1. What are care proceedings?
‘Care proceedings’ is the phrase used to describe what happens when children’s services ask the court whether or not a young person should become looked after.
Usually, to begin with, children’s services will ask the court to make temporary orders (called ‘interim care orders’) while things are investigated and plans are made. In the end, if children’s services still think a care order is necessary, they will ask for a full care order to be made. Orders are like rules that the court says everyone has to stick to.
2. I’ve been told I’m on a ‘care order’. What does that mean?
If your social worker was worried about your safety and felt you should go become looked after, but your parents didn’t agree, then the social worker had to go to court to get something called a care order.
This means the local authority now shares responsibility with your parents for looking after you. The local authority will make most of the important decisions about your life, including where you will live.
They might decide after a while that you can live back at home with your parents with your family getting help from social workers (this is called being ‘subject to a care order but living at home’), but the most likely thing is that you will live with someone else. It might be a relative or a friend of your family, or with a foster family or in a children’s home.
The care order will last until you are 18 if you continue to be a looked after young person for the rest of your childhood. It will end sooner than that if the court decides it is safe for you to return home, or if you get adopted, or if a plan is made for you to live with someone else like another member of your family (when this happens, it’s called either a ‘residence order’ or a ‘special guardianship order’).
3. I got taken in care really suddenly and they say I’m on an ‘emergency protection order’? What’s that?
This means that something happened that meant you had to leave your home straight away because it was not safe for you to live there. You will have been taken into care under an ‘emergency protection order’ which will last for 8 days at the most, and which the local authority can ask to continue for another 7 days after that if they think it’s important for your protection. In that time your social worker will decide whether it’s safe for you to return home or whether you should be put on a care order (which is explained just above).
If this happened to you then you probably became looked after quite suddenly and might feel confused and worried. Your social worker should listen to you and answer your questions.
Your social worker might have found somewhere for you to live just for a short time, while they find a place where you can live safely for longer.
In an emergency, you might be placed with a foster carer who hasn’t got quite the right approvals to look after you for long - for example they might be approved to look after children under 10, but you are 12. If everyone agrees that it would be best for you to stay longer, the foster carer could apply for their approval to be changed so that you can stay.
4. I’m looked after but the social worker calls it ‘being accommodated’. What does that mean?
If your parents – or you if you are over 16 - felt that it would be better for you to go and live somewhere away from home for a while, it’s called being ‘accommodated’. The local authority finds you somewhere else to live, but your parents are still responsible for you.
5. I live with my Gran but she says I’m actually a looked after child. How can that be?
The first thing the local authority should do when they have decided that a child should not live at home with his or her parents is to find out whether there is a relative or a family friend you could live with. You may hear social workers use the phrase ‘connected person’ – this means someone you already know who might be able to look after you.
If they think there is someone suitable like that who you could live with (like perhaps your grandparents), that person can get approved temporarily (just for a while) to be your foster carer. This means you can stay with them for up to 16 weeks while the local authority checks whether they really are the best person to look after you.
If after 16 weeks the local authority decides that it is a good place for you to live, and you are happy there, then the person will be approved as a foster carer and you can carry on living there as their foster child.
Often this doesn’t feel like being a looked after child, because you’re living with someone you have known for a long time, and who loves you. But the local authority is still responsible for you and social workers will check that you are being looked after well.
6. When can a child be locked up on a ‘Secure Accommodation Order’?
The court may say that a child has to live in secure accommodation if:
- a young person has run away before and is thought likely to run away from non-secure accommodation
- They think that the young person is likely to injure themselves or other people
Only children aged up to 18 who are in local authority care or ‘accommodated’ by the local authority can be placed in secure children’s homes. Children under 13 can only be kept in secure accommodation if the Secretary of State (that’s the top person in the government with responsibility for children) agrees to it.
Children’s services don’t need a court to agree for a child to be placed in secure accommodation for the first 72 hours that they’re there – as long as the plan is for them to be there for no longer than 28 days. However if the local authority believes that the child needs to be in secure accommodation for longer, children’s services need to get a court to agree first to them going there.
The court can approve a secure accommodation order for up to three months the first time children’s services apply for a particular child, and then for periods up to 6 months on future occasions for the same child. (If the child is on remand because they’ve been charged with a criminal offence, the rules are different though).
If professionals agree that a child is no longer a danger to themselves or others, then the local authority can release him or her from the secure accommodation, regardless of how long the court order said they should stay.
The local authority has to make arrangements for contact between the child and their parents, unless they think this is bad for the child, in which case they can try to get a court order to stop the contact for a while or for longer.
The law says that there must be regular reviews of the care plan for the child so that their progress while they’re in the secure accommodation can be checked on. These reviews should also consider the future plans for the child, once they have left.
The law also says that children in secure accommodation must receive good quality education, even though they may not be able to go to school.
7. The council sometimes arranges for me to go away for a couple of days to give my parents a break – does this mean I’m a looked after child at those times?
The Government says that children's services in every local authority must arrange for disabled children to be cared for by another person every now and then, so their parents or usual carers can have a break.
These short breaks could include day, evening, overnight or weekend activities, and could take place in an approved carer’s own home or somewhere else like a residential school for disabled children.
When the break means staying away from home there are two ways children's services can do this. The child could become a 'looked after child' for the time they are on their break. The local authority arranging the short breaks must then follow many of the rules in this guide. For example, they must write a care plan, have an Independent Reviewing Officer, visit the child regularly and have reviews. But if this happens to you, it’s important to know that your parents can still take you back home at any time, which is not the same for most looked after children.
Children's services should send someone to visit each child who is getting short breaks, to check that all is going well with the breaks. There are rules about how often these visits should be:
• If you are officially looked after while you are on your breaks and have your short breaks in the same place and they are for no longer than 17 days at one time and you have a total of no more than 75 days in one year, they must visit you within the first 3 months of the first placement day, and then at least once every 6 months after that.
• But if you are looked after on your breaks and have these breaks in different places, or you have more than 75 days worth of breaks in one year, then the rules are the same for you as for all other looked after children.
The person who visits you must be a qualified social worker and they should have the right skills and experience to communicate well with you.
The local authority and your family may decide though that the best thing for you is not to be treated as though you are a looked after child while you are on a break, although there would still need to be a plan setting out just how the short break will work and how it will help. If the council arranges short breaks like this, it does not have to follow the rules in this guide.
