Looked-after Children

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE    To be published as HC 678

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

EDUCATION COMMITTEE

LOOKED-AFTER CHILDREN

WEDNESDAY 15 DECEMBER 2010

JON FAYLE, DAVID HOLMES, DR ROGER MORGAN, MAXINE WRIGLEY and TIM LOUGHTON MP

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education Committee

on Wednesday 15 December 2010

Members present:

Mr Graham Stuart (Chair)

Neil Carmichael

Nic Dakin

Damian Hinds

Charlotte Leslie

Ian Mearns

Tessa Munt

Craig Whittaker

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Jon Fayle, Chair, National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers, David Holmes, Chief Executive, British Association for Adoption and Fostering, Dr Roger Morgan OBE, Children’s Rights Director for England and Maxine Wrigley MBE, Chief Executive, A National Voice, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Good morning. Welcome to this sitting of the Education Committee. I welcome David Holmes, Jon Fayle and Roger Morgan. It appears that Maxine Wrigley is not with us, for which I have had no explanation, but I am glad that the three of you are here.

We are holding a one-off evidence session on the issues surrounding looked-after children. It follows a report produced by our predecessor, the Children, Schools and Families Committee, of which I am the sole, remaining member. Since then, we have not only a new Committee, but a new Government so it is important to revisit the issues that were looked at in the previous Parliament and find out what changes have happened since then. Later, we will have the opportunity to talk to the Minister in the new Government to find out how their approach will differ and whether it will be more effective than that of the previous Government.

Before we move on to looked-after children, I want to ask you, Roger, about your thoughts following John Dunford’s review of the role of the Children’s Commissioner and his proposal vis-à-vis merging the role of the Rights Director with that of the Children’s Commissioner. If that goes ahead, what advice will you be giving to ensure that the new role is more effective than John Dunford found the Children’s Commissioner to have been up to this point?

Dr Morgan: There are a number of positive good points. First, the move to establish the new Children’s Commissioner very much on a children’s rights basis linked to the United Nations convention is an extremely positive and long-needed move. In more specific terms, it involves the commissioner in making child impact statements of legislative change, etc., which is also an extremely positive move. The stress in terms of process and approach on increasing the evidential impact and the basis on children’s views is very welcome.

Slightly closer to home, I very much welcome and-you won’t be surprised to hear-endorse John Dunford’s underlining of the importance of the work specifically for children in care and other vulnerable children in three main areas, such as the casework function, which I have been calling "ombuds-lite"-I notice he has used the same term. That is very welcome as a preserved activity, even in the context of there not being an overall ombudsman function for the commissioner.

Secondly, there is the emphasis on children’s views and pure reporting of children’s views, particularly from the vulnerable end of things. Thirdly, there is the general specialism in children in care.

You asked about advice. I have one major worry and one major element of advice. The major worry is that, although John Dunford has clearly talked about two organisations-he used the term "organisations"-as partners merging into one, a move that I welcome and think is right, I am concerned that the activities of the Children’s Rights Director at the moment-whether it is me in the future or someone else-should not be subsumed or dissolved. I notice that various press coverage has used the word "dissolved", which does not seem to be in the spirit of what John Dunford was recommending.

It is important to make sure that the legislation that preserves the functions that he has endorsed preserves specifically the role and the uniqueness of those in the same way as it has in the move to the National Care Standards Commission, the Commission for Social Care Inspection and successfully to Ofsted, so preserving the role and the unit as well as the broader functions.

One area of advice is clearly to maximise absolutely the extent to which what the commissioner is, does, recommends and chooses to plan to do is based on the directly ascertained views of children and young people rather than necessarily campaigning on a small "p" political agenda, so it is very much child-driven.

Q2 Chair: In your view, those two aren’t compatible.

Dr Morgan: I’m not saying that they are incompatible, but that there are different lead emphases. Sometimes, they turn out to be compatible; sometimes, they don’t.

Q3 Chair: Thank you very much for that.

We will now move on to the subject of the day-looked-after children. When children come into care, they come with a number of problems already. Is the system effective in turning those problems around and preparing the children for adulthood?

David Holmes: Last year, more than 90,000 children will have had at least one day in care. If we think about the circumstances that those children have so often come from, we know that a majority come into care because of abuse and neglect. Often these children have experienced very toxic combinations of parental mental health, domestic violence and huge amounts of difficulty at home. When we think how the care system has kept so many children safe and well looked after, the care system does a good job. Sometimes, we measure performance in the care system by those things that we can count; it might be how many GCSEs looked-after children do. What we find harder to measure is the difference between what would have happened if those children had remained at home, as opposed to going into care.

Q4 Chair: But David, that was not really the question. I am assuming that children going into care are no longer abused-one would hope-in the way they previously had been, but my question was trying to ask whether it does more than be a place of safety, with no rehabilitation or improvement. The danger, some people would say, is that the system lacks ambition. Your answer would seem to suggest that you might share that view of the danger, but that we can do more than just protect children from what would have happened if we had left them in the care of abusive adults, and that we need to look to do better. Other countries do better, and therefore we could do better, too.

David Holmes: But you talk about the system, as if the system is just one thing. In fact, the system is huge amounts of individuals working together to try to make children’s lives better. When you think of the system, another way of doing that is thinking about the tens of thousands of foster carers who, every day, have a direct impact on children’s lives. If you measure success in terms of the impact that individuals can have on individual children every day, you get a better measure of success in the care system. There is lots of good practice, and there are also areas where we need to concentrate much more and do more.

Jon Fayle: I resonate a lot with what David has just said. It is very variable, however. Some children are ill served by the care system, but many, most I think, are well served by it. You might characterise the care population as children, of whom at least 60%, and probably more like 70% to 80%, have had horrific, traumatic and abusive experiences. And you might characterise the job of the care system as seeking to help heal, undo and assist children to become resilient in the face of the trauma they have suffered. It is very variable, but the longer children stay in care in long-term stable placements, with secure attachments with long-term carers-be they foster carers, or adoptive or other carers-the better the chance is.

Again, it is very variable from local authority to local authority, but I feel that, generally speaking, insufficient attention is given to the psychological consequences of abuse and the need to try to counteract those consequences. In one of the authorities that I work with, Sutton, there are two psychologists from CAMHS, who are dedicated to the looked-after children population. The work they do is not always so much with the children themselves, but just as often with foster parents. They help them to understand very challenging, difficult and off-the-wall behaviour, and provide them with ways of thinking about it and strategies for dealing with it. That kind of help for this kind of population of children is very under-provided and, potentially, is a great area where we could improve things for vulnerable children.

Dr Morgan: Going back to what children themselves have told us, the majority of children we have asked said that their life has been better in care than they think it would have been out of care. That is not a controlled trial; that is a perception. Despite the fact that a far higher proportion over time did not want to come into care, overall children regard their care experience far more positively than many people would suspect. In fact, 90% rate their overall care this year, in a survey of more than 1,000, as good or very good.

Q5 Chair: What does that look like over time?

Dr Morgan: Over time, that figure is holding. We have three years’ figures and the figure is holding fairly steady. It is not showing a dramatic increase or decrease.

Where there are issues, or problems, is that there are too many children who are falling through the net, as it were, of what might be regarded as a reasonable system. There are a number of stages at which that is happening. Can I quickly identify three or four of them? One, too many children are telling us that they are first coming into care with too little notice, too little information and too suddenly. Secondly, while in care, many children are coming through-the casework that I was describing earlier-on placement changes that are not always in their own best interests but are increasingly triggered by the financial concerns of authorities, which are not necessarily alongside the wishes of the child.

Thirdly, there is a lot of inconsistency in the provisions and assistance for children leaving care. I think there is a major investment issue for the future on how children and young people leave care and what support they get after that. Finally, on education we know that there is underachievement of children in care in education. To quote two figures, 87% say that they regard their education as good or very good this year, and 77%-10 percentage points less-are saying that they feel that they are doing well or very well in their education.

Chair: I welcome Maxine Wrigley, who has now joined us.

Maxine Wrigley: Apologies for being late.

Q6 Chair: Would you like to come in on that?

Maxine Wrigley: I pretty much echo what Roger is saying, in terms of the research that we carry out. We do similar work to Roger’s organisation, but our organisation is led by young people. The trustees of the charity are young people from care. I am the chief exec and I was in care when I was young, from a few days old until I was 16. One of the things that causes issues is that it is almost like there are 150 mini-care systems in England. We talk about one, but they all seem to deliver differently and have different characteristics. That causes problems, particularly for people moving round the system. One of the problems is that out-of-authority placements may mean that you are used to one area, but then you are moved to a different area, perhaps because of a shortage of carers. By the time you have got settled in that area, it may be that you are able to move back to your area, when there is more availability in the system. A fair bit of moving around goes on, some of it unnecessarily. It is due to shortages of good carers.

Q7 Craig Whittaker: While I hear what David says about measurable outcomes not always being the right things to do, do you honestly think that the current system is aspirational enough for our young children? I am not convinced it is.

David Holmes: It’s whether or not you measure aspiration by what the system does, or by what individuals do in relation to the children in their care. I have met many foster carers and many adoptive parents who have incredibly high aspirations for the children in their care that they are parenting. At its core, this is about the quality of relationships between the people caring for children and those children, and the impact that a single trusted adult, or individual, can have on improving outcomes for a child. I take Maxine’s point that we would be better to think about this as 150 local authority care systems than as one big system. We should think about this as interventions with an individual child rather than what the system does. Of course the system is important, but it is not the only measure of success.

Q8 Craig Whittaker: But would you not agree that the system is failing in preparing those children for life after care?

David Holmes: I think some children are being failed, but many others are not, and are being provided with the care, parenting and support that they need to move on. But, yes, there are a number of children who are being failed. It is the variation between what different local authorities do and between the experiences that different children have even within the same local authority that should be a stronger focus of attention.

Q9 Tessa Munt: Good morning. I want to look at the number of care applications. We have statistics that show there has been a big leap between 2008-09 and 2009-10. Why do you think the number of children in care has grown? Are there more children in need? Are the needs identified better? Or is there a panic approach after recent events and those care applications have come about as a sort of pre-emptive move? May I have your observations?

Maxine Wrigley: I sat on the social work taskforce, which was obviously set up as a result of the tragic death of Baby Peter. I was also lecturing some social work students-masters and degree students-last week. There is definitely a feeling among people of a risk-averse culture where social workers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It’s a very difficult job. There does seem to be this feeling now-"What if something goes horribly wrong again, like with the Baby Peter case?" That has had an impact, and the figures have shot up since then.

