Children Bill [Lords]

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Margaret Hodge: I agree with the hon. Gentleman's opening remarks. The way in which we corporately care for the most vulnerable children in the community—those who are looked after by the state—is a national disgrace. It would not be good enough for us, as parents.

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Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): The Minister is very generous. It should be made clear that it is not a recent disgrace; it has been going on for a long time, under Governments of all descriptions.

Margaret Hodge: Yes, I agree. People often ask me about my new position in Government, my array of responsibilities and how I would want to be measured in terms of the success or otherwise of the endeavour of getting a step change in outcomes for children. We all have to prioritise our work, but for me, achieving better outcomes for looked-after children is the key priority on which, if I am given enough time in the job, I sincerely want to be judged. It is a do-able task; we are not talking about a huge cohort of children, but about 60,000 at any one time. The figure is rising—it goes up by about 1 to 2 per cent. per annum—not because more children are coming into the care system but because children have more complex needs and stay in the system for longer.

If every child is genuinely to matter in our society, our ability to ensure that they have the opportunity to achieve good results, not only in education but right through their life, must be central to the whole endeavour of a children's directorate within the Department for Education and Skills.

It might be worth reflecting a little on who these children are. They go into care for many reasons. Nearly half of them have been abused or neglected, 12 per cent. come from dysfunctional families, 10 per cent. have families who are suffering acute stress, and 6 per cent. have an absent parent. Only 7 per cent. go into care because of their own behaviour, and even then there may be underlying causes. These children, who have suffered or been let down by their family circumstances, go into care through no fault of their own, yet we, as corporate parents, fail them time and time again. We must do better.

I shall pick up on one point that we are considering very carefully as I think about how we can improve the outcomes for looked-after children. The key to ensuring better outcomes for them is stability, to which the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham referred. All too often, local authorities are outrageously poor at planning and commissioning places for looked-after children. Someone comes into the local authority office on a Friday afternoon, there is no proper plan for the number of places needed, officials ring around in desperation and simply put the child wherever they can, probably in a terribly eccentric place right outside the borough and borough authority in which the child is located, thus tearing the child away from their family, their school, their friends and their entire network of support. That is why local authorities need to have the prime duty of care for the outcomes for looked-after children.

We believe that if we can improve stability, we can ensure that children who are brought into the care system are placed more quickly in a stable and loving environment. That will be the key to unlocking better educational attainment and higher educational achievement.

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The statistics are terribly worrying. Some 16 per cent. of looked-after children move home at least three times a year. If those children then change school, how on earth can we begin to expect them to achieve high standards at school? We cannot. We have tabled amendments and new clauses on foster care, which we will discuss later in our consideration of the Bill. We are trying very hard to see how we can grow the foster care cohort, because that is another really important way of giving a good, appropriate, alternative, loving home environment in which a child can be supported. There are huge problems, some of which we will talk about later.

It is a question not only of increasing the number of foster carers, important though that is, but of ensuring that those carers are properly supported. They should receive training, support when they have to deal with a crisis, a little respite, and a telephone line that they can call. It is that panoply of support that makes a better foster carer.

One of the things that worries me when considering the cohort of children who are placed with foster carers is that 40 per cent. of foster carers have no qualifications. We know that there is a correlation between the qualifications of parents—and the supportive environment of the home—and the achievements of the child at school. I am not saying that foster carers are not wonderful, loving people, but there is something that we need to unlock between that worrying statistic and the educational achievement of young children.

Mr. Chris Mole (Ipswich) (Lab): Would the Minister applaud those local authorities that have begun to develop the concept of super foster carers? She spoke of the increasingly complex needs of many of the young people coming into the looked-after system. Not every foster parent is equipped to cope with all of those needs. It is appropriate to identify the foster parents who have had particular experience or developed more skills. In some circumstances, the local authorities are considering providing higher rewards for those taking on more difficult children.

Margaret Hodge: I thank my hon. Friend. I agree with him. One of the things that we are trying to do is to create what amounts to a career structure for foster carers, placing greater value on the foster care work force. Some local authorities are developing very innovative practices both for training to support children with exceedingly complex needs and for rewarding people. One of the initiatives that I have taken since I have had this job has been to instigate a national awards scheme. I hope that it will be in operation by next year so that we can give national recognition to foster carers for their extremely important contribution to the lives of the children in their care.

