Children: Looked-after Children

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[The Earl of Listowel]

That this House takes note of the standards of service for looked-after children and, in particular, the Government’s response to changes in residential childcare in the light of recent child protection failures.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my Cross-Bench colleagues for allowing me a slot for this debate, to my noble friend Lord Laming, the Convenor, for prompting me to table this Motion and for his advice, and to the noble Lords who have decided to contribute this afternoon. I also pay tribute to Tim Loughton MP, for many years a consistent champion for looked-after children and the social workers who serve them and until recently Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families. As a Minister, he never tired of speaking to looked-after children and care leavers. It was good for the morale of the whole service that we knew we had a Minister who was listening to our concerns. I am reassured that his replacement as Minister also has a long track record of experience, most recently as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers and of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Fostering. Mr Timpson has also recently produced a report on the education of looked-after children which I commend to your Lordships and which is available on the website of the Who Cares? Trust, the charity that clerks one of the parliamentary groups.

Finally, I thank Ann Coffey MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults. Her report on children missing from care, together with the work of campaigning journalists such as Andrew Norfolk of the Times, exposed the great variability of quality in residential care and gave rise to some very good work from the Government in response.

I declare my interest as a trustee of the child welfare charity the Michael Sieff Foundation. As vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, I have listened for 10 or 12 years to young people from care, to their carers and their social workers, who come into Parliament to share their experience with us. I am very grateful for the trouble they have taken to warn us of their concerns.

It may be of assistance to begin with a brief description of the principles behind working with children who have experienced the kind of trauma experienced by many children taken into care. To the best of my understanding, the principles are as follows: early abuse, including neglect, of children by their principal carers can cause a significant impact on their development which may be enduring and difficult to reverse. The impact of parental abuse, including neglect, may be mitigated by many factors, the most important of which is the child’s genetic inheritance. Children who have experienced trauma of this kind may find it difficult to trust carers, to permit intimacy and to allow themselves to be loved. They may seek to sabotage relationships or test them to the point of destruction. They may be overly self-critical and critical of others. They may have an unquenchable need for attention. They may find attention very uncomfortable. They are often very complicated and needy young people. If they do not receive adequate early support in recovering from their trauma their personalities may become less flexible with age and they may develop a persistent personality disorder.

Key to recovery from early trauma is finding a person who can stick with the child and whom the child cannot, as it were, destroy through his overt or veiled attacks. Most of us have experienced in our lives the sensation of a love that is not returned. There is a similarity between this and a child’s experience. For a child, it may be as if the love of his life has spurned him and he can never love or trust another again. Learning to love again is the key to recovery from such trauma.

I would like to explore certain themes and questions with you. Most important is the development of the workforce: the child and family social workers, the residential childcare workers and the foster carers. Will the Minister undertake today to improve the qualifications of staff in residential childcare? Will he look very carefully at the call to move to a foundation degree level workforce in children’s homes? On the subject of consultation, the practice of providing groups of staff, managers, foster carers and social workers with an appropriately qualified clinical professional to help them reflect on their relationships with their children and families on an ongoing basis is widely recognised as necessary but is far from universally practised. In particular, given the mental health needs of children in residential care, it is beyond belief that there is no consistent support for staff to help them manage the needs of these children. Will the Minister consider introducing regulations to require that children’s homes receive ongoing clinical support from a professional from an accredited list?

Children’s residential care needs an institutional base to ensure steady improvement over time. Will the Minister examine carefully the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care and the College of Social Work and see how the best of these models can be adopted for our own children’s homes?

Finally, residential childcare needs a champion. Will the Minister look, for example, at the work of Louise Casey the former homelessness tsar, champion for victims and, most recently, lead on families with complex needs? Will he seek to appoint someone of the ilk of Moira Gibb, the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Camden, who led the work on social work reform or Professor Eileen Munro, author of a very important report on child protection services? Both have been effective champions for social work.

These are the key themes I would like to explore today. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Laming, who will look more closely at recent child protection concerns. He authored the report of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié and has been a chief inspector of social services. I regret that there will not be time for me to speak about the health needs of looked-after children, concerns about their education, about transition from care or about the introduction of looked-after status for 16 and 17 year-olds on remand. On these matters I will say only that the mental health needs of these children must not continue to be overlooked. Their health assessments need to capture mental health needs. The dedicated looked-after child and adolescent mental health services need to be funded and protected in this difficult time. In particular, the mental health needs of pre-schoolers, the children under five who account for about 30% of those coming into care, need to be better identified.

On education, the looked-after children virtual school heads have been a very welcome introduction in recent years. The concern now is that they are being cut. Will the Minister ensure that this vital role is put on a statutory basis to make sure there is no deterioration in the educational attainment of looked-after children?

On leaving care, it is absolutely vital that the pilots allowing young people to stay with their foster carers past the age of 18 are rolled out across the country as soon as possible. Can the Minister give a timeframe for when this will happen? The Deputy Children’s Commissioner has found that sexual exploitation of children in care—as concerning as that is—is but a drop in the ocean compared with the exploitation of young people as they leave care and move into often inappropriate accommodation.

The Government are moving to bring children on remand into looked-after status. This will significantly increase the burdens on local authorities at a time when they are most hard pressed. Local authorities may find themselves with responsibility for these young people to the age of 24. Can the Minister assure the House that local authorities will be resourced adequately to meet this new challenge?