I am not entirely sure what the answer and the solution are, but I think there is sometimes a knee-jerk reaction to things, like the media and how they portrayed that situation. On the social work taskforce, we did have "Dear Deirdre" from The Sun, who was one of the people deliberately invited to sit on the taskforce because of her role as a journalist-trying to portray the image of social workers better. However, the social work students I met last week were still feeling something-all of them admitted to wondering whether they should go into social work, because of the public image. If you think about it, that’s not really going to be helping the children and young people.

Dr Morgan: Children I speak to on that point-you don’t get the same response from everyone, but a large number-are saying it is because of Baby Peter. Having said that, there is a context that I hear very frequently from children. One thing is that there are not very many who say that they didn’t think they needed to come into care in the first place, once they’re in; there are some, of course, but there is not an overwhelming view that they came into care inappropriately. Indeed, there is more the view that some of them should have come into care earlier.

Q10 Tessa Munt: From the young people?

Dr Morgan: From the young people themselves-earlier rather than later. There is quite a strong view that, once in care, quite a number of people would feel that they are in a position to return home, but usually dependent upon some major change-very often a major change in their parents’ parenting-and they understand that that is sometimes an unattainable goal.

In terms of the numbers coming into care, yes, quite a number talk and speculate about whether additional support could have kept them at home, rather than them coming into care. I cannot give you a statistic about how many, although I can tell you from different studies or conversations how many children say that they think more support could have kept them out of care. But the figures are actually very different in different studies. There isn’t a constant, but what there is a constant about is the kind of support that might keep more out of care.

Children-generally speaking, not all-are coming up with three common themes. First is support for their parents, yes. Two, they ought to do it themselves-one thing is support for personal problems that the children themselves feel they have. Third is help for them, and doing it themselves-keeping themselves out of trouble, either at school or in the wider community. Those are three common themes of support, help and factors that children feel might have helped to keep them out of care, but in the context of a view that there is not a huge number coming in-at the moment. There are children who, obviously, come into care for a while, but there is a time lag between that and the changes that are taking place.

Q11 Tessa Munt: You referred earlier to a slight resistance from young people themselves to going into care. If they pop in and out of the care system, I assume that that resistance is a lot less the second, third or fourth time. Am I correct?

Dr Morgan: Not necessarily. The resistance is a natural feeling of "I don’t want to have my life disrupted", "I miss my family, I feel homesick" or "I don’t know what the future holds"-"scary" is a term very frequently used. In terms of coming in and out of care, the very strong message we’ve got lately is young people saying you need to put a lot of investment into support to get you back home. Just going back out, which does sometimes happen, isn’t enough. You almost need as much investment in support to keep you back home, to stop you having to go through the revolving door.

Q12 Tessa Munt: That changes the question I originally asked the two of you. The things that we’re trying to measure might be changed in the light of what you’re saying about people who are returning, or coming in and out. That very support system is how we might measure how to keep somebody out of care and stop them being a returner. In the light of that new information, can I ask you the same question?

Jon Fayle: I agree with what has been said. I think the main driver for the increase in the care population has been media exposure and panic. The interesting underlying question of whether that is right and whether more children need to be in care is much more difficult. From my experience and the experience of members of the National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers, I’d say that we are not suddenly seeing a lot of children coming into the system who on the face of it don’t need to be there. I haven’t heard anyone say that. What I have experienced and heard said is that they sometimes stay in longer than they need to. There are the quite proper concerns of local authorities to make sure that things are safe and good for when the children should go home. Often, that is taking a much longer time than it should. I can think of cases where children have been in care for over a year, when really after about three months it was clear that the crisis that led to them coming into care was over.

In response to an earlier question about aspirations, I believe that there are high aspirations for children in the care system, generally speaking. But sometimes they are hugely overwhelmed by terrible bureaucracy and paperwork that sometimes seems to be the most important thing for social workers to do.

The only other thing I wanted to say was about the other population of looked-after children-children in custody. Strangely, while the number of children in looked-after accommodation has been going up, the number of children in custody has been going down. That is a quite curious correlation. I have always taken the view that children in custody are children in the public care. They are not looked after by local authorities, but they are children in public care who should get just as much attention to their needs as others do. It has always seemed to me that it is probably right that a lot of children in custody, who have unmet needs and terribly traumatised backgrounds, would be better in the care of the local authority. They would be better looked after in a welfare system than in a custodial system.

In so far as what’s happened recently may represent children who would have gone to custody actually coming into the local authority system, it is an enormously good thing. Whether it’s true, I don’t know. But I think it’s a very interesting correlation.

David Holmes: A direct consequence of the Baby Peter case has been that local authorities have been looking very carefully at the families and children they are working with and reviewing whether those children need to come into care. I am sure that much of the increase in numbers of children coming into care is explained by cases of neglect where a decision is taken that the child, because of the circumstances in which they are living, needs to come into care now. It’s also interesting to compare the number of children that we have in our care system-per 10,000-with, for example, some of the Scandinavian countries, which perhaps have double the number of children in care that we have. That suggests that the threshold for coming into care in this country is higher than in some other European countries. It’s a group of children with more complex needs. That’s an important point to make, because I think we need to be careful about what we’re comparing when we compare our system with systems in other countries.

I am quite sure that a consequence of the Baby Peter case has been that local authorities are now looking very carefully at the children in families they are working with, and reviewing whether those children should be coming into care. However, if you go back to before Baby Peter’s death, we were actually seeing quite a sharp increase in the number of children with child protection plans, so I don’t think we can link everything to that particular case.

Q13 Tessa Munt: Can I get you to give me a one-sentence answer on the idea of children staying in care until they are 21?

Maxine Wrigley: I think it is a wonderful idea.

Dr Morgan: I would differentiate staying in care from having support when you need it until 21. Yes to the latter.

Jon Fayle: If they want to continue where they are living until they are 21, they should be able to. That would be great.

David Holmes: The average young adult leaves home at 24. Why shouldn’t young people in care have similar flexibility?

Q14 Tessa Munt: Fine. Thank you. There have been discussions around the Minister encouraging local authorities to be more open to adoption by families of a different ethnic background from that of the child. Is he right?

Maxine Wrigley: Yes, I believe so. I have a very good friend who was adopted and brought up in a white family in a very white community. He and I share the view that there is a shortage of placements, and that, "Love is blind"-those are the words he uses. If there are places, and people who want to love children and children who need homes, maybe we need to think beyond just the colour of skin.

Q15 Tessa Munt: Do any of you have any different view from that?

Dr Morgan: Just to elaborate slightly, what matters to individual children, time and time again, is "getting the right decision for me at this particular time." There is a whole range of factors, not just skin colour, ethnicity or any of the others that we might latch on to.

Jon Fayle: I would agree. You want to match the family to the needs of the child. Part of that is ethnic background, but that is not the whole story, and it shouldn’t overwhelm; it shouldn’t be so much the prevailing, high-priority matching factor that other factors are missed. If you can’t find the right match that way, then find the best match you can in another.

David Holmes: The law is actually very clear. An adoption agency or the court, when considering whether or not an adoption should go ahead, has to give due consideration to a very wide range of factors, including the child’s identity, ethnic background, religion, language and culture, but you have to balance that against other factors, including, importantly, delay to the child in making a place for them. I think what is important in this debate is that while we need to speed up adoption, we need to get matches right, and that we don’t just ignore the child’s identity, because that is important too.

Q16 Damian Hinds: Sorry to butt in, but I want to push this a little, if I may. Although everyone said, "Oh I agree with the person who just spoke", it sounds as though there are actually two completely different takes, if you don’t mind my saying so. I just wanted to check if I have actually understood that phrase. What Maxine basically said was love is blind-I am sure there are gradations-and therefore ethnicity, I think she was saying-

Maxine Wrigley: I’m not saying it doesn’t matter.

Damian Hinds: Of course there is a role, but you seem to be putting it quite far down the list of priorities. It seemed a much more nuanced picture from other colleagues on the panel. I just wanted to check with them if that was in fact what they were trying to say.

Maxine Wrigley: I know that we’re in a situation where we have huge delays and shortages, and not enough placements and people coming forward. We are not living in the ideal world. For that reason, I think that it could take more precedence.

Q17 Damian Hinds: To be clear, you would downgrade what people perceive to be the role of ethnic matching in the system.

Maxine Wrigley: Yes. As David pointed out, there is a whole set of criteria that you have to try to match around. We’re having a conversation about just one of them. Rather than not have a placement at all, absolutely.

Damian Hinds: But for the sake of argument, isolating all other factors, you would downgrade that one in the pecking order. I just want to check with the other panel members.

Q18 Chair: Do you think Haringey is wrong, because otherwise you could sound like you all agree? Haringey say that when it places children in families, the families broadly reflect the child’s racial and cultural background. In Haringey that seemed like a pretty clear steer-it gave huge weight to it. Is it wrong to do so?

Dr Morgan: I baulk at saying right or wrong, because that is a factor and we can pick on a whole range of other factors and say, "We should try and make sure that we place a child." "Do we get on as a potential family?" is one of the commonest questions that children are asked-I would put that one far higher in the pecking order, to use your term, and I would put others far lower, but there are a lot of factors.

That range of factors will have a different profile for a different child. Children might have a particular background, where, for example, there is a very strong religious sense, and they have that sense themselves. So that may well be a very important factor, which overrides some of the other factors that we may pick out. It is back to the individual child, I’m afraid.

Chair: I fear we are going to disappear into complexity; we need to move on, because it is a short session.

Q19 Nic Dakin: I am focusing on what looked-after children want. One of the things that you all seem to be saying is that whatever family or arrangement children are in, they want good parenting. Are we putting enough resources into that?

Dr Morgan: Can I put a "yes, but"? Yes-good parenting. There are, however, uncomfortably, a significant number of children and young people in care who have experienced a lot of breakdowns in attempts at good parenting. Many children have experienced both a foster family and a children’s home, and if you ask them which they prefer, some will say, "I prefer a children’s home, because I’ve not experienced that good parenting and I think I need something different now." Whether you agree or disagree with that, it is an important "but" to add to the "yes" in response to your proposition.

