Children: Looked-after Children

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, it is a privilege and somewhat humbling to follow the noble Lord, Lord Laming, who has made such an impassioned speech. I express my gratitude to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for tabling this important debate, for his eloquent and passionate introduction and for his clear explanation of what it takes to introduce a damaged young person to the idea of trust and love as a basis for adult life.

Given the recent cases of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, Derby and Torbay that have been widely publicised and the clear failures in our child protection system, this is a timely debate. The stories from those places seem to have a number of features in common. First, children and young people end up in residential care after multiple placement breakdowns caused by their challenging behaviour, or rather caused by the inability of adults to support their needs and uncover what is behind such challenging behaviour. As one young person involved with the Children’s Society put it recently, “No one thinks there is a problem with the placement; it is always the child”.

Secondly, these incidents involve adolescents who have experienced serious abuse and neglect or have witnessed very traumatic events in their lives. Such children need high-quality support but, as others have said so persuasively, they often experience the very opposite. Thirdly, they have run away or have gone missing on numerous occasions, especially while in residential care and those episodes have not been adequately responded to. Fourthly, the most important common thread is that these children were often seen by professionals involved in their lives as troublemakers, unco-operative and beyond help, rather than as troubled young people, crying out for help.

It is important for us to grasp these things if we want to understand why, in many cases, residential care is not meeting the needs of children and young people. It would not be possible to erase a child’s past experience but patience, empathy and perseverance, combined with knowledge and clear systems for multi-agency working and accountability, should help each child to be able to look, with hope, into the future.

It is not only the cases of child sexual exploitation that demonstrate some of the failures in our care system. Serious child case reviews show children in care taking their own lives or dying of drugs overdoses. One of the key indicators that a child is at risk is if they run away. Many of these children have had difficult starts to their lives and experienced neglect, abuse or trauma. As a consequence, these children are often extremely vulnerable, and when they go missing they are in great danger of being physically or sexually exploited.

The recent all-party parliamentary group inquiry into children who go missing from care highlighted, as others have said, the failure of the state to look for the most vulnerable children and laid bare the often appalling and shocking results. So my first major point is that running away should be seen as a sign that a child or young person needs help.

As has already been pointed out, it is estimated that around 10,000 children go missing from care every year, but many of these children go missing repeatedly, amounting to more than 40,000 incidents a year. The link between frequent episodes of running away and the risk of sexual exploitation is absolutely clear. The APPG inquiry into children who go missing from care found that perpetrators target children’s homes specifically because of the high vulnerability of the children in them and how easily they can make contact with the children. I would like to raise with the Minister a point that has already been mentioned. When will the new definitions of “missing” and “absent” currently being piloted by ACPO be published? Will it include an assessment of the risks related to children categorised as absent?

My second point is that placement stability is one of the most important factors determining the success of care experiences, and has a significant impact on long-term outcomes for children in care. Of the 65,000 children looked after in England in 2011, 14,500 children, which is 22%, had two placements during the year, and 11% had three or more placements. Children in care need stability and to build trust with the people in their lives. How can they feel safe if they are moved so many times a year?

I know that the Government are also concerned about the number of cross-boundary placements. From April 2011, local authorities have a duty not only to ensure that there is enough provision in their local area to meet the needs of the children but that decisions about placements outside their local area are made only by request to a senior nominated officer in the authority. Justification has to be presented in each case to demonstrate the benefits of such placements to the young person.

Surely there is a need now to ensure that local authorities are complying with that duty and that children are placed outside of the authority only when it is clearly in their best interests. What are the Government’s plans to ensure that local authorities comply with those duties?

Thirdly, when the Children’s Society consulted with young people in care about the quality of care that they received, young people said that they wanted an opportunity to have regular chats about their lives with someone. Some suggested that it would be good to have informal meetings with their social worker every six weeks “because sometimes you do not understand the badness of the thing you are in”. For young people placed away from their families and friends, “the care system is an isolated place and you do not want to isolate people further”.

Although young people have a right to express their views when decisions are made about their care to and participate in review meetings, and the local authority has a duty to ascertain their wishes and feelings, they often say how powerless they feel and that they are not in control of events that shape their lives. As a result, running away is one of the only ways that they can express that control.

Research demonstrates that where children are listened to, take part in decisions about their care and get explanations about the decisions made, they are more likely to be happy about their placements, more likely to achieve stability and to share information if they do not feel safe. Advocacy is instrumental in ensuring that children are supported to participate in these decisions. What are the Government doing to ensure that children and young people have the support of an advocacy service when they need help with communicating their wishes and feelings to those who make decisions about their lives?

Finally, as others have said, the support and quality of the workforce in children’s homes is critical to a young person’s experience of care. The variable quality of staff in children’s homes working with very vulnerable children is a concerning issue, with standards often unacceptably low, as others have clearly demonstrated. Workforce development and the academic standard of the residential care workforce in England is much lower than in other European countries. The poor levels of training for staff are also often exacerbated by the high changeover in children’s homes due to low pay and an overreliance on agency workers. What are the Government doing to ensure that staff who work in children’s care homes have the same high standards of qualification and training as in other European countries?

Above all, changes are needed in attitudes. As one young person put it to the Children’s Society, “Basically, I used to go missing all the time … and I mentioned to one of the workers, I went to a girl’s house and there was like prostitution going on there. I went back and told one of my care workers about what had happened. They just saw it as prostitution, they thought ‘she might be a prostitute’ and that’s all they wrote down. They never took time to listen to how I felt about it”.

The phrase “they never took time to listen”, is telling. That, above all, illustrates the need for cultural change in residential child care that we must seek in the years ahead.