Support for Children and Families: Covid-19

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) for bringing forward today’s debate. There are significant challenges for families, not least with the economy bearing down on them now. The biggest solution that we could find would be a way to stop the mass unemployment that we are about to face. I urge the Minister to make representations in Government.

As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on adoption and permanence, I want to focus on adoptive families. Adoption UK’s survey in April understood the impact of lockdown on families. Following that, the all-party group carried out two shorter inquiries: one was into the adoption process, and the other was into education and home schooling. The witnesses made incredibly powerful contributions, and I thank them.

The adoption process has been significantly disrupted during the recent period, not least when courts have not been sitting. That has had an impact on children, and I ask the Minister to make it a priority that normal proceedings should resume. The priority should be on child-focused court sittings. It has also been harder for panels to meet. We need to find solutions, so that there will be no further delays to that part of the process. Also, of course, it takes longer to build relationships when people are not physically in contact with the young people concerned, so, again, we need to continue to review the process to ensure that the right connections are made in the right places.

The Minister could really help with the issue of medical checks. They have moved from stage 1 of the adoption process to stage 2, but, again, delays are being brought into the system. If there could be an advance there, it could prevent further delay of adoption processes.

More than half of adoptive parents have said that their children have experienced increased emotional distress during lockdown. Essentially fear about the health and safety of family members is triggering feelings of loss and instability for many adopted children. Those issues, combined with the fundamentally restrictive nature of lockdown, have led to an escalation in the frequency and intensity of child-on-parent violence, which is already common in some adoptive families. Nearly a third have reported experiencing more violent and aggressive behaviour than usual.

Covid-19 has highlighted the fragility of many children in adoptive families, and that reminds us all of the importance of the adoption support fund in funding supportive and psychological services. As many children did not receive their established support from schools or health services during lockdown, more demand has been put on the services supporting their families. The additional £6 million provided to enable families to access helplines, virtual peer support and online therapeutic support was needed, but we must remember that this money was brought forward from future funding. I plead with the Minister to see this not as bringing money forward but as putting additional money put into the adoption support fund. I would also like to hear her plans for next year, as this period of uncertainty continues and pressures on families increase, particularly on those with vulnerable children. I ask that we meet that demand, to give those families the best chance of being successful.

Adopted children experience many trauma points in the course of their education, and we have certainly found that issues such as exclusion from school bring trauma not only to the child but into the home. We heard powerful testimony from the head of inclusion at Lincolnshire County Council, Mary Meredith—I recommend that the Minister meets her—who highlighted how exclusion approaches are deeply damaging, especially for a child with disordered attachment. I therefore ask that the Minister looks into the issue to ensure that we can keep children safe in school, not least as exclusions are 20 times more likely for children who have experienced care.

Finally, I want to highlight the fact that thousands of children are currently awaiting placement with a family. We need more families to come forward for adoption and fostering, to ensure that these children have a safe and healthy upbringing. I trust that the Minister will do all she can, working with the APPG and the incredible charities and organisations out there, to ensure that these children have safe families for their futures.