David Holmes: My view is that good parenting is essential and should be an absolute priority. But it is also worth saying that we are talking about the parenting of children who have, inevitably, suffered multiple disadvantage, and often they need quite therapeutic parenting-parenting-plus. It is about how you ensure that your foster carer work force-and we are talking about foster carers here, because that is where three quarters of children who are looked after live-have the skills that they need to parent children who have experienced huge difficulties in their young lives. It is about ensuring that they get the continuing support that they need in order to be able to look after those children as well as they possibly can. That is about understanding that it means being able to cope with-maybe-behavioural difficulties, problems with education, mental health difficulties or other health issues. It is thinking about the support that foster carers need to parent children who have had extraordinary experiences already in their lives.

Q20 Nic Dakin: Are local authorities delegating enough day-to-day responsibilities to foster parents to allow them to deliver that?

Maxine Wrigley: There are some mythologies. For example, for many years people have been under the impression that to stay overnight at a friend’s house requires huge numbers of police checks, etc. Two Ministers that I know of have already clarified that with a circular to local authorities over the past decade, yet often social workers and children in care still seem to be under the impression that staying over at a friend’s house or going on holiday with a friend involves a huge bureaucratic process.

Actually, it is a myth. We in this room all probably know that you don’t need to go through all those bureaucratic processes at all. But unfortunately there has been confusion, and a mythology has built up around some of those things.

To answer your question, I think that front-line carers- who might be residential or social workers, or foster carers-so long as they are trained and supported properly to do their job, and are remunerated properly, should be more autonomous to make decisions.

Q21 Nic Dakin: Are they trained and remunerated properly at the moment?

Maxine Wrigley: No.

Q22 Nic Dakin: What needs to be done to address that, Maxine?

Maxine Wrigley: The social workers and foster carers that I come across seem, on the whole, to be lovely people who have busy lives and, frankly, I think that it’s a lot to ask from a system and from a set of people. Foster carers and residential and other social workers have a difficult job, and I don’t believe that they are trained and supported that well.

Jon Fayle: On the previous bit of your question, Nic, I want to very much support what David said. The absolutely critical thing-

Q23 Chair: Can you tell us what that looks like and what we can do to make it more likely? I don’t mean to disrespect your answer, but saying that it is needed is easy. We’re trying to look at what changes-what nudges-need to be made in the system, and what levers need to be pulled by the Minister to make this better, rather than just saying what we’d like and noticing how it’s not there at the moment.

Jon Fayle: It’s very skilled therapeutic support for foster parents who are looking after the most damaged children, because that affectionate, caring relationship with boundaries offered by the foster parent is the most critical factor in undoing the difficulties of looked-after children. In terms of delegated responsibility, the practice that I’ve seen is very variable, but I greatly believe that foster parents should have more delegated responsibility. They often feel very powerless in the situation. It varies a lot from local authority to local authority, but I think that any steps that can be taken to safely delegate much more responsibility to foster parents should be taken.

Q24 Chair: So, would an undertaking from the new Minister today to send a letter to every foster carer, to be handed to everyone who enters into training to be a foster carer, be useful? How do we break this, if Maxine’s right and they still carry on putting these restrictions on it?

Maxine Wrigley: It’s better training of social work students, making sure that the curricula are letting them know the correct procedures. Staying overnight at a friend’s house has never been a big issue, but for some reason there is still a perception for some people that it is, so we need more clarification.

Dr Morgan: Yes to greater delegation. The policy position clearly should be that a foster carer, or for that matter a children’s home member of staff responsible for a child, should be able to make the same range of decisions for that child-that’s a big ask, and there are financial consequences-as a reasonable parent would, unless there is a care plan-specific reason not to. That is not an unknown precedent.

Looking at the issue of some of the delegations-the overnight stays-and responding directly to this issue about a letter, there have actually been quite a lot of letters. There have been circulars and letters, and the likes of Maxine and me pontificating ad infinitum, and information has been sent to children themselves on challenging this one about overnight stays. I ask myself, "Why does the issue occur?" and the only answer I can come up with is that there is a natural risk worry-I’m not even going to use the term "risk aversion" because that indicates that it’s somehow unreasonable-that if you give a permission for a child in care that you might give to your own child and it then goes wrong, you’re going to be for the high jump in some way.

Just more letters won’t do it, without some degree of what I’d almost call insurance confidence to go with it, which is also demonstrated in practice. Did you make a reasonable decision on the information that you had at the time, which you would have also made for your own child? It went wrong; it does for some people’s own children as well.

On the other issue about foster carer training, it is a heck of an ask to be a foster carer. When we’ve asked foster carers and foster children together what they think they need in terms of training, one top answer that comes through is not so much training in the sense of courses or things that everyone gets, but information, briefing and skills to deal with the particular concerns and problems that that individual child you’re about to look after has, be they behavioural or emotional problems, as a result of the background they’ve had, or medical or more specific care needs.

Q25 Nic Dakin: Can we pick up the role of the independent reviewing officer? John might want to start on this. Is it drawn currently in a way that is effective in ensuring that children’s voices are heard, or would it be better to concentrate resources on giving each child an advocate, who is distinct from the local authority and is clearly charged to fight that child’s corner?

Jon Fayle: I believe that having an independent and robust reviewing process for every child in care is essential because-this may sound quite a tough thing to say, and I don’t say it in a critical way of social workers or any individual-we know that the local authority cannot always be trusted to act in the child’s best interest. Its policies and procedures, which the social worker is bound to follow, may not be in the child’s best interests. The child may be looked after in a regime like pin-down, which was believed in the child’s best interest. I believe that having an independent scrutineer of the local authority’s practice and plan is essential. There is a very strong argument for saying that it should be independent and outside the local authority; there are arguments both ways, but I think there is a strong argument there.

In terms of advocacy services, I believe that every child in care should have the right to an independent advocate, but that is different from a reviewing officer. I am glad that the new guidance, in particular the IRO’s handbook, says that every child shall have the right to an advocate. How that pans out on the ground, I will be very interested to see, because it is not the position at the moment. But the advocacy role is a different role, and the advocate may sometimes be arguing for things that they don’t agree with, such as, "I think I should be allowed to smoke in this children’s home." This is where the IRO cannot do it. The IRO may think that the local authority’s plan is right, and the child needs to be away from its parents, but the child might be saying, "No, I want to be at home with my parents. Please let me go home." The child needs to be able to make that view as powerfully and strongly as possible with the help of an advocate, but it would not be the IRO’s role to make the advocacy point on behalf of the child.

Q26 Nic Dakin: So what added value does the IRO bring?

Jon Fayle: Independent scrutiny to safeguard the child from plans, processes and practices that the local authority may be conducting that are not in the child’s interest.

Maxine Wrigley: Young people feel really strongly that it shouldn’t be called an IRO if they are not independent. If they are working for the local authority, I am not sure that there is a proper scrutiny role there.

We carried out quite an in-depth piece of research with young people about IROs two years ago, and we did a refresher piece of work recently. There doesn’t seem to have been much change. I am aware that there are now steps to alter things, but I think the whole idea of having an independent reviewing officer is that they should be independent, and that was definitely what young people wanted. The idea of being able to have an advocate if and when you need one, as an independent person to help you, particularly to make a complaint or to get to what is before the level of an actual complaint, also seems very important to young people.

Dr Morgan: The roles of advocate and IRO, children see them very separately. An advocate, as others have said, speaks what I want to say if I am not articulate enough to do it. The value of an IRO is that they are somebody who can formally and legally challenge the local authority, who can check out for me or a child in care the rules I might not know about to make sure that the authority is doing the right thing. That is very different to advocacy.

I have worked with children who have said that they see the independence as an issue, and would see independence from the local authority as beneficial on the whole. The other key question that some children have asked, when we are looking at all the different roles and functions around a child in care, is, "Which ones overlap or need to be carried out in part by social workers?" They don’t see IROs and advocates as the same, but they sometimes want to know what the definition of a social worker is.

Q27 Damian Hinds: The 2008 Act requires local authorities to provide both in-area availability and a choice of placements. How realistic do you think that is? How close are we to where we need to be, and what more can be done to improve placements? Let’s start with David.

David Holmes: It’s certainly very challenging providing a sufficient range of appropriate placements within a local area. If you are in a London borough, you may be talking about a very small geographical area in which to provide those placements. We also know that staying relatively close to home and being able to maintain friendships and stay at school are the things that really make a difference to many children in the care system, in terms of being able to get on with their lives. So, the principle behind the sufficiency duty is a very good one.

However, that requires very concentrated work, on the part of the local authority, to source sufficient high-quality, safe local placements. That is a huge challenge, but it is a challenge that is shared, and one where there is scope for better commissioning practice and more sharing about what works. But it is also important to continue that supply of placements-to make sure that we continue to recruit foster carers, to make sure that we retain the ones that we have got, to make sure that they are properly supported and trained, to make sure that we have residential care available for those children who need it and to make sure that we continue to have a flow of adoptive parents coming through. This is about all the building blocks of making the system work.

Q28 Damian Hinds: What proportion of children do you think are offered a choice?

David Holmes: In practice, I imagine that few children are actually offered a choice. However, if you were to ask looked-after children which they would rate more between a choice of placements and one very good placement that is right for them, I am sure they would go for the good placement. I don’t think choice is everything. This is about making sure that you have a supply of placements that reflects the assessed needs of your local care population.

Dr Morgan: I endorse that. Very few say that they have a choice of placement. To slightly rephrase your question, children ask the same question, but they put it as: "Can I have a choice of at least two placements?" It is not much of a choice if there are not at least two. Very often what is said is, "We’ve found you a placement." That is a kind of standard phrase. "Can I also have a back-up," might be another question, "if the first one doesn’t go too well and if I don’t settle too well?"

Can I just give you a couple of statistics? Sorry to throw these around, but I am excited because we have just finished the 2010 monitoring of the care system by children and young people, which I will send to the Committee when it has been finalised. Although very few say that they have a choice, 83% said this year that they think they are in the right placement for them. That still leaves quite a number-17%- who are not.

The issue of placement moves is important. The median number of placements that each child in the survey had been in this year was three, over their care to date. Not over the total in a care history, but over their care to date, which covers very variable periods of time in care, that was the median number of moves. Seven out of 10 said that they thought that the last move that they had made was in their best interests. So, there is an issue around the combination of choice and stability. I may be anticipating a future question, but, incidentally, just over half thought that the last time they had had to change school because they had changed placement was in their best interests, too. Sometimes the choice is not only of an initial placement, but also comes up when there are placement changes.

