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Of course children and young people need to stay in care for longer, especially as 45 per cent. of those in care are adolescents. Evidence given to the Select Committee by one of our witnesses suggested that the GCSE results of 16-year-olds in care were remarkably good in view of the state that those children were in when they entered the care system. Because there is so much catching up to do, young people in care are likely to need to continue their education for quite a bit longer. I was pleased when Dorset was chosen as one of the areas for a “staying put” pilot scheme. Has the Minister any idea when we may be able to move beyond the pilots? I understand that they are going rather well.
I was also pleased that the Committee considered the issue of kinship care. However, although a little more money is available since the passage of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008, I know of grandparents who are forced into hardship when they are doing their very best for children. Of course we do not want them to do it for the money, but I have witnessed the making of great sacrifices. “Voice of the Child” is dear to my heart, and I welcome the creation of children in care councils, although I should have preferred them to be statutory. I am not sure that they will be provided by all local authorities, but I sincerely hope that they will.
The Committee said a great deal about advocacy. We argued strongly that every child should be entitled to an independent advocate whenever a decision was made about him or her. The Government responded favourably, making a commitment that future statutory guidance would state explicitly that children were entitled to such support. When will that guidance be introduced, and when will this actually happen? Let me issue a particular plea for disabled children. Many children in the care system are severely disabled, and they of all people need advocates—not necessarily the advocates whom we might expect to appoint, but those who will understand their gestures and emotions.
The right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) made an important point about trafficked children. We have much more to do in that regard. I was disappointed that the Government did not accept the Committee’s recommendation that a guardian should be appointed for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The Government keep turning their back on that all-important issue.
There is much to celebrate in the progress of some young people through the care system, and indeed much to celebrate in terms of their achievements on the way; but as we have been saying for a long time, we must do better. The quality of the work force across the board is key, as is the stability of placements. I agree with the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) that every child in our society ought to be entitled to live in a stable loving relationship.
I suspect that the Select Committee’s report on social workers will be of great significance. We have heard compelling evidence to suggest that things need to be done very differently. Having read the preliminary report of the Social Work Taskforce, I hope that the Select Committee’s report will make a bigger contribution. There is good practice, but we need to provide the best for all our children. We must make a cross-party commitment to tackling a very real issue that we have not faced up to over the years.
3.44 pm
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con): We have had a good and full debate for a Thursday afternoon, with some excellent contributions from both sides of the House on a range of different subjects. Different expertise was introduced into the debate, starting with the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) who spoke about child trafficking. My hon. Friend the Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin) catalogued all the very poor outcomes—I will not repeat them—that I am afraid are very much a fact of life for children in the care system and the generational vicious circle of under-achievement that we so often see.
The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) is no longer in his place but he mentioned that we are talking about victims. It needs to be reinforced that in 99.9 per cent. of cases of children who find themselves in the care system, it is not their fault. They are the victims. They come from a damaged background and they deserve and have the right to a second chance at a decent upbringing, which is what the care system should be able to provide for them.
The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) made some interesting points about the respective ages of leaving care and the particular pressures of the availability of housing. I will not mention the particular cases mentioned by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), one of which I have a special interest in. He certainly had a great fascination for the detail of statistics and the research that was needed—until, of course, it came to researching the number of world wars, where he was out by a margin of 50 per cent.
The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) has spoken a lot on this subject and she made the point that the report received a lot of good media coverage. I wonder whether it would have received the same level of media coverage had it not been in the wake of the baby Peter tragedy. Probably the biggest tragedy is that it takes such a high-profile case to put the subject in the public consciousness and on the front pages, yet it is a problem and a scandal that has been going on day in, day out for too many years.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) and his Committee on the detail and thoroughness of the report and on being able to secure this debate. As I said, we have not had debates on vulnerable children and children in care in all the time that we have had a Children’s Minister; such debates have been held only in Opposition time. They should be held more and we have a responsibility to do that.
