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
for children in care can be improved through changes to:
— family support including contact;
— health and well being; and
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.
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 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 when 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. There is an ignorance of the role that
local councillors play in looking after children in care and some
of that ignorance is held by local councillors themselves.
3. Local councillors are duty bound as corporate
parents to ensure that children in care are fully protected and
that includes protection from abuse by individuals and by the
system. Increasing numbers of parents at councillor surgeries
claiming false allegations of abuse do not generate confidence
in the system if those councillors as corporate parents are not
allowed to see for themselves that, unless they are the Lead Cabinet
Member for Children's Services, the process of taking a child
from caring parents is rigorously scrutinised at every stage.
Social services are part of local authorities and as such are
accountable to the local community through elected representatives.
These representatives though need to be able to look into concerns
raised by the people they represent in order to curtail instances
of over zealousness by social services in their intervention into
family life.
4. Scrutiny is therefore 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. A system where the complainant's eligibility to complain
is judged by the organisation that is being complained about is
not sustainable. 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 and well
before the local government ombudsman is engaged.
FAMILY AND
PARENTING SUPPORT
5. The Children Act 1989 is an effective
piece of legislation but it is not working. Local authority social
workers are ignoring the guidelines and the spirit of the Act.
PAIN through their substantial caseload is aware that social services
are not supporting families in need. Care orders should be used
only when all other possibilities have been exhausted but in our
experience they are used much earlier than at the "last resort"
stage and well before family support is looked into. The search
for kinship care is a case in point.
6. The Public Law Outline and associated
changes in the statutory guidance (Volume 1 Court Orders Children
Act 1989 Guidance and Regulations) are being introduced nationally
on 1 April 2008 and a key element in this process is to place
kinship care as a more preferable option to placing children into
care. This will be the stumbling block for any successful change
to current thinking within social services as to quote Jean Stogdon,
chair and co-founder of Grandparents Plus, there are "highly
restrictive notions of safety which persuade social workers it
is better to place children with strangers than kinship carers
no matter how unfulfilled emotionally a child may be because of
the apparent risks associated with family placements."
7. A further stumbling block in reducing
the numbers of children going into care is that from 1 April 2008
the pivotal stage is the Letter Before Proceedings (LBP) which
not only attempts to ensure that only extreme cases get to go
forward to care proceedings but also provides the platform for
identifying carers from the extended family and friends. The LBP
triggers legal aid for the meeting arranged for the parents to
discuss the problems with social services but there is no provision
for potential kinship carers to attend this crucial meeting and
if they do they will not be legally represented unless they choose
to find funding for themselves or have parental responsibility.
8. The problems are exacerbated as the legal
aid reforms are in danger of ensuring that the interests of the
child to remain if at all possible with the family are ignored.
Case after case we advise on suggest injustices on a worrying
scale but legal recourse is being compromised as more and more
parents, grandparents and kinship carers are forced to become
litigants in person as they are unable to seek adequate legal
representation either because the legal aid is not in place or
because the huge demand for such services is being met by a dwindling
supply of specialised legal practitioners willing to take on this
work.
9. The postcode lottery that exists needs
to be eradicated from the process so that the dependency on where
you reside does not become the determining factor whether a child
enters care or receives family support. This not only demeans
a child's value but will create irreparable harm in the future
when a child reaches adulthood and is made aware of the failures
in the system.
10. There is too little emphasis on the
discharge of care orders and much more effort needs to be made
to encompass this stage as a workable solution in assisting positive
outcomes for children in care. Our particular concern relates
to the need for complete independent advocacy where the voice
of the child is required as too often parents complain to us that
their children's views are ignored or changed to reflect the professional's
position.
11. The other major concern that works against
children been discharged from care relates to contact of the child
with parents, family and friends. Reasonable contact as enshrined
in the Children Act 1989 is being flouted by local authorities
so children often stay in care longer than they should or more
worryingly it ensures that children stay permanently in care rather
than be returned to their parents or to kinship carers. Lack of
contact can have serious consequences for a child as it can be
a major factor in deciding whether to discharge a care order.
CARE PLACEMENTS
12. PAIN has noted the results of the recent
What Makes The Difference Project which found that children
in care who have been moved frequently from placement to placement
are nearly three times more likely to be detained in a youth offending
institution or prison.
13. 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.
EDUCATION
14. There is an urgent need to end the role
of the local authority in assessing children's special educational
needs. Councils' dual responsibility of assessing and funding
SEN leads to a conflict of interest. We are aware of cases where
local authorities have refused additional educational funding
for looked after children with SEN and those cases have not been
challenged by the corporate parent cases as robustly as the birth
parents.
HEALTH AND
WELLBEING
15. PAIN is aware that some children in
care are severely disadvantaged by the rigid risk averse procedures
that social workers demand. These children do not have the same
opportunities as other children to engage in out of school activity
which provides character building exercises, skills for social
networking, cultural sustenance and sporting encouragement. Bureaucratic
procedure means that often such activity is not sanctioned in
time or CRB checks are found to be still outstanding. In replicating
aspirations of parents for their own children corporate parents
must replicate the means to which those aspirations can be achieved
for looked after children. It must be accepted that risk averse
procedures can also harm looked after children.
16. There is a worrying lack of awareness
and understanding by social workers of conditions such as of ADHD
and autism in children. We have dealt with many cases that have
been judged by social workers as bad parenting of children when
in fact ADHD, ASD and other genetic conditions have been diagnosed.
As these children represent a large proportion of children in
care it is essential that social workers are trained to deal with
the needs for such children.
The role of the practitioner (including training
and workforce development)
17. There needs to be a substantial culture
change within social work practice 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.
18. The culture change 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.
Social work practice needs to be overhauled so that family support
and kinship care is encouraged. We find that grandparents are
overlooked as carers in many cases and there is a suspicion of
age discrimination creeping into assessments by social services.
19. The quality of social work needs substantial
improvement as we constantly 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.
20. Throughout the professional practices
working in the care system, the lack of independence makes it
difficult for the outsider to be confident that the children's
best interests are being taken into consideration at all times.
The state's role as employer or funder of social workers and childcare
experts involved in the proceedings can allow for bad practice
to continue unabated. The recent Ofsted Report on Cafcass (Ofsted's
Inspection of Cafcass East Midlands, January 2008) was the
first Ofsted report on a Cafcass region and some of the findings
will reflect wider practice nationally. In the experience of PAIN,
much of the criticism of Cafcass in this report can be applied
to other childcare professionals involved in the system and we
can confirm Ofsted's findings in that we have also noted regular
references to information in reports on the children as being
"unnecessary, inappropriate and [which] made implications
rather than explicit evaluations" and that evidence presented
did not substantiate allegations or assertions. We have also found
many cases where the views expressed were outside the worker's
professional expertise, particularly in relation to mental health
concerns.
21. Decisions need to be continually scrutinised
as there are continuing problems in implementing, monitoring and
carrying forward plans for children in care. Accountability is
essential for the system to produce improved outcomes for children
in care.
February 2008
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