I don’t have an answer, other than to say that there is a supply problem, to how commissioning can generate that range of placements. All I can say is that children are very much saying that the best way of trying to get it right first time, rather than having to change it a number of times, is to have information for both sides-for the child and for the placement itself-and to have a gradual introduction, as well as not forging ahead with a placement that is not actually going to work because the signs of arguments and of not getting on are already there.

Chair: The quality of answers is fantastic, and I am enjoying all of them. Can we make them as short as possible for what remains of this session?

Q29 Damian Hinds: Three seems very high for a median number of moves in a year. There were 1,300 children in England last year who had five or more placements, which seems a shocking statistic. Maxine, what is your take on how to reduce that?

Maxine Wrigley: I think it is a supply problem. As Roger said, if there are not enough people out there wanting to offer the placements and being supported and trained properly so that they are able to offer placements, how can children have choice in placements and how can they have good placements? There is a supply issue in the stock of placements. Moving placements is traumatic if you have to move school as well. You can see why there are issues in educational attainment, if that happens several times. Children and young people have said to us time and time again-this echoes Roger-that they want information pre-placement, during the placement and post-placement. Other young people can then know that the family have a dog and go to Scarborough for the holidays. Those kind of things are useful to know and can set the ball rolling before they go and see a placement. A lot of people do not know until they get there, and in a way that is heartbreaking for everyone if it breaks down. There needs to be a better quality of information before the placement.

Q30 Damian Hinds: I know we are short of time, but I want to touch on care with relatives and friends. There is a formal part of that, because one in 10 settings is formally with friends and family, but a large swathe are informal. Between the two, there is quite a difference in the level and type of local authority support. What are your thoughts on whether there is room for a halfway house, with the best of informal and the formal, but with more support? What progress has been made on improving local authority support for those informal settings? If we start with Jon, as we skipped him last time.

Jon Fayle: Again, there are 150 mini-systems, so it is very difficult to generalise. My general experience is that relatives and friends are not well cared for by the system. They are not properly supported and not given finance. Sometimes they are asked to care for a child by a social worker and then abandoned. Is there a halfway house between being informally in care and a completely informal arrangement? I think that notion would be worth exploring, to try to find some regulatory framework to create that halfway house and give those relatives the support and protection that they need to do the job properly.

Q31 Damian Hinds: Are there any differing thoughts on that from the others on the panel?

Dr Morgan: Children have a strong message. Always look to see if there are family or friends, but always check them out, as you would anyone else. Do not assume that because they are family or friends it is okay. As a caution, watch it and be very clear whether it is a private arrangement or a publicly made arrangement. That has a heck of an implication when you start getting to entitlements for leaving care later on.

Q32 Chair: I just wanted to pick on one thing. The Children's Workforce Development Council will have its core functions brought into the Department. Can we have very quick answers on whether that will make it even harder to recruit decent people, or will it lead to an improvement?

Dr Morgan: As a declaration of interest, I am a member of the CWDC, although I do not think that is why I say this: what is important is not losing the functions, rather than the structure itself. There is always the risk, as I was saying earlier in relation to my own functions, of them dissolving.

Q33 Ian Mearns: The case of Baby Peter seems to have had a profound effect on the whole system in terms of how people view things. Do you think it might have affected the lives of looked-after children and the support that local authorities can give them? Are there long-term implications from that? Secondly, how do you view the prospects for local authorities in being able to commission long-term preventive work to address individual family circumstances? Do you see them deteriorating where children end up being looked after as a preventive measure because of a shortage? There is an end to ring-fencing for a whole range of budgets and that could be a potential implication.

David Holmes: I think that we know from generations at work that, with families who are experiencing difficulty, if you intervene early in a family and do as much as you can to support the family, whether that means providing family support or removing the child, the long-term outcomes for the child will be better. It is false economy to cut early intervention. I know that across the country local authorities are looking very carefully at their budgets, but cutting early intervention is a mistake. On top of that, you must question the implications of the Baby Peter case. The best thing that can happen from very tragic cases like that is that we become even more robustly child-focused and try to make the very best decisions that we can at the right time for children who need state care.

Dr Morgan: There is, I agree, a false economy in cutting back on support, not only early support but returning from care support as well. In a time of austerity, there are obviously major concerns about the sustainability of saying that. A lot of what children and young people identify is needed in the system is not necessarily additional money. It is also getting a number of things done in a particular way. We have used things like information. We have used things like notice and choice, very much listening to the child’s views. That process does not necessarily require additional money.

Q34 Craig Whittaker: Surveys in September show that only 25% of those in care at the age of 18 are in employment or training. That also shows a huge amount of NEETs. That compares incredibly badly, even with a short time ago in 2006, when it was 33%. Why do you think it has fallen so sharply?

Dr Morgan: It is difficult to look at it over time for two specific reasons. Children in care under-achieving was mentioned earlier. It is becoming an increasingly competitive market for getting jobs these days. The second issue is about asking children and young people about their perception of how they are seen outside. Time and again I hear that people from care-either in care or care leaders-are feeling that there is a prejudice against those from care in two areas, one of which is accommodation and the other is employment.

Q35Chair: Can I challenge you on that? Surely when employers interview someone, one of the questions that they won’t ask is, "Have you been in care?" I don’t understand what you are saying.

Dr Morgan: It is a known factor for many that they are from care, whether we are talking about interviews, promotion prospects or college places. Knowing that you are from a care background is a known factor. There is a dilemma. I am sure that Maxine may well want to come in on this from personal experience. "Do I or do I not say that I am from care? Do I try to keep it a secret?" A lot of children try to keep it a secret that they have been in care or that they are from care. That is not the best platform to start selling yourself for employment or, indeed, accommodation.

Maxine Wrigley: We carry out polls of general attitudes to care as work for the Prince’s Trust and the Who Cares? Trust. Attitudes to care have got better over the past 10 or so years. The public generally understand more. The public say that they would give jobs and treat these people the same. However, it is not perfect as yet and we still hear about people who don’t want to tell people that they are from care. My experience when I was living in a children’s home was that I was really embarrassed to go into the children’s home. I used to walk round and round the block until the neighbours weren’t looking, because I thought that they would think that I was some kind of youth offender or that I had been naughty. I thought that the general public thought-and this is still fairly true, and there is a mix-up-children came into care because they have done something wrong.

Q36 Craig Whittaker: So are the two of you seriously saying that one of the biggest causes of children at 19 not being in education or having a job is perception?

Maxine Wrigley: No, I’m not saying that that’s the largest cause. I’m saying-it’s a salient point anyway-that basically there is an element of shame and discrimination in children’s lives.

Q37 Craig Whittaker: Let me revisit the question. Could you explain why you feel that there had been a decline over the past nine years for those children who aren’t in education or in jobs at 19?

Dr Morgan: I gave you two factors; the other was underachievement. I would like to think that employers would very positively want to employ young people from care because they are underachieving and therefore have greater prospects of development, learning and performance after that. Unfortunately, that is a rather more altruistic view than is generally taken. If you’re underachieving, that shows up in your qualifications, certificates and achievements, and that is a major drawback in securing employment. From what children and young people have told me, I can’t proffer a trend statement, but I think that that has been a fairly consistent picture over the past three years.

David Holmes: I think that it comes back again to the parenting issue. A key transition point for any young adult is support to get into employment, education, training or whatever it is that they need at 18-plus. These children are in state care, and it should be a priority for the state to ensure that every support is given to get them into employment. There have been some good pilots, the From Care 2 Work programme and apprenticeship schemes, and we need to look at those really carefully, find out what’s working and what isn’t working in them, and prioritise getting these children jobs.

Q38 Craig Whittaker: Let’s talk about underachievement. What we do see in the education system is that the attainment levels of children in care go down, and that there is a huge crevice between those in care-or those who have been in the care system-and those who aren’t. What can we do to put that right?

Maxine Wrigley: The children and young people we speak to consider that getting an education is the single most important matter, above and beyond better spending, which I thought was quite shocking. They basically want to get a better education, with out-of-hours support, and extra support so that they can stay behind and do extra activities and generally just have a little more support with homework and education. If your life’s in a mess and you’re feeling unstable you’re very likely to not focus on your school work. Education is an area in which children and young people want to do well.

Q39 Craig Whittaker: Do you feel that carers have the skills to give that support? Foster carers, for example.

Maxine Wrigley: Often they don’t. There are foster carers who perhaps didn’t have the best education themselves, so we can’t say, "You can’t be a foster carer unless you’ve got a degree," but at the same time people perhaps need to support the carers more to help them to do homework with the children more.

Dr Morgan: Catching me up when I’ve missed something, perhaps because I’ve had personal problems or been out of school for a while-a very constant issue-isn’t necessarily something that purely a designated teacher can do, although designated teachers are getting a positive report from children and young people at the moment. But yes, it is carers having the skills to be able to pick up, for example, that you have dropped badly back in reading, which is something that can really set you to fail consistently thereafter. You change schools-that might be positive for some reasons and negative for others-and you end up on a different course or with a different teacher and a different approach, starting at a different place in the book, or in a different book. "Catch me up" is a term that I’m afraid I’ve invented, but which summarises the kind of issues that a lot of children are raising.

David Holmes: Helping foster carers to support the learning of looked-after children is crucial. My organisation has just done a project called "Fostering Education", which focused on five to 11-year-olds in foster care and on helping them with literacy. It was a quick intervention, which worked, and is the sort of thing that foster carers need to have available to them.

On that point about catch-up, these children have experienced a lot. They might not be ready to do their exams at 16 or 18. We need to make sure that the support is there so that they can catch up and take those exams when they’re ready.

Q40 Craig Whittaker: I want to take up what Roger said earlier about those involved in the criminal justice system. Do you think there is a lot more scope to manage looked-after children by managing their behaviour throughout the process rather than to help reduce the numbers?

Dr Morgan: I think there is. I wish I could give you the answers to exactly who is doing what. We’re actually planning a consultation with children and young people on specifically that issue of what might build up-resilience and recovery-in relation to criminal activity.

Q41 Chair: Perhaps Jon can tell us.

Jon Fayle: I can’t tell you yet, but I can tell you that-with another hat-we are commissioning major research from the University of East Anglia precisely around the issue of the over-representation of looked-after children in the criminal justice system. What it’s looking like is that occasionally children are sucked-accelerated-into the criminal justice system by the looked-after children system. Behaviour in children’s homes that otherwise would not be regarded as criminal is reported to the police and the whole thing starts. There is some of that, but we think that that may be just anecdotal rather than systemic. But a lot more can be done. There are better ways of dealing with challenging behaviour in children’s homes-and foster homes-through restorative justice, most obviously, but also the protocols between the police, children’s homes, social services departments and youth offending teams about how to handle the issue. We can try to decelerate and divert children whose behaviour might be seen as criminal and get it out of the criminal arena. We think we can make a lot of sensible proposals around those areas to try to ensure that care is a buffer against criminalisation rather than what it occasionally is-an accelerant.

