Young People

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for calling this timely and important debate and laying out the context so helpfully. If I may say so, feeding her experience as a community and youth worker into political discussion and policies in this area benefits the House greatly.

I declare my interest in the register as a trustee of an adolescent mental health service, the Brent Centre, which grew out of the Anna Freud Centre 50 years ago—I am sorry; it is rather difficult for me to concentrate while the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is speaking. Anna Freud’s last work on adolescence was entitled Adolescence as a Developmental Disturbance; I see the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, laughing. Adolescence is an extremely challenging time. Freud highlights physiognomic changes and, particularly importantly, the fact that this is the time when a child makes his or her transition from dependence on the mother or father and moves towards adulthood.

During that difficult period, the peer group becomes extremely important, which is why youth workers and community police officers are so important for young people then. They need positive role models in younger adults who they can identify with. If one wants to understand why gangs are such an issue, one needs to recognise that children moving towards adolescence who lack guidance, good role models and support from youth workers may be excluded from school and left to their own devices. It is not hard then to see why gangs exist, according to Freud’s developmental model.

I want to talk in particular about adolescents in children’s homes. They are often the most traumatised young people because not only have they been traumatised in their family home, but they have been removed from their families—a traumatic experience. Often, they are placed in the children’s home only after several placements in a foster care environment. They have had multiple losses. I welcome the efforts and interest of successive Governments in improving the experience of children and young people in residential care. According to Anna Freud’s model, residential care and children’s homes are absolutely appropriate for adolescents. The peer group can be a very good tool in working on these issues. It is no wonder that boarding schools can be an excellent place for many adolescents to grow up in.

However, the level of need in our country was identified some time ago—in 2004, I think—by the Office for National Statistics, which found that 69% of children and young people in such homes have a mental disorder of some kind and 45% of them have a conduct disorder. Those high levels of trauma are typically being managed by people with low qualification levels; if you are fortunate, the residential childcare worker may have an A-level and the manager may have a degree. There have been some improvements in that direction.

There is a variety of young people in such homes. Some of them do not have those kinds of issues, but many of them do. One needs to ensure that those staff are well supported; that is a cause for concern, especially regarding this level of need. Will the Minister look at forming a working group to ensure that staff and managers in children’s homes have the support of a clinical psychologist or a child and adolescent psychotherapist on an ongoing basis? They could then form the healthy and strong relationships with these challenging young people that will prevent them entering the criminal justice—as they do too often—and being sexually exploited, instead going on to have careers, have families of their own and avoid having their children taken into care at a later date.