The report should not really be necessary. We should have tackled the scandal of these under-achievements a long time ago. Along with child protection and safeguarding, the Government have done a lot in terms of legislation over the past few years, especially since the Climbié report. We have had big structural changes—in children’s services and in directors of children’s services. Lots of new positions and new databases have been created, with varying effectiveness. We have had new qualifications for the professionals involved in looking after vulnerable children. I fear that the system has become rather bureaucratic. In some cases, it can be said that the system has become more about protecting itself and conforming with the rule books than about protecting the vulnerable children and families whom the people involved are there to protect.
We have been clear for some years—we published “No More Blame Game”, the results of the Conservative party’s commission on social workers, almost two years ago and made a submission to the Laming inquiry—that new structures, new personnel, new titles and new computer systems are all very well, but they are subsidiary to making sure that there are adequately resourced, motivated, trusted and respected professionals, especially social workers, able to get on with their jobs at the sharp end. It is not computer systems that rescue vulnerable children and provide them with a decent opportunity to rebuild a damaged upbringing by giving them the tools to succeed. It is the right interventions by the right people, properly informed by computer data rather than shackled to those computers for too much of the time as they struggle to fill in ever more bureaucratic integrated children’s systems and other assessment forms—constantly chasing their tails, reacting to safeguarding children cases, rather than getting involved proactively to keep families together and steer them away from crisis situations or to remove a child speedily when the value judgment needs to be made.
Nine years on from the tragic death of Victoria Climbié, and following numerous reviews of the care system, it is unacceptable that, for many children, simply taking them into care will condemn them to a childhood of significant under-achievement. If we are taking a child into care, it must be able to replace that child’s growing up environment with something that is better. It must take them out of immediate danger but surely gives them something better than they would have put up with had they remained with their birth parents.
We have heard all the statistics. The proportion of children in care achieving five GCSEs or equivalent at grade A* to C has risen from 8 per cent. in 2001 to 13.9 per cent. in 2008. That is progress, but over the same period the proportion of all children—including children in care, so the figure for non-children in care is even higher—achieving those grades at GCSE has risen from 48 to 65 per cent. The gap, which is what is important, has risen from 40 per cent. in 2001 to about 51 per cent. That under-achievement gap is the true scandal, and it shows how we regard children in care. We permit them to under-achieve so badly because the system is simply not looking after them.
Let us look at some other outcomes. The report underlined the fact that 45 per cent. of looked-after children aged between five and 17 have mental health problems, compared with one in 10 of the school-age population as a whole. Also, up to 49 per cent. of young offenders in young offenders institutions have been in the care system, and we condemn them to a recidivism rate that makes it very likely that they will get on to the slippery slope to a lifetime of crime. We still have a long way to go, therefore.
It is not only right in itself that we should redouble our efforts to get a better deal for children in care, but it is a false economy not to do so, as children from the care system feature disproportionately in the fallout from broken Britain. Following the baby Peter case, the situation has become even more urgent, as the number of applications for care proceedings has risen sharply from December of last year. Interestingly, however, the proportion actually resulting in care orders has fallen quite sharply over that period, which raises the question of whether there is an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction. We need to do more research into that.
I do not want to be entirely negative, because in my travels around children’s services departments throughout the country in recent months I have seen some excellent examples of good practice—as, I am sure, have many hon. Members. They need to be disseminated more widely, however.
Yesterday morning, I visited an excellent small residential home in Harrow that is run by the local authority. It gives very good support to the teenage residents there. I met the director of children’s services for Harrow, Paul Clark, who knows all of the 150 children in the care of that borough. Last week, he took a group of them out bowling. All the children in care in that authority can have access to the director of children’s services. We should be able to expect such hands-on contact in all authorities.