Chair: Thank you. That’s a very positive note on which to end. Thank you all very much for a really fascinating session. Please do stay in touch with the Committee. If you have any thoughts or if you want to follow up with any recommendations on which you think we should press Ministers, we’d love to hear from you. We will now take evidence from the Minister himself.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Tim Loughton MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education, gave evidence.

Q42 Chair: Minister, it is a great pleasure to have you with us. This Committee, including in its previous guise, has always taken a close interest in the welfare of looked-after children. We are all, cross-party, enormously pleased and confident that we have in place a Minister with such a long record of involvement in the issues, so our hopes and expectations of you within the Government are extraordinarily high. We know you will be able to satisfy that confidence in your answers to our questions this morning. We have a lot to get through, so if we can keep questions and answers brief and to the point, that would be fantastic.

I don’t know whether to start or end with this. I think I’ll start with it while you’re on the spot and just having a ride. The predecessor Committee in the previous Parliament produced our looked-after children report and, obviously, the Government had to respond. The whole Committee wishes to make this request, so can I begin by requesting that you and the new Government respond to that report again, formally to the Committee, so that we have a clear steer from the Government about what they think of the issues raised and the recommendations made by the predecessor Committee. I wonder whether you’d be prepared to do that.

Tim Loughton: I am very happy to do that. I think that we have done a lot in the first six or seven months to justify quite an update. I am very happy to take up that offer.

Q43 Chair: Brilliant. We very much appreciate that.

Is the structure of children’s services too complex for "the child" to have a proper voice? We have directors of children’s services, children’s trusts, the LSCB, IROs, the Children’s Commissioner and, still, at the moment, the Children’s Rights Director, etc. It is a very complex world. How does the voice of an individual child with real needs get heard in such a system?

Tim Loughton: First, Chairman, thank you for inviting me again-the second time in three months, I think-to this Committee. It is always a joy and a pleasure, and I am sure it will be again. I welcome the fact that the Committee is doing a report into looked-after children, which is a very important and often overlooked area, but something I have been banging a drum on for all the years that I have held the brief, in opposition and now. Over-

Q44 Chair: I apologise for interrupting. This is a one-off session, following our report from last time. We are not planning to produce a report from this-our evidence will be put in the public domain, and the evidence from you and the predecessor panel will form our evidence on this occasion.

Tim Loughton: But it’s very important, the evidence you are taking and, hopefully, the profile it will gain.

In all the years that I had this brief in opposition and, certainly, in all the things to do with children that have happened post-Victoria Climbié-in particular, post the Children Act 2004 and, actually, post the Adoption and Children Act 2002-there has been an enormous amount of legislation, regulation, structural change, name changes, and new individuals and committees, all around children. It is not through lack of trying, but it is a question of whether the quantity has got in the way of the quality. I think that we have a slightly cluttered landscape as to children.

Is there the danger that the children’s voice-the welfare of the child is the absolutely paramount consideration of all of us, going back to the Children Act 1989-has somewhere been lost? We can’t see the wood for the trees, as it were. That is why the Eileen Munro review of the whole structure around child protection and social work is looking at the interaction between all these different responsibilities, individuals and organisations.

Having said that, the last thing I want is yet more structural upheaval-I think I made that clear on my previous appearance before the Committee. The whole sector has suffered from too much structural upheaval-whether it was right or wrong I make no comment. There were certainly advantages in bringing together children’s services departments with children’s social care and education. That was a huge structural upheaval, and there is still fallout from that with the responsibilities of certain directors-whether they have children and adult social care in their brief, whether it is education or children’s social care, etc.

We are looking at that, but as far as I am concerned, the prime consideration must be what most impacts beneficially on the child-in this case, vulnerable children in the care system-and gives them a better chance. I want to do that first. If it turns out that we need some form of structural change in order to make that easier, or because the structure is standing in the way of achieving that, it will be secondary. I want to make sure that we get the best deal for children first.

Q45 Chair: A quick follow-up to my first question: who should be responsible for the individual budget for a looked-after child, to ensure that when they move school, foster home or, conceivably, even local authority area, their specific needs and the level and quality of support are seamlessly maintained? It seems that even with a lot of people with good will, there are endless breaks that stop that seamless delivery.

Tim Loughton: The local authority is responsible for children in the care system; specifically, a responsible social worker is the professional directly in contact with a child in the care system. That social worker is required and should be trusted to make the best decisions in the best interests of the child. That is subject to all sorts of checks and balances, with statutory responsibilities for what is in the best interests of the child in legislation and in guidance. Among the checks and balances is the independent reviewing officer who, if a child is not getting a fair deal, can take up the cudgels on behalf of that child.

Chair: We know IROs who sit there being the only stable person with whom the looked-after children seem to have a stable relationship. The social workers change again and again, and when the children go to see the IRO, the IRO sometimes seems to be the only person who stays the same. How can we create stability and make sure that there is continuity?

Tim Loughton: That is part of the problem. The IROs should not have to do a job; if the system is working properly their role becomes redundant-it is not, because they have a hell of a challenge.

There is also the Children’s Rights Director, who is taking up the cause of children in care, generally, as to what is going wrong. That is why we have to get stability in the system. That starts with stability and continuity of the front-line care available to that child in care, which starts with the professional social worker. There is still too great a turnover in social workers for all sorts of problems that we know about-largely the huge vacancy rates that we still have, and the huge work loads, pressures and stresses on social workers. That is why Eileen Munro’s review is looking at how we can make it easier for social workers to do the job they came into the profession for-staying at the front line more, staying there longer and staying with their charges.

Vulnerable children and vulnerable families, probably more than any other group of people, need the continuity-particularly younger children who have been cast out or have had to leave their birth families. The last thing they need is continued instability in their life. If that stability can be provided by a friendly, understanding, empathetic social worker, working closely with a friendly, skilled, suitable foster family-or whatever the placement is-that is what we have to improve. We are a long way off doing that, but everything I am doing aims to achieve that greater stability.

Q46 Chair: I have one more question before I open it up to the rest of the Committee. What can be done to reform fostering and adoption panels to help minimise the still inordinate delays in care proceedings?

Tim Loughton: Again, these are all part of bigger problems, such as the shortage of and turnover in social workers and being able to bring reports to courts, or to panels, in a timely fashion. I have sat in on adoption panels and family court proceedings and time and time again, you will be told that the social worker presenting there is not the social worker who started off the case. That can only add to delay-a report hasn’t been filed, something’s gone missing, or the judge wants further evidence from an expert witness because he or she is not content with the presentations made by the social worker. We know that the courts are clogged up at the moment. We are working with CAFCASS, and there are signs of some progress. All these things are interlinked.

I sat in on an adoption panel recently, when I spent a week being a social worker in Stockport. It was a very good adoption panel-highly rated-but they had huge amounts of paperwork to get through, which was a big job of work. I was asking them, "What are the delays in the system?"; they were saying, "Big problems with the courts and the timetable of the courts."

I have had a number of meetings with Sir Nicholas Wall, the president of the family division of the High Court, who will make some criticisms of the adoption system, and CAFCASS and adoption panels. One thing that I have done-it is not rocket science-is write to every local authority asking, "Would your adoption panels please go and speak with the local family court judges?" Sir Nicholas Wall has kindly offered to impart the same message to all his judges, to have a dialogue with adoption panels, because they don’t seem to be talking.

We could get some easy wins if we had better communication to make sure that the system is working better before we see how to change it to make it much more streamlined and ensure that it is working more speedily in the best interests of the child.

Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much.

Q47 Neil Carmichael: Tim, you said that you are not going to tackle any changes in structure unless or until it becomes obvious that some are necessary. In some of Maxine’s evidence she talked about the number of different agencies, and so forth-151, I think. We have also been hearing about variation. Have you any plans to introduce policies to tackle the variations of delivery and standards?

Tim Loughton: One of the biggest challenges at the moment is that more children have been coming into the care system, which is an immediate response to Baby Peter, and the fallout from that will last for some time to come. There are various things that we have instituted, and I have been writing to local authorities. We have a bigger group of children to deal with, and we have continuing problems about recruitment of social workers. The professional work force is still stretched, and we are doing things to try and improve that. We’ve got all the problems with the courts and the delays there.

Within that, we have huge variations in experiences between local authorities-in the timeliness with which children come into care and in the level of placements. There has been some progress, I am pleased to see, in that the number of children having three or more placements in a year, which is scandalous in itself, was just over 11% of children in care but is now just below 11%, so there is progress, slight though it is. But that is an average, and it hides a huge variation in some authorities, where children are having many multiple placements. Some authorities can get it right; others aren’t getting it right. In many cases, they are similar authorities-this is like for like. I can quote you examples from education as well. In one London borough, more than 18% of looked-after children go to university; there are other boroughs where the figure is 2%.

Why is it that some authorities are doing well and some aren’t? My aim is to try to get everybody up to the standard of the best and to try to learn from best practice. The thing that struck me is that we are just very bad at disseminating best practice. In going round the country and dealing with local authorities, different children in the care of different authorities and different IROs and other agencies, I am trying to grandstand some examples of best practice. Particularly where you’ve got authorities that are deemed to be poorer performers by Ofsted, I am trying to do some buddying up with authorities that are doing particularly well in certain areas. There is a lot of peer supporting and mentoring that we can do before we have to bring in the heavy squad from outside as well.

Q48 Neil Carmichael: The Chairman mentioned our predecessor Committee’s inquiry and report, and one of its focuses was the emphasis on keeping children with families, as opposed to going down the adoption route and so forth. Is that something you will endorse, or will you have a different approach, perhaps encouraging a different balance?

Tim Loughton: I absolutely endorse that. I had highlighted various factors for many years, and most of them were taken up in the Children, Schools and Families Act-sorry, the Children and Young Persons Act 2008; there have been so many bits of legislation, Chairman, as you know. The 2008 Act introduced various requirements on local authorities as regards children in care, many of which come into effect in April next year; in fact, just this morning, I signed the commencement order for many of them.

