Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DR JO
ALDRIDGE, JOHN
REACROFT AND
KATHY EVANS
6 FEBRUARY 2008
Q1 Chairman (Fiona Mactaggart): Welcome
to this sitting of the Children, Schools and Families Committee,
which is considering the issue of "children under the radar"—those
children who are not in touch with services and the reasons for
that. This is a single evidence session, not part of a general
inquiry. It is an issue that several members of Committee are
interested in—some of us have been members of a parliamentary
panel convened by Helen Southworth about young runaways. We thought
that it might be useful to invite some of those voluntary organisations
and researchers who have particular experience with groups such
as young carers, young runaways and so on, to talk to us about
their experiences of this group of children. The most useful thing
would be for me to invite each of our witnesses to tell us the
key issues in their organisation about provision for young runaways,
what are the biggest policy challenges and what are the issues
that we should address. We shall obviously be looking at the issue
in some of our other inquiries, on children's trusts and so on,
so we are really interested to hear what you think we should be
drilling down into before we go into further questions.
Dr Aldridge: My experience is
mostly of young carers, but obviously some of those children do
have problems and do run away. One of the key issues is identifying
young carers, which does not seem to be happening, particularly
through schools. We have been doing research for 15 years now
on young carers and the different adult roles that they undertake,
and they are not being picked up in schools as much as they should
be, despite that being a key area where these children can be
identified. Often when such children are picked up it is usually
as a result of persistent absenteeism or lateness, so it almost
becomes a matter of punishment rather than of looking at the issues
that these children face at home, and their difficult circumstances.
Another key issue is the information that these children are not
getting on particular health conditions and on medication. Last
year a young carer died after taking an overdose of her mother's
morphine. A lot of our young carers, particularly those caring
for parents with mental health problems, are administering medication
and are in control of a lot of drugs, and they are doing this
on their own.
Q2 Chairman: Looking at your research,
I thought that matters had improved during the last 10 years.
More young carers—even if it is still too few—seem
to have been identified, and the services for them seem to have
improved. Has the work on young carers resulted in lessons being
learned in relation to other groups of vulnerable young people
who are outside the radar?
Dr Aldridge: I think so. There
have been improvements across the board. However, there are still
inconsistencies in the services that children receive. A key lesson
is that these children have received dedicated support services
specifically for their own needs as children but also for their
needs as carers, and for their parents as well. Much of our research
shows that these children want a key worker. They want someone
who is consistently there and available for them for pretty much
24 hours, if possible. When we first started our research they
used to have night sitting services, for example, but that has
all gone, and they are often left on their own. But the fact that
a lot of young carers projects are picking up on family work as
well as giving their children dedicated support is absolutely
vital. There is evidence of some very good practice, particularly
in identifying local families who are willing to serve as mentors
or advocates for children who are round the corner—the traditional
idea of a good neighbour, really. Where those services are in
place—they are scant—they work very well. That family
is identified as supporting the child, and if there is a problem
at home, or mum or dad have gone into hospital while they have
been at school, they are available for them. But as I say those
services are a little bit inconsistent. Certainly the dedicated
support that these children are getting from the projects is vital.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you. Kathy Evans,
tell us about your experience and what you think we should be
focusing on.
