local authorities.

I add my congratulations and thanks to those expressed by my noble friend Lord Listowel to the Minister, Tim Loughton, who has done an enormous amount of work in this area. He made a very positive statement in another place on 3 July about the skill set needed for staff in residential homes. It appears that in a number of places the professional relationship between the staff and the looked-after children in their care just has not worked. There have been reports of staff unable to prevent children running away and, with children moving from placement to placement, there is virtually no time for staff to get to know a child and their background before the first crisis hits. Knowledge of their background might prove helpful in knowing how to handle the crisis. That must change. We need professional qualifications for staff in residential homes, as has already been mentioned. These staff, after all, are looking after children with the most complex problems imaginable. With fewer and fewer local authority-run homes, what check is there on the qualifications of residential home staff in private homes? Can the Minister say whether there will be further requirements on privately run residential homes to demonstrate that their staff have qualifications and to undertake continuing professional development on a regular basis?

If noble Lords have ever talked to looked-after children in the care system, or met them later in their lives, they will know that it is obvious right from the start where the system has worked for them or failed. I want to end by talking about a young man whom I met 10 years ago when Cambridgeshire County Council reviewed its fostering arrangements, including a new and comprehensive guide for foster parents. I was one of the councillors on the panel. We were lucky enough to have as one of our expert members on the panel a young man who was just starting out at university and who had been in foster care since he was seven. I shall call him Tom. He had moved from placement to placement in the early years but had been with one family for the preceding six years, and that relationship had transformed his life. He said that without their love and care, including that of his foster siblings, he would probably not have managed to stay on at school until, let alone beyond, the age of 16. He was the first person in his family to go to university. Through the generosity of his foster parents—and at no inconsiderable cost to them—they had kept his room for him during the holidays, otherwise he would have been on his own at his university halls of residence in the holidays.

Tom knew exactly what we needed to do, including the need for support after the age of 18, which thankfully is now much more available. His sage advice then meant that Cambridgeshire was able to give its foster parents a really effective head start in their support for youngsters in their care. Do enough local authorities actually seek the advice of the young people in their charge?

Sadly, Tom’s experience is not the norm. Local government talks about corporate parents, and rightly so, but I think that this term needs to extend beyond councillors and the professionals involved in the work with looked-after children. All of us in public life have a responsibility. That responsibility extends beyond learning the lessons from the dreadful incidents of the past—although we must do so—to ensuring that looked-after children get a consistent, supportive and reliable service that will give them the basis to rebuild their lives after their traumatic start.