Two things came out of that legislation. One was a requirement that children in the care system should be kept closer to home wherever possible. A sufficiency principle was applied to local authorities to make sure that there are places in their area, where it is suitable. It will not be suitable to keep some children in their home environment, because of threats to their safety, or because of family members who may be a threat rather than a benefit, or whatever the case may be. Keeping children closer to their home, familiar environment is important. Into that flows greater continuity in terms of children being able, hopefully, to stay in their school.

Secondly, there is continuity and familiarity in terms of the people looking after children. All the studies show that, statistically, children will usually, although not exclusively, be best suited by being with an extended family member or familiar kinship carer where possible. That will typically be a grandparent, and I am sure that we will all, as constituency MPs, have had grandparents coming to our constituency surgeries saying that they want to take over responsibility for a grandchild because the parents have gone off the rails. My figures may be slightly out of date, but up to a few years ago, only 3% or 4% of social worker-instigated placements in this country were with kinship carers, whereas if you go somewhere like Denmark, the figure is over 25%. Although there is a requirement in guidance, I don’t think it’s being followed as aggressively and enthusiastically as it might be.

You can see reasons for that. A social worker, under pressure, may be faced with a child who needs to come into the care system, and for whom a placement needs to be found. You have a pool-albeit there is usually a shortage-of foster carers who have a track record, who have worked with the authority before and who you know are up to scratch. Then you have a grandparent. You don’t know anything about the grandparent, and you are going to have to do quite a lot of assessment on that grandparent to see if the placement is safe. The easier option may be to go with the foster carer that you’re familiar with. The more difficult option, although it may statistically be the more rewarding placement option, and is more likely to be long term, is to go with a kinship carer. We need to make sure that the social worker is absolutely exhausting the kinship carer option before going to somebody unfamiliar.

Q49 Chair: May I press you on that? Part of the point was not just about kinship caring, but about the tendency of the system to resist taking children into care. We had evidence previously that there was too great a tendency to give the family the chance, which left children at risk, and that compared with Scandinavian countries, we are rather less inclined to take children into care, and we might have better outcomes if we intervened earlier, acted, took them into care and got them on a decent placement. It is actually easier at an earlier age as well, when they have suffered less abuse and damage.

Tim Loughton: We could have a whole conversation about your last report, and I had this conversation with the hon. Member for Huddersfield when he was chairing the Committee, although I did not give evidence to it. The comparable figures for children in care in this country against some Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark, are not that dissimilar. The thing that queers the figures is that they don’t do adoption in those countries, and if we were to add children who have gone into adoptive placements in this country, it brings the overall total rather closer to Scandinavia.

Is the system more reluctant to bring children into care? Clearly, in the last couple of years, no, because the figures in the last year for the number of children coming to the care system have gone up 6%, so now it is 64,500. Is that a short-term, knee-jerk, risk-averse reaction? Possibly, although the CAFCASS report shows that for children coming before the courts to be placed into care, there is good cause for them to be in the care system. Pre-Peter, were we being complacent? Was the system not working well enough to pick up some of the children who should have been picked up and are now being picked up? I think the jury is out on that.

To an extent, I don’t know whether we have too many or too few children coming to care. What I am most concerned about is that we have the right children coming into care. We often face our social workers with the judgment of Solomon as to whether it is better to bring a child into care. If you bring a child into care, it must be for one of two reasons: first, because it is better for them and they will have a better chance of a decent upbringing, or secondly, because it would be dangerous to leave them with their parents. Given the outcomes for children in care, which are scandalous across too many areas, one has to make a good case for why bringing them into care would be an improvement.

I see social workers, in my time out on the front line with them, go the extra mile to work intensively with families to try to keep them together. Only when it becomes quite clear that that family is going to be incapable-either in the short term or permanently-of bringing up that child do they take the decision to initiate care proceedings. I am sure that in some cases they take that decision too early, and in some cases, clearly-we know from high-profile tragedies in the extreme-they take that decision too late, or they haven’t taken it at all, and then it is too late. We have to have a social-work work force who work closely with the courts and have the professional confidence to make well-informed value judgments and to see them through. That is the key to getting it right. I don’t think that there is a systemic over-tendency or reluctance to bring into care, but there are divergences, where you have some good children’s services departments that are better geared up to making the right, best informed value judgments about what is right for that individual child.

Q50 Neil Carmichael: Do you think decisions to intervene are based on sufficiently holistic evidence on all the issues that arise, especially in terms of communication between agencies?

Tim Loughton: Sometimes not. When you have social workers spending up to 80% of their time in front of a computer screen, my contention is that they are not best placed to gather all the evidence to make the best informed value judgment. Whether or not you take a child into care is not a science. It is a subjective value judgment. That judgment is best made by eyeballing-literally-the people you are there to look after and potentially intervene with, working with other agencies to put the pieces of a jigsaw together, which was the description I used at my last appearance here.

Ultimately, it is not just down to people sitting around talking and exchanging information, it is somebody picking up the ball and acting-somebody making the decision that something is wrong and that we need to do this now. We need to take that child into care under whatever section order it might be, and this is the game plan. Too often, that person picking up the ball and coming up with the action plan is what is lacking. We have to give confidence back to them, and have manageable case loads and good well-functioning teams to be able to make those decisions. That is entirely the mission that Eileen Munro’s report is all about.

Q51 Neil Carmichael: Do you think that social services and social care is held sufficiently accountable by our local authorities?

Tim Loughton: It should be, and it is probably rather more accountable now than it has been in the past, on the basis that the last thing any leader or chairman of a council, cabinet member for children’s services or director of children’s services wants to see is his or her appearance on the front page of a tabloid newspaper because a Baby P has happened in that borough or county. Yes, the awareness and the importance placed on getting it right for vulnerable children has shot up enormously, alas as a result of tragic circumstances. In that respect, there has been an improvement.

Q52 Neil Carmichael: In terms of the number of looked-after children placed in adoption, do you think that needs to be pushed a bit?

Tim Loughton: It does, and I have, and I am. The statistics we had a couple of months ago about the number of children coming into care and about placements, stability and going on to adoption were quite worrying in many respects. They were worrying because of the additional children coming into care. They were also worrying for the number of children being adopted, which has fallen from 3,300 to 3,200. Its peak a few years ago was about 3,800. The vast majority of the 64,500 children in the care system will not be appropriate for adoption. The vast majority of them go back to their families after a short term in care, but I don’t believe that we cannot do better than 3,200 children being given a suitable, loving family placement that will them a second chance at a stable family upbringing, which they missed out first time round.

I am particularly concerned about the very low number-only 70 babies-who were placed into adoption last year. We know it is important that the most stable adoptive placements are those that can be done at as young an age as possible. We need to speed up the system, and it is taking too long to get children through the adoption system. That is why we launched, in tandem with National Adoption Week back in November, a campaign to promote adoption, to try to counter some of the obstacles to adoption, of which there are many.

In cross-cultural adoptions is reluctance to use voluntary adoption agencies and other things like that. I absolutely want to see adoption numbers rise. I am not going to set any targets-I don’t want to do it just because I want to see the numbers rise-but there are too many children who very clearly could have a suitable adoption placement, for whom adoptive parents could be found. That would be better for them than staying in care for longer, or in many cases permanently until they are adults.

Q53 Damian Hinds: Referring to that figure, did you say only 70 babies went into adoption?

Tim Loughton: Yes.

Q54 Damian Hinds: Do the Government have a gauge of how many potential adoptive parents are keen to adopt a baby?

Tim Loughton: Well, babies are the most popular.

Q55 Damian Hinds: I just want a rough idea of the ratio. Do we have a number?

Tim Loughton: I probably do in the file in front of me, and I may be able to find it before the end of the session. Through the adoption register and other forms of database, we have a lot of prospective adoptive parents for whom the favoured adoption would be a young child, and preferably a baby. Not enough of them are coming forward, when there are clear signs that those children are never going to be able to grow up with their parents. Very often they are single parents-usually, but not exclusively single mothers-and typically with a drug or alcohol addiction that they just haven’t been able to overcome.

There is a particular problem with children from BME backgrounds, particularly black boys, who take at least three times as long to be adopted as equivalent white children. Too many of them don’t get adopted at all, and are permanently in care until adulthood. There is an argument that the trouble is that there are not enough black adoptive parents coming forward. The case that I have very clearly made is that a perfect ethnic match is a bonus but not essential, and that what’s most essential is a stable, loving family who can offer the child a stable, loving upbringing. That is better in many cases than the child staying in care, with the lack of permanence that that can involve.

Chair: You have brilliantly anticipated Neil’s next question.

Neil Carmichael: Yes, you have.

Chair: We’ll move on swiftly then.

Q56 Charlotte Leslie: I have two quick questions, one of which is slightly left-field. On the number of adoptive parents who might be available, I know that couples thinking about IVF treatment are asked if they have thought about adoption. I just wondered what assessment you’ve made of the amount of support and information provided on that option for those prospective IVF parents.

Tim Loughton: That is a very good point. When couples take the decision that they want to go ahead with IVF treatment if they are unable to conceive, the normal practice is for the health professionals to talk them through that process-it’s often quite a big undertaking-and to point out that there are other options, one of which is adoption. As to how strong and consistent that message is across different health professionals, and how much it’s pushed, I don’t know, and that’s an area for me to have a dialogue on with colleagues in the Department of Health. Adoption is a more attractive option for many people than an IVF system that is expensive for many, and can be exceeding cumbersome and often not successful. If they were properly prepared for all the options, they might choose to go for adoption.

Q57 Charlotte Leslie: I have a second question, while I have you here. The professionalism and professionalisation of the social services work force seems to me to be at the bottom of a lot of what you’re talking about. Do you think that there’s scope to increase the status given to social services, and do you think that that would solve a lot of the problems that are currently encountered?

Tim Loughton: Key to the setting up of the Munro review, and to the commission on children’s social workers that I established in opposition in 2007 in the report "No More Blame Game" that we produced, was the fact that there was a crisis of confidence among social workers in child protection. There is a crisis of confidence among the public in the profession, and that has exacerbated a crisis of confidence in the profession on the part of the profession itself.

When I address conferences or groups of social workers, I say that there are three groups of people who are held in very low esteem: social workers, bankers and MPs. Having worked for a bank before I became an MP and then become the Minister responsible for social workers, I feel their pain trebly, but it is in no one’s interests for any of those three groups, but particularly social workers, not to be held in great esteem by the public. Social workers are the fourth emergency service, and are absolutely essential to caring for vulnerable children. It is absolutely essential that they are confident enough to make the right decisions. That is why transparency in the whole system is very important in restoring public confidence, and that is why we wanted to publish serious case reviews and raise the whole profile of child protection.

