Still seeking matters of substance from the Minister re children’s social care
The Minister is hitting the soundwaves. Now is the time for him to be deployed as children’s policy arrives on to the government policy matrix. NCERCC was advised to listen to one podcast to hear the Minister’s current advocacy. Listen yourself, make your own evaluation. (CV Family Talk – Children’s Minister On Fostering Reform)
As we listened the plans for the future sounded plausible, but after the fast-food type of soundbite we were wanting substance.
So, one important issue that emerged from our listening is that the Minister thinks the policies are substantial, maybe he has called them somewhere “once in a generation”. Once in a generation claims need to be expunged from thinking and speaking, they are unlikely and learning from children’s social never been such.
Several thoughts tumble. First, much of them are obvious changes, but the ones that are not obvious are avoided. We will address some later in this blog. Secondly, such changes always need further changes, stuff happens, sometimes serious stuff, which is how we got to where we are today. So, thirdly, it does not seem a ‘reset’ at all, more a seeking of stabilisation.
He speaks in this podcast with erudition, but we were left with the assessment he is not getting below the surface. What is preventing him getting to deeper? Is it that nobody speaks in critique, or is it no one is being reported? We have not read any in mainstream media, or indeed Parliament. The promotion of the policy is designed to meet the things we would like to hear about vulnerable children. Does the Minister seek out critical analysis? Not that we have heard. Maybe what he takes as critical voices – but are they?
He often speaks about people having avoided the difficult stuff. And yet here it is being avoided again but we are being made to feel that it is being addressed by a smorgasbord of policy (actually not because a Scandinavian approach to the situation we are in would be very different, starting in a different place and getting further. Though we hear the inflection of the Scandinavian system in the use of ‘relationships’ it is a very different context and outcome).
The more he speaks publicly seeking to promote the policies now being rolled out the more questions that emerge. Maybe he sees this as the wend of the process he set in motion with the Care Review? Once enacted where does he go? He has a CV of swift moves. Involvement in children’s social care informs us this is not the end but only the beginning of a series of beginnings. It has been observed there is a 30-year reset cycle of children’s social care, and within that a 7-year cycle of implementation, development, decay, remodelling, then and only then operating optimally. Will the Minister still be there on the tomorrow when the systems he has personally badged start to unravel, as they always do?
What he has not been heard to address is the resilience of the system we have, with all of its tweaks.
This is important to note. In essence he seeks a greater productivity, relationships producing reduced use, reduced cost. Which you will get during a period of being studied. Inevitably this will decay. The avowed intention is that the system will work ‘at pace’. This often requires oversight to ensure consistency. Yet what is being proposed is a system with less checking and assessment. There is potential for a serious event to be missed, perhaps routinely if the thresholds are not sufficiently detailed. The Children Act has been modified over years according to the learning from serious events. It is these measures he seeks to remove. They are seen as obstacles, but they were enacted for child-centred safeguarding purposes.
It is elementary in psychosocial work, and the systemic work he seeks to enact, that to remove a defence we first need to know what will happen if that defence is not there. Defences are good things as they allow things to happen, they are structures. Has he been provided with an analysis of what happens next after next after next? It is beyond important that he has; it is of concern if he has not. It might be that some systems are seen as large on “red tape and the outdated rules, standing in the way of change. What if they have been the change children needed and have been protected by?
He makes the claim of the changes being the ‘counterfactual’. Has there been analysis if is this the change needed?
His commitment to care and love is not questioned whatsoever. However, he states unequivocally that ‘state’ care cannot provide this? He used the term ‘abandonment’ in the podcast. He is rightly obsessed with ‘life-long loving relationships’, not being ‘alone at 21 or even 30’, he looks not to the state or a service but to ‘their people’, their ‘tribe’, an odd word in the fullness of the family focus of the policy. How does he account for many people having life-long relationships established in ‘state’ ‘services?
Moving on, he said success looks like 10K more fostering. But the question is unanswered, what will they be doing? Family support and less in care.
Some fostering settings will be 5 plus children – isn’t that group care? Family group/cottage homes we ended decades ago. Will this group fostering be registered as the children’s homes they are? We and the families need to be told.
The Minister says we not short of people interested in fostering. The question arose during the podcast, is the Minister a foster carer? How many in the Cabinet or in Parliament are? Should there not be a requirement?
He addresses how the government are seeking to mitigate the effects of poverty and neglect through child benefit, family hubs, family help, free school meals, of social workers retraining to distinguish them. Care is to be extensive. He does not address the difficult issues of trauma, abuse, exploitation that happen later in teenage years and require specialist intensive care.
He does not address the penetrating question: Is the evidence gathering process adequate? Do we use the tools we know that will assist? The answer is no. Action is needed. There is nothing in the social work development or the Regional Care Cooperatives that address this omission that could lead to needs led specificity and away from numbers led sufficiency of places.
The Minister’s simplistic prejudiced view of RCC is made obvious in this podcast.
A false opposition is stated; fostering is ‘better for children’. He recites a list making the outcomes of residential living an attribution whilst omitting the contribution of others that make the outcomes so, often the result of too long in family and community settings enabling high level, multiple, co-occurring needs to be unmet for too long. The evidence is repeatedly shown, the outcomes from residential settings in England are the result of how it is used. You get positive residential settings in a positive social care system. How it interacts with residential care is not being addressed. Children need better social work assessment, psycho-social assessment and support. Children need specialised intensive care as well as family and community care. The term therapeutic is much devalued and need reaffirmation. It is not therapy, or trauma informed, or treatment. What is the Minister’s definition?
There is incipient danger in the proposals that someone must have brought to his attention but have been omitted. There is ample evidence that too long in inappropriate family and community settings, then with 3+ or 5+ moves a year a child arrives at a residential resource serially and hierarchically. This is not addressed, assessment and needs should drive placement, but we do not have this approach.
The incipient danger is that the crisis for a child has been delayed in receiving attention. The family first ideas manage a crisis but do not resolve it. The pile of Jenga the Minister talks about potentially is added to by his changes. Then the cost for residential care will be higher as the sector will be smaller as it will have been closed down, despite the support that it is said is coming.
Has the Minister experienced a child in panic? He talks of crisis led placements. Does he know what it takes to stabilise a child?
Two decades ago NCERCC wrote of the right place at the right time for the right child , there is nothing here that will deliver this.
Effective care is efficient use of funding; this omission is not addressed in this policy programme.
We also need to end the idea of ‘leaving care’ and bring the approach of Through care and Continuing care.
Rates, income, are to be reviewed, to be remunerated properly. The Minister did not include a Fair Pay agreement requirement in the Children’s Well Being Bill. Residential Child Care is a low pay sector and must change. He could have included the £20 an hour minimum before profit capping that could attract lots of people.
Much said. Much unsaid.