I have seen some very good projects as I have gone round the country and spoken to people who are looking for carers. There is one in Wandsworth, a Conservative authority, run by the Shaftesbury

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Society. It is not a foster home but a children's home, and the scheme is not rocket science but common sense. It has a simple system: it employs a number of women who work part time. Many of them are graduates, many qualified teachers. Each adult works with about five children and makes sure that the children get up in the morning and go to school, use personal computers to access the necessary information to complete their assignments, and get their work in on time. They go and talk to the teachers at parents' evenings, as many of us have done for our own children. Miracle of miracles, if we look at the GCSE results in that environment with that additional support, the children are at national average—52 per cent. pass five GCSEs at grade A to C, rather than the horrifically poor figure to which my hon. Friend alluded. There are other issues—

Mrs. Brooke: I raised on Second Reading the fact that funding for computers for foster homes had been stopped. I have now received a written reply on the matter, and it is clear that that scheme has come to an end. As the Minister is rightly saying that we have to improve educational standards within foster carers' homes, can she look into that cut in budget? I shall be happy with a written answer. I apologise for that, but it fitted well in to the discussion.

Margaret Hodge: I shall certainly look into that—how could I resist the temptation?—and I shall write to the hon. Lady about what is happening with regard to computers for looked-after children in foster care homes, and what steps we can take to give support. This is a complicated issue. It is partly about the growth of foster care and partly about an issue that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham raised, which was that nearly a third of looked-after children are placed outside their authority. As he knows from experience, there may not be good communication between the two local authorities.

Tim Loughton: The Minister makes a good point. I was looking at the figures last night and was alarmed to see that the vast majority of London boroughs place the vast majority of looked-after children—either in foster care or private children's homes—outside their boroughs. In one case, 88 per cent. of a borough's children are placed outside the authority.

4.15 pm

Margaret Hodge: That is alarming. The hon. Gentleman will be pleased that we are working with a number of authorities that receive and export children, to examine commissioning arrangements, so that fewer children are placed outside the borough, and to establish better working protocols, if they are placed outside the borough, to ensure that children's interests are protected and promoted.

I should put these discussions into context: a lot has improved. The number of adoptions has risen hugely since our enormous efforts and the review of the procedure. There has been a 30 per cent. increase in the number of children adopted from care over the past three years. That is important because if more children are adopted, they are provided with a stable

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environment in a warm and loving home, which is the precondition of ensuring that they are able to do well at school.

The social exclusion unit report examined educational outcomes of looked-after children on behalf of the Government, and this clause emerged from that. It is worth reflecting on a number of its findings before we view a duty on schools as the solution to this complex problem. First, it found that young people in care spend too much time out of school—they either do not have a school place, are excluded or do not attend. I hope that many of our reforms, which will build professional services around the needs of the child with a lead professional, will support looked-after children better so that those factors do not emerge and lead to poor results.

I say to the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham that in my constituency almost all looked-after children attend the same school. That is not a good situation, which is why we have introduced our admissions code. It may interest the hon. Gentleman to know that that school, which has always had more places available than any other in the borough and therefore takes in not only looked-after children but asylum-seeking children, has miraculously had the highest increase in results of any secondary school in the borough. When trying to explain that, we obviously take it as read that there is a brilliant head and brilliant staff. However, another factor is that the asylum-seeking children are very motivated and high attaining, and once they master the language, they add huge value to the outcomes of the school.

The second reason that the social exclusion unit found for children not doing well was stability, which we have talked about. The third reason was that they do not get sufficient help with their education if they fall behind. In that context, we should consider the scheme that the Shaftesbury Society has implemented. It is expensive: there are 60,000 looked-after children so one adult working with five children would be a big investment. We will later consider foster care allowances, so we must think about our priorities on where our investment gets the most effective outcome for looked-after children..

The SEU's fourth finding was that primary carers are not expected or equipped to provide sufficient support and encouragement. Again, I have dealt with that issue a little in talking about the qualification levels of foster carers and the failure of many social services departments to put sufficient energy behind the foster care work force, and to invest in and support it properly, particularly through the difficult times such as the teenage years. If one cannot keep people locked in the system in their teenage years, one is bound to fail.

The fifth reason given in the SEU report for the poor results was that children have unmet emotional, mental and physical health needs that have an impact on their education. Again, there are some shocking statistics. I was shocked when I first got this job to discover that one in 10 children between the ages of five and 15 has a mental health condition that requires some sort of professional intervention. Looked-after

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children are five times more likely than any of their peer group to require some support because of mental illness. That is linked to our failure corporately to parent them in a loving way and to provide an environment in which they feel emotionally well and therefore emotionally equipped to support their education.