Kathy Evans: First, I would just
like to welcome the fact that this subject is being examined by
the Committee, because it is a subject dear to our hearts. We
have an awful lot of experience, not just in relation to runaways,
but a range of groups, which I will talk about. There are two
issues here. One is what is happening with those children who
are in touch with services. They are going to school and they
are seeing a GP, but their needs as children are being kept under
the radar; they are not being spotted as children in some kind
of trouble or at risk. The other issue concerns children who are
or who are becoming completely disengaged from services and professional
sight with a view to their welfare. Both of those are a particular
challenge to the Every Child Matters agenda, but they can be very
different in terms of their underlying reasons. One can undoubtedly
lead to another. The failure to identify a young person struggling
at home can result in them removing themselves from home because
it is not safe. There are a lot of questions about how and to
what extent we can helpfully and ethically, but proactively, seek
to find out whether there are any problems with children at home,
and not only in those cases where the first presenting reasons
for concern may look like misbehaviour. That is a big issue for
us; there are a lot of children where the systems in which they
find themselves, whether at school or in their community, are
reacting to the fact that they are perceived as trouble, but which
should be viewed as an indicator for concern. A reaction that
builds on that in a disciplinary way, rather than an investigatory
way, can just compound the problem. With many groups we run the
national young carers initiative; we also work with young refugees,
both in families and unaccompanied, and with Gypsy and Traveller
children. We find that disabled children placed away from home
are very much invisible; they are clearly in contact with services,
but their needs can be invisible. How do we react to a child who
is not crying out for help but is too quiet and too compliant,
as a result of their trying to deal with a situation at home with
which they are not confident? So, I think that it is actually
a really complex subject with a wide range of issues underneath.
Q4 Chairman: In terms of what the
Children's Society does, what is the key lesson from working with
these disparate groups? I accept that you have said that this
is quite a complex picture, but what are the key lessons from
working with those groups of children that this Committee should
take away?
Kathy Evans: One of the principles
running through the core of what we do across a range of different
kinds of circumstances and issues is about ensuring that each
child has an opportunity to give voice to their situation, and
that often requires you to stick with them for quite a while to
build trust. Children in those situations about which we may be
most concerned—whether at home or situations that they have
been exposed to in the country that they came from—and who
have been traumatised or frightened will need time to build the
trust in the person who we hope will help them to sort that out.
A lot of our systems at the moment, or our expectations and desires,
are built upon the presumption, "Well, if that was going
on, you could have told us earlier. Why didn't you tell?"
The child's perspective is that it is a big scary adult world
a lot of the time, and there are a lot of power systems that they
are involved in—school, family, the immigration system and
the community where they live. They are small people and they
do not necessarily believe that they have the authority to be
believed as soon as they tell; they have reason to want to build
trust before they disclose.
Q5 Chairman: Thank you Kathy. John,
tell us about this issue from the perspective of Barnardo's.
John Reacroft: The particular
issues that I have specialist knowledge of are homeless families,
families in temporary accommodation and insecurely housed families,
and there are very large numbers of those. There are a number
of groups who fall under the radar within those and children who
become dislocated from services. The main reason why children
become dislocated from services if they are insecurely housed
in temporary accommodation is that they have to move frequently
and each time they move they have to re-establish all the local
connections. Because they know that they are in an area only temporarily,
there is a disincentive—a psychological disincentive in
some ways—to do something about it. So, for example, children
end up out of school, and they do not have access to services
like GPs, community support, day centres and things like that.
That is particularly cruel because if your family is homeless
and in temporary accommodation, your needs are increasing, but
your access to services can often decrease. Many families, for
example, are housed long distances from where they originated. There
is a group of families that everybody recognises is homeless and
in priority need, and their number is going down. However, despite
the fact that the number of officially homeless households is
going down, the number of families living in that situation is
in fact increasing. About 10 years ago, there were about 40,000
households in priority need in temporary accommodation. Pretty
much consistently, just under three quarters of such households
will be in priority need because they are households with children
or a pregnant woman in them. That number rose to over 100,000
and there was then a government target to reduce it by 50% by
2010, which we all welcomed. However, the social housing that
would have been necessary for those households to have a decent,
secure and affordable home was not provided. What is happening
now is that when households become homeless, they are helped to
avoid being homeless by being placed in private sector rented
accommodation. However, such accommodation is always insecure
because landlords do not give secure leases, but short tenancies
for as little as six months. A private sector family home in London
is also always unaffordable, at £300 or £400 a week.
