Why is there so much movement in care?
What do children need in order to grow into adults that can function independently in society? All children need secure, loving homes and stable relationships, as much as food and warmth, to nurture them. And yet children who grow up in our care system often don’t have this basic level of need met.
The government’s Care Matters agenda identifies stable relationships as one of the key factors in ensuring good outcomes for children in care. But there is an unacceptable amount of movement in care for a lot of children, who often don’t get the chance to form stable relationships with carers or social workers.
There are 75,000 children in care in the UK at any one time, and most of them are in foster care placements. More than one in 10 children in care had three or more placements in the year ending March 2009. Last year, 1,200 children had more than 10 placements; 10 young people were moved 50 times. These statistics are clearly not in the interests of the children, or the wider society into which they will grow and be expected to function, and point to a care system in crisis.
“The failure of the care system is the thousands and thousands of kids who aren’t living, just existing, and leaving care needing mental health services, or substance abuse services, or who are in contact with the criminal justice system,” says one social worker.
Care Matters says: “Children in care need foster carers and residential workers with warmth and commitment who provide a supportive and predictable routine…The quality of care has a crucial effect not just on the stability of relationships but also on health, wellbeing and education.”
Not enough choice
A key factor in placement stability is good matching between the child and the carer. Broadly, there are two factors which lead to poor matches being made: a lack of choice when finding a placement for a child (ie. not enough foster carers and/or not enough places in children's homes) and a lack of resources.
There are not enough foster carers to ensure every child is put with a suitable family who has had the training and support to deal with that child’s particular needs, in the right location. Most estimates put the shortfall in foster carers at around 10,000.
Fostering charity The Fostering Network says: “The larger the pool of foster carers, the more likely it is that a good match can be found, in terms of location, culture, language, religion, background, lifestyle and even interests. It’s about finding a foster home for a child that feels familiar to them, where they can feel comfortable whether they are there for two weeks, two months or two years.”
When placements are made in a hurry from a ‘pool’ of whoever is available at that time, there's a fair chance the family and child will not make a strong match – either because of differences in background or culture, or because the child has needs the foster parents are not trained to meet, or because the placement is too far away from the child’s home. This exacerbates the likelihood of the placement breaking down as the child is away from its support network of family and friends, and has to change school, GP practice and so on.
Research shows that if a child’s first placement breaks down they are likely to enter a cycle of breakdowns as local authorities move them quickly into another inappropriate placement. Emergency placements lead to mistakes.
'The relationship is not invested in'
Often the bureaucratic systems which are used in the placing of a child take the place of common sense, as tick box forms which cannot adequately describe a child’s needs decide its future. When a child is admitted to care at the point of crisis, the placement it is sent to is “rarely considered”, according to one social worker in a London authority. “The matching process is flawed. There is a lack of choice. You have a shopping list but there's only orange juice in the shop.”
The way children’s services are set up can mean that the social worker does not know the child they are placing. Children often do not get consistent attention from social workers, as cases are passed around when social workers leave, or the child is transferred to a new team – dubbed “assembly line social work” by some social workers.
“You’re only responsible for one little bit so the child never gets continuity of care and no one is invested in the outcome. There is no pride in your work,” says one frustrated social worker who spoke to us about her concerns. “The relationship is not invested in. The structure of a local authority actually means you cannot be a child’s social worker for any length of time. There’s no culture among social workers which encourages the relationship. There’s no emotive language used.” Children's care plans can get neglected or overlooked, and new social workers simply do not know the child and the process of building trust has to start again.
There is also a debate about at what stage a child should be taken into care. Some arguments have been made that the earlier a child is taken into care the more likely they are to have a stable upbringing within the care system, and some research evidence has found better outcomes the longer a child is in care. Certainly the younger the child is when taken into care, the higher the chances are of them being adopted. However, current practice means social workers usually try to keep families together for as long as possible, or reunite them as soon as possible.
Cost considerations
When budgets become a significant factor in deciding on placements, the centrality of the child's interests is likely to be undermined. Sibling groups are sometimes split up because of cost – it is more expensive and difficult to find a foster family which will take in a group of children – and this also leads to instability.
“I feel like there’s a fair amount of dodgy decision-making in my local authority,” says one practitioner. She cites a case where a set of siblings were recently split up because the stable placement they were in was provided through an agency and was deemed too expensive. Potential foster carers are joining agencies more and more because they usually provide better pay and support packages. But these carers cost local authorities a lot more, so the placements sometimes break down because the local authority cannot continue to fund them - so moves the child to a cheaper option when it becomes available.
The Children's Legal Centre say they have dealt with cases where a local authority wants to move a child in care from a placement where they are secure and happy - in order to save costs, rather than because it is in the child's interests.
No room for complacency
We all know that what really matters is the quality of a child's day-to-day carer, and the chance to build a trusting long-term relationship with that person. Placements break down for a whole host of reasons, and sometimes a child and a placement will not match however much care is taken. But too often placements are made in a hurry, mistakes are made and children are stuck in a cycle of deeply demoralising breakdowns which can affect the rest of their lives.
The good news is that there's a lot of research and innovation in the care sector at the moment and a great deal of time is devoted to searching for the holy grail of placement stability. And there's no sense of complacency about this problem - at the very least there is widespread acceptance that we absolutely must make placements more stable if we are to improve the outcomes for young people who spend time in care.
John Kemmis says:
Phil says: