Children in care

Back from a lovely walk, this autumn in the north west of glorious. All the dog walkers delighted with the warmth, all the dogs chasing squirrels, what joy. I saw the heron, who looked at my dogs and took off slowly and majestically. So, I'm not quite as downhearted, though I just so wish we could Do Something, other than talk.
Greatnan, yes, TA's are being left in sole charge of classes. PCSO's are being sent out to investigate all manner of things, with no powers to do anything other than go back and tell the Sergeant. 15 minute visits, heart breaking. We managed to keep mum at home until 3 weeks before she died, with the support of a wonderful woman who spent an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon with mum. this meant that our daily visits could be more fun, and not all about preparing food, clearing up, etc etc. 15 minutes would have been no use at all.
I keep watching the news, or listening to the radio and chuner/rant on about how it's like Angela's Ashes, or Victorian approach to the deserving and undeserving poor. Same old Tories, never caring, understanding or wanting things to get better for people, other than themselves. It's curious that this government continues to give the rich bonuses, huge salaries, etc to 'attract the best', yet for the rest of us it's wage reductions to make us work harder.

To broaden the thread a little - it seems classroom assistants are sometimes being left in sole charge of classes i.e. unqualified teachers on the cheap.
On the Today programme this morning, it was said that visits to the elderly and disabled are as short as 15 minutes with no time for a chat, a cup of tea, or a change of bedding.
This wretched government by the rich, for the rich, seems hell bent on a return to Victorian values.

nellie, nightowl, when, mishap - full agreement with your comments. I wonder if the common assessment framework will be identified as an issue that contributed to issues surrounding his death. The various cuts to benefits and services are likely to add to the likelihood of more children suffering neglect. Expecting teachers to complete common assessment frameworks is like asking a doctor to fix the plumbing in the hospital between seeing patients. Social work is treated like a poor relation. I wonder why Cameron made positive comments at the conference, at the same time as ensuring through the cuts that experienced and qualified staff are replaced with unqualified, inexperienced staff?
I feel a bit despairing for this time of the morning. Off to get a coffee, and walk those dogs.

There are indeed unqualified SWs being employed to do assessments - and quite wrongly. This has been going on for years and is a disgrace.

Perhaps I used that term too loosely - what I really think is needed are "hands-on" people who are employed to be in the homes of these families, rolling up their sleeves and modelling proper parenting. Or centres where families can go - as we had locally until the council closed it - where parents are supported and learn how to be a parent, as well as getting some personal affiirmation and help to get jobs and training. I used to go to one and run a singing group (after I jumped of the SW treadmill and began to do much more enjoyable things!) and it gave the Mums a real buzz.

The whole preventative plan is highly expensive and requires proper assessments by qualified and experienced SWs to identify when this sort of intervention is appropriate and to monitor what is happening.

Sorting out these problems cannot be done on the cheap and until government takes that fully on board we will go on seeing some of these dreadful cases of neglect and cruelty.

I don't think they ever will when. The genie escaped from that particular bottle a long time ago. The Munro report identified everything that was wrong but it doesn't appear to have been translated into a change in practice

Targets, managerialism and finance-led working! When will they understand that this method of providing social services doesn't work?

Oh dear! This thread has sort of deteriorated into a catalogue of professional despair.

I recently commented that a friend who covers three schools found that the social work files were kept in the admin office at one school and she had the devil of a job gettng them transferred into her office. The head teacher was happy to have admin staff controlling and keeping the files updated before her job was created. CAFs were initiated by an admin worker, and left on file without any intervention. She was horrified. There had been a visiting social worker who would go back to the SSD and start CAFs afresh, so the head and admin worker saw no reason to get their act together. She spent eighteen months trying to run Safegarding single-handedly in the school and it nearly broke her, but now they have a good system in place, and also have many families in need of support that were getting nothing beforehand. That school is lucky they didn't have a tragedy occur whilst they had their eyes well and truly off the ball!

Couldn't agree more nellie. I would be interested to know what any teachers thought.

Any thoughts on the childrens Common Assessment Framework CAF? In my place we were instructed to routinely pass many of them over to schools to carry out an assessment on what were child welfare concern issues first passed to SSD.
My place seemed to use these as a "well we have been seen to do something with that enquiry. That buck has been passed! " That to me was like asking teacher to do our job and us to teach.

Sadly I don't think much preventive work goes on any longer, and as for social work assistants - well they acquired different titles but are basically just used to do assessments on the cheap, with no professional qualifications and no training. It's the qualified staff that are losing their jobs now, with more posts being filled by unqualified workers. Anyone can do social work, it's easy apparently.

Yes when, greatnan and mishap, total agreement with your comments. It takes a lot to stand up to management. I'm still cross about Re-Focusssing, a way of working that saw 'rescuing' children as Bad, and re-focussed work onto preventive work. No problem with preventive work, but you need very experienced staff to assess the level of risk, not some blanket term that implies statutory intervention is always a Bad Thing. I can't remember hearing a judge criticise an application for an interim order, as long as it was accompanied by good, well thought out, and resourced plans for each child. This would always involve a thorough assessment of the parents, and the attachments, family support, what resources could help either keep, or re-unite a family. I did hear judges express dismay that the local authority had taken a long time to issue proceedings, despite evidence that often went back many years. Neglect and emotional abuse featured often in the families where as concerns had increased, so had resources and practical input, to no effect. That isn't to say preventive work isn't wonderful, but it needs careful monitoring to ensure it's actually leading to necessary change.
This fits easily with Nightowl's concern that criticism of la's for having too many children in care, or too many with child protection plans fails to recognise the complexities involved.

Prevention is better than "cure." What is needed is to stop the closure of preventive faciltiies for families who find parenting hard; and lots of money pumped into social work assistant posts - these people are invaluable for going into homes every day to help support hopeless parents (who in the main themselves have been poorly parented) and they can make a real difference.

Those children who finish up in the care system are seriously damaged by the time they get to this stage and require huge amounts of love and tolerance to deal with them - and some very special people to deliver this. They are bound to be few and far between.

And the next time one of these children is sent home and killed/tortured/starved we will be told 'Lessons will be learned' and social workers with ridiculous, unmanageable workloads will be pilloried.
It makes me so angry to hear about cuts to such essential services when billions are being wasted on defence and 'consultants'.
It must be soul-destroying to have to work with children in such a climate.

It was ever thus! In probation, if we had 'too many' very high risk offenders, we were instructed to de-register as many as possible down to high or medium risk in order to reduce the frequency of risk management meetings to allocate resources to keep them under close supervision, which soaks up resources. The knock-on effect was social workers contacting us to say they couldn't argue for resources and concerns about continued risk to children when probation were assessing the risk as having reduced! Then, the solicitors woud be on our case about human rights to a famiy life!

My argument, and that of practitioners holding the cases, was that many dangerous criminals needed more resources to control their risk. Senior management's argument was that some are most dangerous and others less so, there won't be any more money, so get over it and tell us how these dangerous offenders have become less risky. Er.....no! Prison and probation are frequently effective, but some dangerous offenders don't change. Those children who remain at risk do need to stay in care.

You are so right Iam, but unfortunately social workers' power to stand up to managers and panels is being stripped away at a rate of knots. A recent inspection of my authority highlighted the fact that we have 'too many' looked after children. A reasonable response might be to look at the reasons for that, but of course that doesn't happen. Instead social workers are being instructed to 'send children home', without anything having changed in the circumstances that brought them into care in the first place. Another knee jerk response of the target driven culture in which we work.

Yes night owl, but investment in our future should be better funded than it is. I despair that cuts mean this group of children will be even more disadvantaged.

I agree with everything you say nellie. I have recently been working with a child psychotherapist who describes the problem along the following lines (apologies for jargon): children in the care system all have varying degrees of attachment disorder (which is what it says really: they have had disrupted and/ or distorted attachments to caregivers, causing them to struggle to form attachments to others in the future). Research also shows that neglect and abuse cause high levels of cortisol which affect brain development. These children continue to experience high levels of anxiety and arousal which prevents them from learning. The underlying attachment disorder needs to be addressed by long term therapeutic parenting before the child can move on.

I have seen remarkable benefits from this style of work, with the emphasis on developing the skills of the carers, but it is not a quick fix and it is certainly not cheap.

It seems to be becoming more difficult to recruit foster carers, which will add to the problems of children who are simply placed where a vacancy exists, rather than in a placement they are as well matched for as possible. Cuts, and the pressure on less experienced social workers just compound the multiple difficulties involved in working with children who have experienced abuse, abandonment and neglect. Sometimes, social workers need to stand up to managers, to panels that tell them for example, they can't hold a multi agency meeting, can't initiate care proceedings etc. Senior managers are so distant from the individual child/ren, and panels are set up to save the local authority money. I do appreciate the money has to come from somewhere, and priorities are important - but any family spending it's budget on a flat screen tv rather than food would be criticised. Yet, so much money is wasted on getting in consultants,agency workers and setting up panels - put it on the front line I say

Yes probably, with really good counselling some more help could be given if the older children are not so disaffected and distrustful that they would accept it, however the local authorities cannot afford the costs.

I agree, nelliemoser The being in care is not the prime cause of their problems, they were already struggling. These children need nurturing for a long time to recover. The care system needs far more input in money, expertise and time.

Thank you, Nelliemoser, and I agree with all you say. Do you think that anything more could be done once they are in care, and especially when they leave care, to improve their chances?
I have read reports of children being moved several times from place to place, or being placed in homes far from their parental home. Is this usually due to financial constraints?

Re. these statistics looking at this I do not quite see what they show us that is not obvious.
I find it no surprise at all that there are poor outcomes for children in care. Children do not end up in the care system without having experienced severe disruption in their lives. Generally this is serious abuse and/or neglect, that has meant that they cannot live with their families, that is a heck of a lot of issues this child has to deal with.
Children get very damaged by this and learning suffers because of this stress.
Of course they are not going to do as well at school as children who have not suffered these problems.

On there own these statistics only tell us what happens not why.

The information that would help to make these statistics more useful would be to in some way quantify the number and severity of the disruptive and abusive events in each child's life, as well the quality of basic parenting these children have received very early in their lives. That information would then need to be balanced against other children's performance and their life events which is barely practical to do.
All this really tells us is that children in care need special help and nurturing to assists them to do as well as possible, bearing in mind that some of the emotional damage they have suffered particularly with early emotional neglect might be permanent.
The care system is not always good for children but a lot of children in that system were damaged by their family care givers long before they came into care.
Typed on my laptop as a Word document this time.

I have just lost a post on here after trying to type it on my tablet. It froze and disappeared. Damn thing!

If you right click on the link you will find a drop down menu - click on 'open' at the top, then click on 'open' at the bottom of the page that appears.