So the number of families that have been accepted as homeless
has decreased from about 135,000 a year to 73,000, which is a
very big decrease, but it masks all the households that have often
been placed in private sector accommodation long distances from
the boroughs they originated in. There is a big reservoir of children
who are living in insecure housing and who may have to move at
very short notice at some point in the future. What makes the
system work is that many people have invested in accommodation
to let out to others—usually because their pensions are
not performing well enough, and this accommodation seems to be
a safe investment. The things that are making the system work
for poor households are, one, that the interest rates on what
people borrow to buy accommodation are low; two, that house prices
are rising significantly; and, three, that there are unlimited
amounts of housing benefit to pay the rents, because people who
are on minimum wages—£200 a week—will not be
able to pay £300 or £400 rents. When these factors are
not there any more, quite a lot of households will suddenly become
literally roofless again and present to local authorities with
nowhere to live. So the pool of insecurely housed children and
families is increasing significantly, although the official statistics
seem to indicate the opposite.
Q6 Chairman: Tell us about the lives
of those children. You have talked about housing policy, but that
is not our remit, if we are honest about it. Our remit is what
impact insecure housing—for whatever reason it is arises—has
on children in terms of being in touch. The families you described
are referred to housing by the local authority, so the authority
certainly knows that they exist, but what provision of services
goes with that experience? Will the new proposals for children's
contact information and so on make a difference to whether we
know that these children exist and follow them up?
John Reacroft: In terms of the
impact on children, Barnardo's, like everybody else, obviously
supports the Every Child Matters agenda, but all five of the Every
Child Matters outcomes can be compromised by living in temporary
accommodation. We have a test for the kind of accommodation that
children need, in that it should be decent, secure and affordable.
Most temporary accommodation never meets the test of being secure
and affordable, and quite a lot of the time, it does not meet
the test of being decent. So even basic things, such as being
safe and healthy, can be compromised by temporary accommodation.
I can give you more details on that, as outlined in my report,
Do my kids have to live like this forever? [1]If
you want more information on the different outcomes, I will come
to that. What would help? If borough A, for example—I will
not name particular boroughs—persuades a homeless household
to accept private rented accommodation in borough B, which could
be 10 or 15 miles away, and then simply informs borough B that
they have put that family there, borough B will not necessarily
be happy to pay for a lot of expensive services that the family
might need.
Q7 Chairman: So you think that there
is no effective information passing—you are saying that
providing information will not do it. Is there anything that will
do it?
John Reacroft: Obviously, I realise
that this Committee does not have a housing remit. However, if
we do not provide decent, secure and affordable housing for children
and families, it is very difficult to meet the five Every Child
Matters outcomes. I would not argue that there is anything wrong
with passing the information on—some children at risk can
slip through the net in all sorts of ways. However, for the majority
of children, the fact that basic information about them is being
passed on from one borough to another is not going to help them
that much. The most serious problem that they have is being in
temporary accommodation. The fact that the local authority has
been told that the family has been placed in the area will not
deal with that real problem.
Kathy Evans: Some of your concerns
and questions about the value of sharing information are relevant
not only to the group that John is talking about, but to some
of the young people that we work with: Gypsy and Traveller families
who may move regularly and repeatedly across different areas;
runaway children who may appear in different areas from the ones
that they left, and refugee children who, whether in families
or unaccompanied, often face regular moves. When the ContactPoint
system was proposed, we had a whole range of concerns, although
we saw that, in theory, it had the potential to help those groups
in particular. On many occasions, we would be working with a child
or a family who would then disappear with relatively short or
no notice. We felt it useful and necessary to feel that they could
be picked up within a system. At that theoretical level, it remains
something that we are interested in. However, John is right—passing
information does not really create the kind of pick-up of concerns
and cases that we are keen on. The ContactPoint system does not
intend to do that, and we are satisfied that it should not. One
of the critical issues for children who move around regularly
or face real instability in their living conditions is how quickly
and smoothly they can re-engage with education, or whether they
remain at the school that they were involved with, which is usually
what they would like to do. For children who face multiple and
significant school changes on a regular basis, that is one of
the most destabilising factors for them, and for our consistent
attempts to build up a picture of what is going on, to feel that
we have a point of engagement and to know that there are problems
at home. An information exchange that says that someone has moved
and is now there is not a replacement for the face-to-face care,
concern and knowledge of the child that will be the best basis
on which to find out whether there are needs that still need to
be met, or concerns to be explored.