That is what the SEU found to be wrong. It then made a series of recommendations that it thought we should undertake. It talked about better management and leadership. It talked about a new proposed duty on local authorities to promote educational achievement. Taking on that recommendation led to the clause in the Bill to ensure that local authorities—the corporate parent, the new director of children's service and his cohort—take responsibility for that. Round the country one sees the best outcomes for looked-after children where they are owned at leadership level in local authorities. Ealing council came in to see me recently. The leader of Ealing council sits monthly at a committee overseeing the care of the council's looked-after children. That commitment and leadership at the top results in far better outcomes for those children than we have seen elsewhere.

The second recommendation was to support the front line more effectively by improving training on child development. Our entire change for children programme implies that we should focus much more on training those people who work with looked-after children, particularly on supporting foster carers. The third recommendation was to improve the understanding and attitude towards those in care by developing a communications strategy to promote understanding and positive images of care.

Here I have to say, and I think that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham would agree, that the work that the BBC did last year in that series of programmes was a powerful demonstration that tried to ensure that our values for children in care were challenged. The hon. Gentleman talked of the backlash that exists against looked-after children and I hear about how that is handled day in and day out when I talk to them of their experience at school.

The recommendations also concerned the number of school changes, reducing the out-of-authority placements, improving the regional commissioning of specialist services and ensuring that work force national standards take full account of the priority that the Government place on the education of children in care. We are doing that. Another recommendation concerned prioritising children in care in policy development. I have given assurances to the Committee that I intend to do that. Another was to make better use of information research and priorities in looked-after children inspection arrangements. We have taken on board all those recommendations from this thorough bit of work by the SEU.

We have come specifically to the issue of whether we should put a duty on schools. We think that that misses the point. It misses the point of stability. If we can get stability in children's lives, a lot of things will flow from it. The proposal passes the buck for

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responsibility for the corporate parent away from the director of children's services and to the schools. That is unfair. We already overload schools. Schools have to be a partner and to co-operate, but they should not have prime responsibility.

The new school admissions code of practice, however, makes it clear that admission authorities should give top priority to looked-after children in their admission arrangements. All admission authorities, whether they are LEAs, foundation schools, voluntary aided schools or academies, are required to have regard to that advice. Admission arrangements are consulted on and published each year. The governing bodies of schools that are their own admission authority are required to provide LEAs with information about their admission arrangements, so that the LEA can publish them in its composite prospectus. If a school's admission arrangements do not give looked-after children top priority, the LEA or other schools can raise an objection with the adjudicator. Our experience, even in the short time that such arrangements have been in place, is that the adjudicators have consistently upheld such objections.

The new admissions forums also have an important role. They have been asked to agree protocols to ensure that looked-after children can access suitable schools outside the normal admission arrangements in an effective and timely fashion.

I accept that the school admission system has not worked in favour of looked-after children in the past, but I hope that the new arrangements that we are putting in place will ensure that it does so now. We need to see how the arrangements work in practice before we think about any further action. However, I am happy to assure the Committee that our forthcoming guidance for local authorities on their new duty under the clause will include the importance of securing an appropriate school place.

The amendments also seek to ensure that schools publicise their arrangements for addressing the needs of looked-after children more generally. We have already taken steps to ensure that schools play a key part in supporting the education of looked-after children. We published a guidance document, ''The Education of Children and Young People in Public Care'', in 2000, which recommended that schools should designate a teacher to act as a resource and advocate for children and young people in care. That guidance says that LEAs and social service departments should co-ordinate suitable training for designated teachers and maintain an up-to-date list of designated teachers in schools in their area.

As for publicising a school's arrangements, we are actively considering how best to ensure that schools, through the proposed new school profile, should be encouraged to demonstrate to parents, carers and others how they serve the full range of their pupils, including looked-after children. I am not in favour of requiring schools, through legislation, to report on their provision for specific groups of vulnerable

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children. That might lead to the problems to which the hon. Gentleman alluded. If we made such provision for one group, we would be asked to do so for others.

I am happy, however, to assure the Committee that we will think carefully about what our forthcoming guidance for local authorities on the new duty under clause 42 should say about the issue. I would ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment and accept that the framework that we are putting in place is the best way forward.

 

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Prepared 21 October 2004