On Monday, I spent the day with social workers in Hackney, and saw the effective new social worker units there with their consultant social worker professionals. They are fired-up and motivated people, and they told me that they are now spending more of their time with the vulnerable families and their children, rather than in front of computers filling in assessment forms—although they would like to scrap the integrated children’s system or ICS all together. In the past few years, that borough has gone from being almost a basket case in child safeguarding to reducing the number of children in care by about a third. It has done that by being far more proactive, putting in far more resources, and freeing up far more social workers’ time to spend with the families in order to try to keep the children with their families and keep the children together. That is the result that all of us want to achieve. Consequently, whereas there are a great many problems with vacancy rates in other authorities throughout the country, for its posts of consultant social worker that authority was turning away 10 applicants for every one recruited—so it can choose the cream of the crop. This can be done, therefore.
Barnet had an innovative recruitment campaign called “Got a new Barnet?” It has brought in a buddy system: every child in care is buddied up with an officer of the council, from the chief executive downwards. Educational achievement, for one thing, has gone up considerably.
Nearby, in Ealing, where I opened the Horizons education centre the year before last, there is a drop-in place for children in care. It is run largely by people who used to be children in care, who went on to university, and who have taken up work with that borough, so they really know what children in care want. As of this year, 18 per cent. of children in care in the borough of Ealing are going on to university, which compares with some 1 or 2 per cent. of the looked-after children population as a whole. That is an extraordinary achievement, and I believe that Ealing’s figure is the highest in the country.
Another example that I have seen is the family drug and alcohol court in Wells street, here in London. It is a new pilot scheme, based on an experiment in the United States, whereby intensive support is given to parents who are on the verge of losing their children to the care system. It involves not only rehabilitation for drug and alcohol problems, which are so often the cause of family break-up, but housing support, education support and so on. It is a real last-chance saloon aimed at trying to keep families together.
I have seen examples of family conferencing through the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and we need a lot more of that. I have seen
Foster Care Associates projects offering intensive support to foster carers such that the educational achievements of children in that sort of foster care are alarmingly higher than the average that would be expected. I have seen the Action for Children black families adoption project, which is run out of south London, where black children, and black teenage boys in particular, who are disproportionately represented in the looked-after children system are now finding prospective adoptive black parents, of whom there has been a great scarcity. That innovative project is offering those black children stable, loving homes and a second chance to have the stable family upbringing that they have missed out on.
The Government response to the report was a bit light and could have gone a lot further, although the spirit of it was very much in agreement with the thrust of the Committee’s report, most of which I agree with. I support the measures in the Children and Young Persons Act 2008 designating a teacher responsible for looked-after children. I would have also liked to see a designated governor to give some extra beef to the accountability line and ensure that things are carried out in practice. It is important to ensure that children in the care system are kept, wherever possible, in a familiar environment that is close to home, close to family members and extended family members and close to their school so that they can receive some continuity of education, as the lack of that is such a big problem for so many children in the care system.
Let us consider some of the points that the Committee made and the Government’s response. The first point is about removing the barriers that obstruct the development of “good personal relationships”. We have heard a bit today about the Danish experiment, but I do not think anyone has mentioned the pedagogue view of social work, which is all about empathy between the social worker responsible and the child in the care system. We hear so often from children in the care system about the lack of continuity in social workers. Children are constantly chasing their tails, they cannot rely on the social worker to turn up when they want them to do so, and before they know it the social worker has moved on and there is a change. How on earth can we expect to rehabilitate a child who has gone through such a damaged and disruptive family background if we constantly give them different schools or different foster carers because they are being moved around, or different social workers? These children need to establish empathy, stability and a link with people who have their best interests at heart.
That is why the Danish experiment was so interesting. What I saw in the homes that I visited—I went to Helsinki with the shadow children’s team—is a flexibility in the system. In this country, a child is either in care or with their birth parents. In the homes in Denmark—many more children in care there are in residential children’s homes, which are almost exclusively owned and run by the municipalities in that country—there is greater flexibility. The children will go home, whatever home may be, at weekends. Once a week in one of the homes family members come in and the children cook dinner for them. We lack that greater flexibility in this country, and we need to see how some of the social pedagogy pilots that are being developed and that will be coming in with residential children’s homes pan out, because I think that they could offer some interesting examples of how we can do things rather better.