Q8 Chairman: Are you saying that
for children who are very mobile—some may travel 15 or 20
miles, but quite often it is a shorter distance—it would
be good for them to have priority when it comes to retaining a
school place, and some financial support to enable them to get
to that school because that would be a good way of keeping them
in touch with services? Jo was suggesting that schools can be
ignorant of children's needs.
Kathy Evans: It is important to
recognise how critical school is to children. Many of the groups
that we are most concerned about may have a very negative experience
at school. It can be exactly the point in the cycle at which we
say that something better should have happened here. At the same
time, most children whom we work with say, "I wish that school
had been good." For some children, school has been a haven
for them from circumstances away from school that are much worse
than they can bear. It is not about saying that schools are
great and a saviour from all the problems that children face,
nor is it about saying that they are so terrible that they are
the root of the problem. Some of what we valued and supported
in Every Child Matters is the recognition that for the majority
of children, it should be our expectation, and theirs, that school
is a safe and welcoming place and somewhere that is concerned
about their welfare, as well as their achievements. Given that
so much of their life is spent at school, school should be the
hub around which we organise our professional concerns and our
specialists. What we have to look at in a slightly more sophisticated
way are cases in which children are having difficulty in moving
around school placements regularly, and difficulty accessing school
in the first place. There are children for whom school is an uncomfortable
place. They get excluded and passed from school to school, and
their behaviour at school is seen as a concern about them, rather
than for them. There is also the large number of children whose
parents exercise their right to educate them at home. I am not
demonising that decision; that is their right. We conducted some
research recently with Gypsy and Traveller children. The average
experience in the group of young people that we worked with was
that they had left school by the age of 10. In fact, 11.4 was
the average age at which they had left. More than a third had
left by the age of 10. The drivers out of school included racist
bullying and a very prejudiced experience within the school community.
There were some cultural drivers about Roma and Gypsy families
who often, and quite traditionally, take their children into home
education as they approach secondary school. For those families
and children, viewing school buildings as the hub for service
provision does not necessarily work.
Dr Aldridge: School is critical
here. From our perspective, after our years of research into this
issue, particularly related to young carers, there used to be
people in schools who were more obvious—for example, education
welfare officers. From what I have picked up at conferences across
the country, education welfare officers seem to have a much bigger
case load now. So who deals with the welfare of the children?
Although a lot of children are being picked up by their bad behaviour,
a lot of teachers do not see that as their role, or feel uncomfortable
in a situation in which they have picked up a young carer at school,
or found out that their parent was a single parent with a serious
mental health problem or was terminally ill. What the heck do
they do about that? In a lot of cases, it has been about responding
inappropriately because they do not have the skills to deal with
the situation. There is a training issue there, particularly for
teachers. At the very least, they need to recognise where they
can refer these children on to. It does not just stop. Some of
our children have had plants or chocolates bought for their parents
because teachers do not know what to do about the problem. Teachers
have a lot of pressures and responsibilities on them. The welfare
of those children, as Kathy and John have pointed out, is critical.
That is the area in which they will pick up on these children.
We have consistently asked for the triggers for caring, for example,
to be recognised—where a parent has a serious, long-term
health problem or a disability, to at least look at whether there
are issues there for the children. It is quite common practice
that GPs do not always ask their patients whether they are parents.
Parents often want that support, but there is not that sort of
integration. Within schools is the one area where they will—or
should—be picked up. Our research has shown that the 11
to 15-year-old age group is the most difficult for dealing with
these issues. These children will just not turn up and will stay
away for long periods. It is a critical age—when they are
making the transition into adulthood. Our research has also shown
that that is very difficult for those children who are caring.
Q9 Mr Carswell: I am slightly going
off on a tangent, but we are talking about the scale of the problem
and defining what we mean by "children under the radar".