Q58 Charlotte Leslie: Finally, I wanted your view on an anecdote that I have heard. A social worker said that the problem was that all the really good experienced social workers suddenly went on to the clerical-administrative side of their job and weren’t able to stay on the front line, where their experience might be most valuable.

Tim Loughton: That is a very good point. It is one that is often made and it is one which is very much under consideration by Professor Munro. The solution to it is to look at the Hackney model among others. If you are a senior doctor in a hospital and you become a consultant, it does not mean that you are deskbound. You still see patients and wear a stethoscope, although you have some seniority at management level within the hospital. Too often, in the current structures, a good social worker, who performs well at the front line, gets promoted to be a manager and is then not allowed on to the front line. That seems to be an inordinate waste of talent and expertise.

The Hackney model has effectively invented a consultant social worker model, who is the team leader of a multi-agency team, has seniority at management level, but also goes out and looks after cases. A number of other authorities have started to copy or replicate that model in different forms. Professor Munro will comment on that further, but it does seem to make a lot of sense. It is interesting that, at a time of huge shortages of social workers, for every one of the 48 consultant social workers they have been recruiting, they have had 10 applicants and some good-quality people coming forward. Clearly that model appeals to the profession itself as well.

Q59 Chair: While we are on the issue of models and social workers, how have the pilots of the social work practices fared and is that something that the Government are planning to take forward?

Tim Loughton: Yes. We very much support the social work practice model that was set up in the 2008 Act, which we supported. I think that I have just signed off the order to promote an expansion of that scheme and a number of other authorities-I think it is 16-have come forward to offer to expand social work practices in other areas of the country as well. It is early days and research is still coming in, but I am optimistic about the greater choice and expertise available, particularly in dealing with vulnerable children, who have some complex problems. The social work practice, which is effectively a co-operative of social workers, is an additional tool in the army that we need. I am positive, and we are very keen to promote them and expand them as much as possible.

Q60 Tessa Munt: I want to ask you about Government policy on fees for care and supervision orders. Briefly, in May 2008, the Labour Government increased the fee from £150 to £4,800, including the final hearing costs, with the aim of getting some sort of cost recovery. In March 2009, Lord Laming recommended a review, saying that one case that did not go to court was one case too many, if the local authority was deterred by the fees. In September 2009, the independent review recommended a complete abolition of fees. In March 2010, the Labour Government abolished the fees, and in October, you said fees are back. I want to know why you said that. I assume that you are saying that there is no evidence that they are a deterrent, but you have to bear in mind the tension between social workers who may want to make an application and the problem of the financial situation in which we find ourselves. You have already said that you want social workers who have well-informed value judgments, but what about those financial pressures? How much are those fees going to be?

Tim Loughton: First, this is not a Department for Education decision. It is a Ministry of Justice decision to place them on a full cost recovery basis. I think the fees overall rise from £150 to £4,825 on a full cost recovery basis.

Q61 Tessa Munt: But they don’t cover the full cost anyway, do they?

Tim Loughton: Well, that may be. There are variations, but that is the maximum amount. The Government have taken the view that funding to local authorities to cover the future cost of the fees will be delivered through the SR2010 settlement. To help avoid any additional financial pressures on local authorities, it has been agreed that any future increase in the unit cost of the fees will be covered by MOJ budgets. Although it sounds slightly bureaucratic, it is a recycling of that money. What is absolutely vital, Tessa, is that decisions on bringing care proceedings to court should be made on the basis of what is in the best interest of the child. The fact that we will be doing it on a full cost recovery basis, with the money coming out at one end but going in the other end, should not affect that decision being made in the best interest of the child.

Q62 Tessa Munt: Do you think there is going to be any impact?

Tim Loughton: I hope not. The MOJ will keep this decision under close scrutiny. It was a decision made by the MOJ and the Treasury, and they obviously wanted to be assured that it wouldn’t impact on that, as did I. There is no reason to think that it should, as long as the money is there, coming through a different budget. If we see evidence that it’s having a detrimental impact-clearly, it hasn’t so far-I will want to know about it.

Q63 Damian Hinds: Minister, I asked the previous panel exactly the same question, and you’ve referred to elements of it already. It concerns the 2008 Act and the requirement for local authorities to provide local provision and also choice. First, I am interested to know how realistic you think that is as an aim. Secondly, in terms of making good the gap, you’ve already talked a bit about kinship care and promoting and developing adoption. What else can and needs to be done to increase the supply of quality placements?

Tim Loughton: Most placements are through foster carers at the moment. We have a relatively small number of children placed in residential homes. The standard of those homes is mixed, although I think the standard has been rising. In a country such as Denmark, many more children are housed in municipally run children’s homes. I think there is scope for seeing whether a greater use of children’s homes is appropriate. We used to have many more children in children’s homes before the 1980s. They were rather under a cloud, because of a series of scandals that went on some years ago, so there was a systemic switch to children being placed in the community more than with foster carers.

There is some scope for looking at whether we can do a bit more on residential children’s homes, particularly residential schools as well. However, the biggest single thing we can do at the moment is, first, to recruit more foster carers. There remains a shortage of foster carers. It has been estimated that we need another 10,000 foster placements. Secondly, we can improve the quality of those placements. There are foster placements provided directly through local authorities and through fostering agencies. I think there is a case for saying that some of those foster carers coming through foster agencies have greater opportunities at training-and some of the support services as well. I am in no way saying the local authority is inferior, but we should learn from best practice.

There are evidence-based practices such as multi-dimensional treatment foster care and multi-systemic therapy, which we are promoting and have provided funds for in next year’s settlement, which is about improving the training to foster carers, particularly when dealing with challenging children. There have been cases in the past where a child has been deposited with a foster carer and that child has some quite challenging behaviour-it may be behavioural problems, learning disabilities, or physical problems as well-and yet the foster carers have not been properly briefed and prepared, and in some cases have been left completely in the dark. It is not fair to the foster carer. More importantly, it’s not fair to the child.

Making sure the appropriate placement is there and that the family is able to cope with the particular challenges of that child is good sense. It’s a false economy not to be doing that. That is where I think local authorities can make a good investment, because the cost of getting that wrong is multiple placements, which cost more and they break down, and ultimately it might end up with the child going into a residential care setting, which is far more expensive and may not be the most appropriate thing for the child-if only somebody had acted earlier and got the right placement.

Q64 Damian Hinds: How much of the recruitment gap do you think is down to the variability of reimbursement allowances and fees? What other factors can be brought in to attract more people to be foster carers?

Tim Loughton: I meet a lot of foster carers-we have some fantastic foster carers. They are a great unsung army. They need to be praised more-publicly-and we need more of them to come forward. We need to promote foster caring as a noble vocation, and we need publicity on just how easy it is for people to be able to come forward. We need better promotion of the benefits of foster carers. The differential in fees may be a factor in some cases, but most foster carers tell me that that is not the overriding effect. What they need is to feel properly supported, so that if it all goes pear-shaped, they can call on the local authority and that support will be brought in. In too many cases, foster carers feel that they are rather detached from the local authority.

I am initiating something at the moment. We are designing a foster carers charter, which will be a basic set of principles-probably 10 core principles-on what foster carers can expect from their local authority, what should be expected of them and what their responsibilities are as foster carers, and also what foster children should expect from foster carers. That will not be prescriptive and compulsory, but it is going to be a basic set of principles that I hope every local authority in the country will sign up to. If foster carers feel that they are being ignored and not getting a good deal, they can say, "Look, this is not in accord with the principles that I signed up to," and they will feel that they have some leverage.

If we get all that right, it will make existing foster carers feel more loved, and they will want to stay and perhaps expand-there are some practical things that we can do to make it easier for foster carers to take on more foster children. I hope that it might also encourage more of their friends, neighbours and other people to come and try foster caring as well, because it is a good thing to do.

I wrote to all local authorities back in August to say that, as far as I am concerned, foster children should be treated by foster carers as if they were their birth children. If there are any particular reasons why they should not be able to go on sleepovers, or should not have their hair cut in a certain way, that should all be set out in the care plan, right at the beginning of the placement. It is in everybody’s interest-the foster carers will know where they stand with the foster children, and the foster children will also know where they stand. I have made that very clear to local authorities, and that guidance has gone down very well.

Q65 Chair: To follow up on that, Minister, some of the fostering agencies seem to have excellent systems and much improved outcomes, which are well above the national average. What can be done to encourage local authorities to use agencies with a proven track record and improved outcomes for children?

Tim Loughton: It needs to be a level playing field. There is a mindset in some authorities that it is much better to keep it in-house, and they are often under the impression that it is much cheaper to keep it in-house. The work done by Julie Selwyn of Bristol, particularly on adoption, although the principle applies to fostering, is that the cost of a voluntary adoption agency is equivalent to the cost of an in-house local authority adoption and placement, when one takes all the add-on and overhead costs into account. As I have said, voluntary adoption agencies may provide better training to their people and better support services that they can bring in. If you add the cost of all of those to a local authority placement, there is not a world of difference. What is important is what the best and most appropriate outcome is for a child.

Q66 Chair: Sorry to labour this, but how can local authorities be challenged? We all believe in localism and in freedom, and we want them to be able to innovate, but on the other hand, consistently failing to deliver standards for the most vulnerable children in our country-that we know agencies consistently deliver at a higher level-is unacceptable. [Interruption.] Sorry, we’ll have to wait for the bells to stop ringing.

Tim Loughton: I’ve had time to think about the answers-doesn’t often happen, does it?

My job is to assess the differentials, and I come back to one of my earlier points about the big differences in outcomes between local authorities. Ofsted can assess that when they inspect, and I am keeping a close tab on the performances of different local authorities, and I will be asking awkward questions. Why is it that local authority X has got only 5% of its children having three or more placements, but the authority next door, with a similar environment, has a figure of 15%? Why is it that that authority appears to be using hardly any voluntary agency placements, and the one next door, which is doing better, is-or vice versa? I’m really drilling down to that data, and will be asking challenging questions.

Q67 Chair: I think in technology, and green technology in particular, they have a sort of top runner methodology from Japan, where once you’ve got a type of pump that is cleaner and better improved than anything else and used on a regulatory basis, you say that within two years, every pump must meet the standards that the best in the market now deliver, or it can no longer be sold. With some notice, while still allowing them to do it their own way, could you as Minister say, "Here is a standard that we now believe can be a top runner and can be delivered. In two or three years’ time, if you are not delivering it, we will come in and challenge your provision."? Something needs to challenge from the outside where they aren’t delivering.

