I have been reading about the murders of two young people just about two years ago, in February 2002. This tragic event was made even more so by the fact that one of the teenagers was in the care of a local authority and the other one had been ‘looked after’, or accommodated, or whatever the latest parlance is for young people who, for whatever reason cannot live with their own families.

Whatever it is called presently, we can be sure it will all be changed if the legislation proposed in the Green Paper Every Child Matters ever gets into statute. Among other things we are likely to kiss goodbye to those most favourite whipping boys and girls, Directors of Social Services, and welcome instead Directors of Children’s Services. Under the wing of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), these new guardians of the nation’s children will no doubt stride forward fearlessly and we hope be filled with good intent.

Unfortunately, I remember the rise of the bright new hopes of the 1970s, Social Services Departments, each with its very own Director, replacing Children’s Departments and Children’s Officers. I also remember Social Work Teams becoming generic, instead of specialist, thereby expecting workers whose interests and experience lay with one group to become instantly expert in several others without benefit of much, if any, additional training.

I also remember when there was a Department of Education, followed by a Department for Education and Employment before we got to the present title. No doubt Ministers and their minions get a little dizzy with the changes, and perhaps have to check surreptitiously each morning to see what the sign outside the door in Great Smith Street says today. I do every time I go that way. Perhaps sign-making and reprinting stationery have been some kind of Government job creation scheme.

So I hope I may be forgiven if I suggest there are some rather more fundamental things wrong with the way we look after our children and young people and the people who try to care for them than will be addressed by new names and yet more reorganisations.

Years ago, when I was President of the Social Care Association a well respected Director of Social Services of the day described his job to me as being akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. It was an image which has stayed with me for twenty years.

Now I am a Trustee of Social Education Trust, which managed and financed the Webmag for its first three years. Our strap line is Making Things Better for Children. One of our reasons for supporting the Webmag was so that it could be accessed easily by those caring directly for children and young people and by offering a way of linking people from around the world together, provide information, ideas and support through opportunities to learn from each other. There are nearly 200,000 hits from over 50 countries on each issue of the magazine, but so far very few people have grasped its potential for mobilising the workforce or uniting service users to “tell it how it really is” in order to help to develop really top quality child-centred services.

I know that there are pockets of good practice, I know that some staff work unstintingly and selflessly and I know that some young people come through the ‘care system’ - horrid term - to become fulfilled and honest citizens. (Just before Christmas I had dinner with a friend who had successfully survived the care system, and whom I had first met when she was in a Regional Assessment Centre for girls in London after she had been charged with Actual Bodily Harm, nearly 25 years ago.) But until we can all say hand on heart that conditions for children living either with or away from their own families are good enough for our own children we are failing not only these children but their children’s children.

Caring for Children, which now manages the Webmag, has as its strap line Campaigning for Quality Services for Children. I would really like to see that from the fifty-first issue all of our readers start to take the opportunity to use this powerful tool www.childrenwebmag.com to help start a movement that can make a real difference.

The inevitable criticisms of the local authority and the not-for-profit agency which was actually running its services for young people where the young people were murdered fell into three broad themes.

1. The management of challenging behaviour

One of the officials was quoted as saying, “ We would expect that children with challenging behaviour would be properly cared for.” No-one would disagree, but what does it actually mean? I wonder who defines challenging behaviour and whether any of the Ministers, Civil Servants, Directors of Social Services, Chief Executives of private and voluntary care providers, Assistant Directors, Area Officers, Team Leaders, Education Officers etc. have actually experienced being on the receiving end of challenging behaviour.

Even in an Approved School for boys in the north east of England in the 1960s the boys would not swear in front of female staff, staff wives or staff children. As a Teacher in a Comprehensive School in the 1970s I had reasonable expectations that pupils would be orderly and co-operative. However by the time my cousin retired early from teaching last year she commented that by 10.40 a.m. she would normally have been restraining a seven-year-old child for the third time since school started at 9 a.m., and that physical aggression, spitting, biting and punching had become the norm throughout the primary school where she had served loyally for about twelve years. So can we please acknowledge that challenging behaviour is not about five-year-olds saying, “Won’t”, or teenagers slouching and grunting.