The social worker practices to which we gave legislative authority in the recent Bill will be very important, certainly in providing specialisations to deal with some of the more challenging children. We need to consider how to ensure that we can fill the gap in the number of foster carers; there is a shortage of up to 10,000 quality foster carers in this country. There is a postcode lottery of what we pay foster carers and how we support them. If we invested a bit more in the support that we give them, especially those dealing with some of the most challenging children, fewer placements might break down—which is a big problem. We should also do more with kinship carers. It is crazy that in this country some 4 to 6 per cent. of social worker-instigated placements are with kinship carers, but in Denmark the figure is nearer 25 per cent. The guidance says that we should do more, but in practice we are not achieving it. Much more practical help for foster carers, especially kinship foster carers, is needed.
I have a serious concern about what Ofsted is actually inspecting in children’s social care. There is still a big problem with the legacy from the Commission for Social Care Inspection. Ofsted is dominated by people from educational backgrounds and we know that there is not a single qualified social worker on its board, so we need to review the way in which it inspects children’s homes and other forms of children’s social care.
I am glad that the Government have set aside any notion of a target number of children in care. That was a nonsense, as are any targets for children in care. Every child must be treated as an individual.
Many hon. Members mentioned the need to intervene early wherever possible. It is a false economy not to do so, because some children are so damaged when they eventually come into care that it takes twice as much effort to get them back on to the straight and narrow.
It is crazy that in this country the average age at which children leave their parents’ home is 25—it is getting later and later because of property prices and the recession—but we expect many children in residential care to go into the big wide world at the age of 16. They face enormous questions about whether to get a job or sit more exams, and how to find housing. We need more flexibility in the system because, while some children may be up to doing all that at 16, some certainly are not. Even for those able to do it at 16, everything can go pear-shaped a couple of years later and they find that they cannot cope. That is why we need support mechanisms so that children can leave the care system, but dip back into it if they need to do so.
It is absurd that many care leavers are declared intentionally homeless and have to fall back on the local authority to give them emergency housing. That is crazy, and I am pleased that the report mentions this vicious circle that affects too many of our most vulnerable young people. Housing is one of the biggest practical problems that they face.
The recommendations in the report include a request to the Government
“to guarantee future funding for social workers posts in Youth Offending Institutions.”
Earlier this year I visited the YOI at Brinsford and met the social worker of the year, Jacqui Knight, who is doing fantastic work there. She sent me a letter earlier
this week from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, which warns that the funding for the scheme that has been working for some time to secure the long-term sustainability of social worker posts in YOIs is now seriously under threat. For that reason, some of the posts may be lost and the future of people such as Jacqui Knight is seriously in doubt. That would be an enormous loss in dealing with some of the most challenging young people who have left care and ended up in the youth justice system. I hope that the Government will look at the issue again, because those social workers are doing some fine work.
I could also mention the whole problem of unaccompanied asylum seekers, of which I have particular experience in West Sussex, where we have Gatwick airport. Many children come into the care system as a result, only to be abducted by pimps from west Africa and to end up in the sex trade in northern Italy.
This is an important report on a really important subject. It deserves much greater exposure than it has had over too many years. It is a tragedy that it has taken a high profile tragedy such as baby Peter to get this sort of work noticed.
The outcomes for children in care in this country are a scandal that we have accepted over too many years. We must redouble our efforts to ensure that we do not fail so many children in the care system who have already been failed by their families. They have the right to expect the state to give them a second chance at a stable upbringing so that they can become the decent members of society that we all want them to become. We have a duty of care to ensure that that can happen.
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