Tim Loughton: We will institute the Stuart pump table of differential performances by local authorities. I’m absolutely determined about this; there has been too much complacency, and looked-after children have been an afterthought and not regarded as a priority. That is a wholly false economy. It is false economy for the outcomes and the personal experiences of those children, and a completely false economy because we know from the statistics that more of those children will end up in the criminal justice system. More will end up homeless or as teenage pregnancy figures and everything that goes with that. That is a tragedy that we could be doing more to prevent.

Chair: And, Minister, that happened in the good times. Now we’re heading into a period of greater austerity, looked-after children will rely even more on someone like yourself championing them at the heart of Government.

Q68 Craig Whittaker: Good morning, Minister. I want to talk about preparation for adulthood, and educational attainment in particular. We heard this morning about how the numbers of children in training and employment at age 19 have been slipping over the past few years. We know that the attainment level of children declines as they go through the care system. There is a crevice between those who are in care and those who aren’t. You have said today that many outcomes for children in care are scandalous, and you started off by saying that for far too long, these issues have been swept under the carpet. Now you’re the chap at the top of that pile-

Tim Loughton: Pile carpet.

Craig Whittaker: Of course. What policies are you going to put in place to stop that slide and turn it around?

Tim Loughton: You raised that question earlier and asked why children from the care system are finding it harder to get jobs and whether there is a sort of prejudice against them. What it comes down to is that educational achievement is No. 1. The fact is that 18-year-olds who have been through the care system are statistically likely to have far less favourable qualifications than an average child who has been brought up with his or her parents. That is why, and given the pressures on the economy and jobs now, when there is a choice between somebody better qualified and somebody less qualified, that militates against children coming through the care system. It is not the fact that they have been in care themselves, but it is about what being in care actually means for them.

The number of care leavers in education, employment or training was rising steadily. It was 65% in 2008, and only last year, 2009, did it drop back to 62.1%. Some progress had been made and it is absolutely essential to make sure that we resume that. Tomorrow we will see the educational outcomes for looked-after children and the latest figures. I haven’t seen the figures, but I am optimistic that the gap in educational achievement, say at GCSE A to C level, between looked-after children and mainstream children will narrow. In the past, the educational achievement of looked-after children meant that something like 6% or 7% got five A to Cs at GCSE. That number has risen and last year it was 15%. Over the same time, the number of children overall has risen from 40-something per cent. to 70%. That gap is the most challenging thing.

Q69 Craig Whittaker: What are we going to do that is different? If you put in the same, you’ll get the same out. We need to do something very different to increase the life chances of those children very quickly. What are we going to do?

Tim Loughton: That means keeping them at the same school wherever possible. If you are placed three times in a year, quite often, particularly in a rural county such as my county of West Sussex, you could be moved from a foster placement at one end of the county to one at the other end of the county. Then, either you have a 40-mile taxi or bus journey to the school, or you start at another school. No child stands an equal chance of being able to maintain an education standard at school if every four months you have a different teacher, a different set of classmates and maybe a different form of the curriculum as well. That is absolutely key, and the local requirements to keep a child closer to home, which will come in with the regulations in April, is absolutely crucial, so that there is greater emphasis and importance placed on keeping that child closer to home, in familiar surroundings, in a familiar environment, with a familiar friend set if possible, and familiar continuity with other family members-but, crucially, at the same school as well, wherever possible.

We have done various things within schools so that there is greater recognition of the needs of children in the care system. Children in the care system will all benefit from the pupil premium-they will be a key set of beneficiaries, which is absolutely right. They have preference in going to schools of their first choice-that is right, although it is providing pressures in certain parts of the country where a lot of children are being placed, such as in Kent. You have an awful lot of out-of-area looked-after children competing for places with in-area looked-after children and, down the chain, competing for places with indigenous-if I can call them that-children with their own parents, in that locality. That needs sorting out. But if those children are kept closer to home, so local authorities have greater responsibility to ensure that sufficiency is there locally, you might stand a better chance of those kids getting on at school.

There are things like the designated teacher, which Roger Morgan mentioned earlier, which I think is a good thing. Interestingly, I have set up two groups, one of which is looked-after children who come to see me on a quarterly basis. Roger Morgan organised it and they are certainly not slow in coming forward with their views. When we asked the group about the designated teacher, they were split as to whether it was a good thing or not. Perceived wisdom is that it is a good thing, so we need to think a bit smarter on that as well.

However, continuity of school is absolutely key, and so is making sure that the kids turn up at school, and have the ability to be able to perform on an equal basis with kids who are lucky enough to be with their own parents.

Q70 Ian Mearns: On the pupil premium, in a recession, how are you going to hold head teachers to account to make sure that they are actually spending the pupil premium for a looked-after child on that child?

Tim Loughton: Again, there is a deal of de-ring-fencing that has come into all this. But I am, as I keep saying, absolutely hot about wanting to see those attainment figures for looked-after children increase. If we have schools where there are a large number of looked-after children, so they are getting a large amount of additional money for each of them, then I want to see where the money is being spent if they are not producing the goods at the end of it. I am going to be keeping on everybody’s tail on this. My Department now knows that for me and for this Government this is an absolute priority, because key is getting those kids achieving more, from an early education level.

Q71 Craig Whittaker: This question is supplementary to Ian’s. Will the pupil premium be physically attached to those children? If they are still in the process of moving around from school to school, because things don’t happen overnight-

Tessa Munt: Craig, can you speak up? Sorry.

Craig Whittaker: Sorry. I was talking about the pupil premium and asking whether it would be physically attached to the looked-after child, particularly if they are moving quite frequently around schools.

Tim Loughton: That’s a good point. The pupil premium is attached to a child and it goes directly to the schools, so if a child were to move around, my understanding-if I am wrong, I will be corrected on this and officials will probably start harrumphing in the background-is that it will go with them. If a child goes to another school, then he or she would take the pupil premium with them. As to how-

Q72 Chair: Would it only be at the beginning of the financial year?

Tim Loughton: That’s a very good point. Whether it is cut off at the end of term-

Chair: When they’re on roll, the money will come, if they are not on roll, it won’t. I am not an expert on that.

Q73 Tessa Munt: There are certain key dates, aren’t there?

Tim Loughton: There may be key dates. What I suggest, Chairman, is that I will find out about the mechanics. Given that we only announced the pupil premium details two days ago, I am not completely up to speed with some of the mechanics, but the principle must be that the money follows the child, because the money is for the child.

Q74 Craig Whittaker: Minister, I just want to take you back to educational attainment, because one of the key things that we now know is that children who aren’t in care normally leave home at about 24, but a very large proportion of children in care leave at the ages of 16 and 17, which I am sure is the inhibitor for them going on to further education. The previous Government did the "Staying Put" pilot, which took children up to 21. Will you make it a policy aim to reduce figures for looked-after children who leave care at the ages of 16 and 17?

Tim Loughton: Yes. The "Staying Put" pilot is very good, and we will promote it. The pilots going on at the moment have not finished, and I want to see the full results from them when they do. The principle is that for most children, whether or not they are in the care system, leaving home at 16 is a very big challenge. Some children at 16-whether they are in care or with their parents-may think that they are worldly wise and big enough to do it, but for many of those children, when they get to the age of 17 or 18, things suddenly go pear-shaped. Their flat could fall through. They could get chucked out of school, fail their exams or lose their job. All of a sudden, they are not so worldly wise and big enough to look after themselves. Yet we expect too many of the children who have the most traumatic backgrounds-who do not have mum and dad to take their washing home to and get a spare bed when it all goes pear-shaped-to leave home and go out into the big wide world at 16. Not surprisingly, many of them end up going off the rails and that is a false economy.

"Staying Put" pilots are all about giving that extra safety net. What we need is not a prescriptive system but flexibility. For those kids who make it, fine. I am talking about those kids who need to dip back into the support system and to be able to go back to a familiar foster carer. I am also talking about when they go off to college as well, because there is the problem about coming back for holidays. Some local authorities are better than others in making a payment to the foster carer to keep the bed vacant for that child during university. Most of us who went to university came home during the holidays with a great load of washing and all sorts of other things as well. If you have been in the care system and you no longer have that link, where do you go? None of this is rocket science. There are different ways of doing it, but the principle must be to provide a flexible safety net, because different children have different requirements as they leave care.

I have also set up a group of young people who have left care and they come and advise me. Again, they are pretty gobby and they come up with some really interesting practical experiences from different parts of the country, where certain authorities are doing it well and they feel supported and others make them feel completely cast adrift. My aim is to get best practice as the benchmark standard rather than the postcode lottery that we have.

Q75 Nic Dakin: Minister, you come across-it is really pleasing to hear-as somebody who really champions looked-after children, and I think that’s excellent. In your championing of looked-after children, what do you think of the proposal, backed by Barnardo’s and Action for Children, for an alternative to the child trust fund for looked-after children?

Tim Loughton: There have been some discussions with Mark Hoban at the Treasury, and with Paul Goggins, who has taken this up as a cause. I know that certain Members of the Lords-Baroness Walmsley as well-have been working with a charity to come up with some alternative proposals. There are moves afoot to see whether some measures can be put in place. It is not directly my responsibility because it is a Treasury matter.

Q76 Nic Dakin: Are you positive about those moves?

Tim Loughton: I am open to whatever options are being put around. What is important is that local authority money should be available to match what demands there are for certain young children. A child will not be able to touch the trust fund until they are 18, yet they might desperately need some more music tuition-if they have a skill in music-or some additional support in certain other areas. Some local authorities offer quite imaginative bursary schemes to children at school. Children with birth parents may automatically be able to get those extramural activities, but children in care don’t. There are other ways of ensuring that we have the biggest impact rather than having to wait until 18. I am open to see what discussions are going on.

Chair: Thank you, Minister.

Tim Loughton: Is that it?

Chair: It is. It is nearly 11.50, so we have time to rush to PMQs. Thank you very much for your evidence. On behalf of all my colleagues, let me thank you for championing looked-after children and for your promise to give a formal response again, by Government, to our report and doubtless within the time period, if not sooner, than would happen if we had just published said report. Your nod to that can also be recorded by Hansard.

Tim Loughton: It was a twitch.

Chair: Thank you.