Does this include children—mainly from Africa—who
have arrived in the UK as a form of exploitative labour? I would
not want to dignify it with the term indentured labour, because
it is even more exploitative than that.
Kathy Evans: I certainly have
children who are being trafficked into this country on my list
of groups of children about whom to be concerned under this heading.
There are increasing levels of awareness of that phenomenon. There
are also large numbers of children—although unspecified
and under-regulated—who are in private fostering arrangements,
whether trafficked or not.
Q10 Mr Carswell: What do you mean
by private fostering?
Kathy Evans: Private fostering
would involve a child being looked after by arrangement but not
by a blood relative. We certainly gave plenty of case studies
to the Home Office about trafficked children. Children from a
variety of countries and not simply west Africa may be brought
to the country by people on behalf of their parents. They may
be relatives of some sort but not direct blood relatives—they
are not acting in loco parentis but living with extended
family or friends of family in this country by arrangement with
their parents. Private fostering arrangements were covered under
the Children Act 2004, but it was left to local authorities to
instigate registration processes rather than have them as a requirement.
So we continue to have serious concerns about the unregulated
and unmonitored extent of private fostering.
Q11 Mr Carswell: Do local authorities
keep a record of how many private fostering arrangements there
are?
Kathy Evans: No. We certainly
do not have experience of any who do so rigorously or robustly.
The sunset clause in the Children Act 2004 permitted local authorities
to develop at their own pace the way in which they would deal
with private fostering arrangements, but we have real concerns
that that is not being done.
Q12 Mr Carswell: Given the sensitivity
of the issue, do you think that certain local authorities who
want to see private fostering arrangements in a more positive
light than is merited might be reluctant to take action?
Kathy Evans: I think that a combination
of issues are involved. There may be sensitivity, but a much bigger
issue is the finite—and usually stretched—resources
that are devoted within children's services to child protection
and to the referrals of a child believed to be at risk of abuse.
We have certainly had anecdotal experience of agencies reporting
children they believe to be privately fostered to children's services
authorities that say, "This is not our job unless you think
that they are at risk."
Q13 Mr Carswell: Post-Victoria Climbié,
do you not find that slightly shocking?
Kathy Evans: There are many ways
in which we should revisit Victoria Climbié's case and
ask whether the reforms and processes that we have been engaged
in would have addressed that situation—not only in relation
to private fostering, but also in relation to the question of
how, under this new ContactPoint system, a child like Victoria
Climbié would have got on to the database, because that
still would not happen. It is not clear whose responsibility it
would be to put Victoria Climbié on the database. That
is a valid question and we certainly are concerned about private
fostering.
Q14 Mr Carswell: Am I right in thinking—I
apologise if I am showing my ignorance—that Victoria Climbié
was in a private fostering arrangement?
Kathy Evans: Yes, she was, by
definition, except that she was in the care of her great aunt.
She fraudulently brought Victoria into the country on a false
passport that suggested that she was actually her mother. Some
private fostering arrangements are perfectly legitimate and children
are genuinely looked after, but the authorities should know and
be clear about such arrangements, because there is the potential
for abuse.
John Reacroft: The homelessness
statistics will not tell you anything about children from abroad
who are under the radar. Everyone accepts that children living
in temporary accommodation are homeless and are in priority need,
but any child in a family who have been declared intentionally
homeless will not appear in those statistics; and nor will any
child of a migrant worker unless they have been working in the
UK for more than a year or any child in an asylum seeking family.
Children who are in families from outside the EU and who are here
as migrants will not appear in the homelessness statistics, even
though they may well live in a series of temporary accommodations,
because those families will not have the right to apply for housing
support.
Q15 Chairman: We are concerned about
the services for the children. The issue is not whether they appear
on the homelessness statistics, but whether they are in ContactPoint
or any such system that identifies children who should have services.
John Reacroft: I was trying to
identify the scale of the problem, because that is one indicator
of how many children you might be talking about. We know that
out of 82,750 homeless in priority need living in temporary accommodation,
approximately two thirds will be families with children.