Both this and the previous Government have made significant improvements to services for looked-after children. The previous Government introduced ring-fenced funding for looked-after children under Quality Protects, introduced a minimum qualification in children’s homes of national vocational qualification level 3 and saw an increase in young people leaving care to go on to university from 2% to 8%. This Government have raised the bar for entry to social work, have implemented the newly qualified status for social workers introduced by the previous Government, and are implementing many of the important recommendations of Professor Eileen Munro’s review. They have promised the appointment of a chief social worker. I ask the Minister when he expects that appointment to be made.

Nevertheless, increasing numbers of children entering care, the worst recession that we have known and particular concerns about the sexual exploitation of children in residential care indicate that forward momentum has to be sustained. I suggest that this can be done by taking the following steps—or at least steps that can contribute. I would encourage the Government to place the development of social workers, foster carers and residential childcare workers right at the top of their agenda. It was heartening to read this week of the winner of the annual teaching awards, a woman fast-tracked into teaching with an excellent academic record and strong interpersonal skills. This is just the kind of person needed in services for looked-after children. It is most encouraging to see the fast-tracking model being applied to social work. I praise here the work of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who regrets that he cannot be present, and others in doing this.

On the continent, we see far more teachers and social workers choosing to become foster carers. Please can the Government support teachers and social workers to make that choice? Please will the Minister consider a similar fast-track approach for residential childcare—a care first, which learns from the experience of placing pedagogues in children’s homes and ensures that candidates need to be placed in supportive environments and not just parachuted into homes unsupported.

I invite noble Lords to remember the research by Professors Petrie and Cameron, and others at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, which compared homes in Denmark, Germany and England. Some 90% of staff in Danish homes had degree-level qualifications; the figure was 50% in Germany but only 30% in English homes. Yet in Germany and Denmark, half the children in care are in residential care, compared to 10% in this country. Homes in England are generally the last resort. Our children’s needs are generally of a much higher level of complexity and urgency, yet our staff are far less well equipped than their continental peers.

I can recall visiting the manager of a children’s home in Maida Vale, north London, five years ago. She had 30 years’ experience as a manager, postgraduate qualifications and a couple of degrees behind her, but she deeply regretted that many of her staff were barely literate. My experience of working in and visiting children’s homes has led me to admire many of the staff. I have met remarkable people making a difference to vulnerable children, often against great odds. These are extraordinary people. Some of the therapeutic communities in particular are remarkable and tremendous places to work, but the quality of staff is highly variable between and within homes. Our most vulnerable children need and deserve consistent expert care—staff who are confident about what they are doing; who understand the principles behind what they do; who can reflect and respect teachers, clinical psychologists and social workers and are respected by them; who have excellent interpersonal skills; who can engage children who may spit and hit; and sustain a relationship with such children over months and years. This work can be the most rewarding imaginable—working with a team and seeing the immense difference that one can make in a child’s life. It has attracted people of the calibre of Paul Ennals, the former chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau; Hilton Dawson MP, founder of the parliamentary group and now director of the British Association of Social Workers; and Sue Berelowitz, Deputy Children’s Commissioner. They all started their careers in children’s homes. This work is among the best ways to learn about children. It can attract the best, as it does in Denmark and Germany, if staff feel supported and valued in what they do.

Paul Connolly, best-selling author and a graduate of an abusive children’s home—now a father of two and an entrepreneur—spoke to me recently about why he succeeded while four of his contemporaries died before they reached the age of 30. He explained that he had always sought out adults to whom he could aspire. For him, he found them in the boxing gym neighbouring his home. He was befriended and became a boxer himself. What he wants most now for children in children’s homes is that they, too, have adults to whom they aspire. The chief executive officer of the Mulberry Bush Organisation, John Diamond, has convened a group of academics to look at establishing a foundation degree for residential care. I very much encourage the noble Lord to consider this as the next step forward.

I must shortly conclude. I should like to remind your Lordships of the words of Sir William Utting in his report in the 1990s on children living away from home, People Like Us. He wrote, and I paraphrase, “The best safeguard for children is an environment of overall excellence”. Confident, carefully recruited, well qualified and well supported staff are less likely to be awed by some celebrity or be bullied into silence or complicity. Confident staff are more likely to gain the trust of their children and minimise the child’s risk of running away—or follow that child if he or she seeks to disappear. Effective staff are more likely to be trusted by their children and to learn of any abuse from guests, volunteers or staff.

The best gift that we can give these children is to surround them with professionals and carers of the very highest quality. If this Government continue to address the status of residential childcare workers, foster carers and social workers adequately, they will be leaving an inheritance of which they can be well proud.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the care with which the Minister has replied. As I said, I was most grateful for the Government’s response back in June, when these concerns were raised, and for the setting up of the working groups. All that is very welcome indeed. Recently the Minister invited me to meet the head teacher of Rugby School with regard to the setting up of the Springboard charity, which helps vulnerable people on the edge of care to get into some of our best boarding schools. I take my hat off to him for this endeavour.

I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. A number of important themes have been raised but I know that at this stage I should not go into any detail. I shall look very carefully at what the Minister has said. Many of the young people from care who have come before our parliamentary group over the years have voiced the anxiety that Members of Parliament and Members of the House of Lords may not be hearing their concerns. I shall ensure that this debate is circulated as widely as possible among them so that they know their concerns are being heard and acted upon.

Again, I thank noble Lords for taking part today.

Motion agreed.