Memorandum submitted by Parents Against
Injustice (PAIN)
Please accept the following submission which
is based on the experience gained in our work for PAIN—Parents
Against Injustice (www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk) which for
over 20 years has offered advice and support to parents and carers
who have been falsely accused of abusing children in their care.
From our experience as advocates for families
involved in public law proceedings and beyond, we agree that outcomes
can be improved through the four main principles behind the Bill
namely:
— Good corporate parenting.
— Listening to children in care.
We believe though that more emphasis needs to
be placed on certain aspects of these principles to ensure that
high quality care and support is given to children and young people
in care.
GOOD CORPORATE
PARENTING
1. For corporate parenting to work effectively
there needs to be a substantial improvement in transparency within
care planning and its operational base. Our feedback from many
local councillors seeking to ensure quality care within corporate
parenthood is that officials within social services can often
be obstructive as well as patronising when asked questions or
information is sought on behalf of birth families and friends
of children in care. The prevalent attitude that they are the
professionals and therefore know what is best for children in
care is a barrier to effective and shared corporate parenting.
2. Scrutiny is crucial to the workings of
corporate parenthood and complaints should be open to all and
not restricted to the immediate parties involved and those that
the local authority choose to allow to complain to them. Accountability
is needed throughout so that a robust complaints procedure allows
criticism to be noted and lessons learnt through the various stages.
A migration therefore is needed away from "marking ones own
homework" to a rigorous and critical investigation of all
complaints by an independent body not associated in any form with
local authorities.
IMPROVING STABILITY
3. Children in care need far more stability
and a cap needs to be made on the number of placements a child
goes through whilst in care. Stability would also improve if out
of borough placements are reduced as this would not only assist
children's ties with their families and friends but also free
up social work resources. We are aware of round trips of eight
hours or more being made by key social workers to carry out their
statutory duties of meeting with children in their care. This
also impinges on contact with family and friends where distance,
time and costs negatively influence reasonable contact.
LISTENING TO
THE CHILDREN
4. We are aware that children's views are
not always sought and, if they are, they can be ignored if they
are at variance to the current social work thinking on the child's
future.
5. Independent advocacy is crucial at this
point as we hear of many complaints that CAFCASS do not carry
forward the views of children. However, more emphasis is needed
on the advocate's "independence" particularly as regards
the funding of that role and that person's life experience. We
are conscious of the public's lack of trust in the notion of an
independent person funded by the local authority looking after
those children and where the background of that independent person
very often has close ties with the local authority or with the
social work profession. To work effectively, advocacy in this
setting needs to broaden itself out to completely independent
funding and the background of advocates should reflect less on
professional care experience and reflect more on the experience
of being in caring situations either as care leavers or foster
carers.
CHANGE IN
CULTURE
6. There needs to be a substantial culture
change for the outcomes of children in care to improve. These
changes may also have a collateral effect in reducing the numbers
of children entering care thus giving them the potential for better
outcomes in their lives if the State continues to be a bad parent.
7. The culture change though needs to start
earlier in the child protection process so that children only
enter care as a last resort. Unfortunately our experience is that
often children are wrongly removed from parents and carers where
there is no evidence of abuse or where proper support to the family
as a system would result in there being no need for the child
to enter care. Family group conferences should be supported by
all social workers and become the norm and not the result of a
postcode lottery. We also find that grandparents are overlooked
as carers in many cases and there is a suspicion of age discrimination
creeping into assessments by social services.
8. The quality of social work needs substantial
improvement as we constant encounter examples of a very poor standard
of work, be it in assessments, investigations or court preparation.
The proposed social work practices may offer the opportunity for
a complete change in culture that will also lead the emphasis
away from over management. To work effectively though they must
be robustly scrutinised not by the usual professional peers but
by "the community" either in a model similar to school
governors or a completely new model that will help to improve
public confidence in this area.
January 2008
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