Q16 Chairman: But we do not know
how many children. The figures are very broad—they do not
tell us how many children have how many and what specific needs.
John Reacroft: No. There is a
scheme in London, which is separate from ContactPoint, called
Notify. When children are placed in temporary accommodation across
a borough boundary by a local authority, the receiving borough
should be notified that a child has arrived and that they have
this or that particular need so that their education, for example,
is not disrupted. Two broad groups of families might end up living
quite a distance from a child's school. One group will make a
huge effort to get the child to school, incurring expenses that
they perhaps cannot afford, and the other group will not be able
to do so, so their child will have a significant period out of
school. Even the child who attends school might not arrive in
the best state to take advantage of it, because they will have
travelled long distances and their parents might be stressed.
Kathy Evans: The children of failed
asylum seekers are among those who are profoundly affected or
profoundly at risk of destitution. Again, it is a question of
how many we do not know about as much as it is a question of how
many we know about. Certainly, we are engaged with a great number
of families, including women who have become pregnant and have
children after the refusal of their claim. Their children face
lack of food and lack of places to sleep. Recently, we did some
research with families with whom we are engaged, and found that
one pregnant woman was given a £3,000 maternity services
bill, but absolutely no support for her child. We have good reason
to believe that a significant number of children are living with
families who are overtly and explicitly under the radar, because
they are frightened about what will happen if they are detected
by it.
Q17 Ms Butler: I wanted to touch
on something that Kathy mentioned, but perhaps the whole panel
can respond. You said that lots of children leave school at an
average age of 11.4. If the school is not the hub to provide the
services to catch those children who are at risk, where is the
hub?
Kathy Evans: That is a particularly
good question. One of the things we try to do is to take our services
out to Traveller communities where we work with them and build
relationships with them. That may mean going to sites. Some Traveller
community members are given housing and live there with their
families if they have children. None the less, they still face
many challenges in terms of their identity and their experiences
as Traveller people. We certainly try to take our services out
to those communities, particularly if that is where children are
also being educated. We take play buses and do play work with
them. We also have to recognise that our expectation is that those
children and families should be in touch with primary health care—with
a GP—and should receive advice on healthy living regardless
of whether they are educating their children at home We think
that children centres can and should be seeking to provide resources,
support and advice to parents in the early years to those communities
as much as to any who are locally resident in built housing and
who might walk in through the door. I do not think we should be
viewing school necessarily as the single and first port of call.
In the early years of life, it will be health visitors, services
offering support to parents with babies and GPs, in particular
who should be viewed as that hub before a child ever becomes involved
with school.
John Reacroft: Our experience,
particularly with asylum-seeking children, is that many schools
make incredible efforts to include the children and to make them
part of the community and give them additional support. Some schools
probably struggle to do that but we have heard of many examples
and spoken to families who have been very grateful for the support
they have received from schools. In a child's life there is not
really anybody else, apart from their parents, who see them for
that many hours. If they are not in school, therefore, there is
limited opportunity for other people to look out for the child's
interest.
Dr Aldridge: Certainly there would
be a very good reason why children who have care responsibilities
will not be in school. Usually this would be that they are very
anxious so they are at home. Our research has shown that these
children geographically have very restricted lives, even if they
go out to play areas. They also have restricted social lives. The
health aspect has to be considered. We have found, particularly
in our work with training GPs, that they do not see it as their
role to ask adults who have serious mental health problems and
long-term mental illness or disability what impact that is having
on their children. They often tell us that they only have two
minutes per patient anyway and that it is not part of their remit.
We have also found within psychiatric services that particularly
the old CPNs—Community Psychiatric Nurses—who might
visit families do not want to talk to the children. We have had
experiences where they have wanted the children out of the way.
Health services, as well as staff in education, need to look at
the whole family. I know this has been an old chestnut for some
years but that message still does not seem to be getting across.
Like Kathy said, I think GPs and health visitors and others need
to be involved. What happens if a parent arrives in a surgery
in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis? What impact does that
have on the children at home? Are there any children at home?
We should know those things or we should be asking. It does not
take any longer than a few seconds to ask those questions.
Q18 Ms Butler: Do the GPs and health
visitors need a trigger so that they ask "Are any children
in the home? Is it just you? Is there anybody else? Yes or no?"
What is the next process? Who does it go to next?
Dr Aldridge: In our work with
GPs, we have suggested that it does not take much more than a
five-minute phone call to make a referral, to ask and to look
where the services are. A lot of young carers' projects, for example,
do a lot of work, providing information and raising awareness.
They are in touch with GPs' surgeries and they have their information
there, but it is inconsistent. So, doctors, GPs and health visitors
will be aware that there is a project here, or a social work issue—whatever—but
it cannot just stop there. There are other avenues of support,
within the voluntary sector too and not just in state services.
John Reacroft: In the service
that I run, health visitors are extremely important because they
visit newborn children at home and they know when those children
are living in some of the worst temporary accommodation. However,
the health visitors have a remit to do only a certain number of
things and they have to do those things for quite a lot of children.
So, when they meet families and children in those circumstances,
they often refer them to us for support. I think that health visitors
meet a lot of families who are in very poor housing and they are
probably the one professional group that meets those families
and that can do something about the situation, by referring them
on. Obviously these children will not be at school for some time.
Q19 Chairman: The Millennium Cohort
Study, which looked at the people health visitors visited, showed
that 57.4% of families with an annual income of more than £40,000
were supported by a health visitor in their child's first year,
whereas only 41.5% of families with an annual income of less than
£3,000—precisely the type of failed asylum seekers
that Kathy has been talking about—received that support.
So the more prosperous are getting access to these services and
the least prosperous are being excluded from the service that
all of you identify as a key service. What can we do to stop that,
or reverse that, so that those most in need get access to this
critical service?
Kathy Evans: We run children's
centres in 13 different places around the country, but obviously
we are not in a unique position in doing that. We have been involved
in Leeds and Bradford for the longest time and there we are involved
with SureStart, helping the community to design the children's
centres. There are a range of things that we are doing overtly
with a very acute awareness that we should not just wait for service
users to come through the door and use the services available.
So we work closely with the health visiting service and with the
midwifery service to ensure that, from the first visit that takes
place, the mothers and families are engaged with what is available
at the children's centre, rather than just letting the health
worker in for a one-off visit. We have put an awful lot of effort
into building neighbourhood networks. Many of the people who work
and volunteer in our centres are local parents. Just as often
as we get referrals from health visitors, people are referred
to us by concerned or caring neighbours, who will say that there
is a young woman that we should see. That is particularly the
case with young teenagers, who can be very isolated and fearful
of becoming involved with these much bigger "adult"
services. Neighbours will say that there is a young woman who
has just had a baby, who they think is really isolated, and they
ask if someone could visit her and see what is going on. I am
keen to convey that some of this work is not about having the
right services or systems in place. Some of this work is about
making a direct challenge to anyone who works in those services
and saying to them, "Are you speaking to children about their
situation?" So, is a disabled child living in residential
care for 52 weeks of the year still falling under the radar in
terms of what concerns or upsets them and in terms of what their
needs are? Certainly, we have quotes from here to kingdom come
about young people who are drowning in services. They have key
workers; they are looked-after; they are involved with mental
health; and they have school issues going on. There is no lack
of professional involvement in their lives, but they still find
themselves in meetings where everyone is talking about them and
not to them. So it is as much of a challenge to us to have the
confidence to speak to children, to hear what they have to say,
to be willing to believe it, and to listen to it. We spend a lot
of the time thinking about particular service designs, or specialisms,
or points of intervention. That time would be better spent just
on spending time with young people and listening to them.
1 Do my kids have to live like this forever?:
The lives of homeless families and children in London,
John Reacroft, December 2005, http://www.barnardos.org.uk Back
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