Typically, care workers and probably some teachers have disguised the sheer awfulness of daily, violent, physical confrontations by describing it as, “Going off on one”, “Kicking off”, or “Throwing a wobbly”. To the outsider this gives no hint of constant barrage of foul and abusive language and the terror that the threat of physical violence can turn into actual violent assault on the person by hitting, pushing, or an attack with a knife or a some flung object. This is not play-fighting or jolly rough and tumble. It is the manifestation of deep disturbances and symptomatic of a society which does not encourage self-control and the niceties of consideration for others.

How many care workers are subjected to these assaults regularly in the workplace? How many have that knot of fear in the pit of the stomach, maybe throughout a shift? How many who might have been very good carers give up and go to do something else?

A number of young people are looked after by the Local Authority because their parents cannot or will not cope with their challenging behaviour. The approach to families experiencing problems advocated by the Children Act 1989 was to work in partnership with parents and to support parents to keep control over their own children, by means of a variety of community-based interventions.

A lot can and has been said about the distortion of social work caused by the over-emphasis on child protection. Working in partnership with parents, setting up a variety of community-based resources, nurturing and supporting everyone concerned has to be prioritised against the demands of acute abuse cases or dozens of unallocated cases.

2. Too many moves

The responsible agencies stated that “We would expect that the provision of a relatively stable environment would be a priority for these children.” Again, who could possibly disagree? But in reality how would this be done? Certainly not in the revolving door placements which seem to be the norm in several areas and where the majority of, if not all, staff are agency workers.

Having been moved out of the family home, some young people embark on a lightning tour of all the local foster homes, where - surprise, surprise - their behaviour is still usually challenging and grows more so with every move as they act out in full technicolour their script which runs, “I’m so bad even my mother didn’t want to live with me”. and “I will test to destruction your attempts to give me another family”. How many young people have experienced multiple disruptions of foster placements before finally arriving in the destination of last resort – a children’s home? By now their CVs include not only their own families who could not cope and rejected them, but also numerous other families who could not or would not tolerate being in the same house with them.

For generations local authority children’s homes have been externally managed by people with no background in, and no love for, the positive contribution which good group care can make in the lives of distressed young people. In consequence the homes have been starved of human and physical resources. How many local authority children’s homes would we be happy to live in, or have our children live in? From all my long and varied career I can think of one. Can you give us some actual examples from your own direct experience?

Most residential workers lucky enough to get onto a professional qualifying course are likely to be taught by ex-field social workers, who do not present the positive aspects of good group care practice and who certainly are not well equipped to prepare workers to plan strategies to avoid violent situations, nor techniques for dealing with a sturdy fifteen-year-old in full flight across the room brandishing a chair. Many workers will have to get by with a brief induction and, if they are lucky, some in-house sessions in staff meetings.

Both the covert and overt messages are potent. Residential care is residual welfare provision and the people who live and work there are of little account. Children don’t vote but the neighbours do. “We certainly don’t want a home in our street.” Is your home well supported in the community where it is located? How do you feel about your job?

Then we need to take account of the squeeze from both sides. The parents, possibly feeling guilty, can be very critical of what the Social Services do with and for their rejected children. They couldn’t or wouldn’t raise their own children, but they have strong views, aired loudly about what and how other people do it in loco parentis. We hear plenty about where Social Services went wrong. Did we ever yet hear a parent proclaim in the tabloids that the original fault was theirs for rejecting their own child and that carers did the best they could?

The young people are also more vocal about their complaints and criticisms. Social workers - and particularly residential workers - are under pressure from young people, who claim to know their rights and threaten “to get staff done” if they do not always comply with even the most absurd requests. Some staff have therefore become wary of applying even those few sanctions allowed under the mountain of regulations, by which children’s homes are now operated. What experiences have you had of parents or residents complaining about you?

So far I have been building a picture of a sure fire disaster : a young person experiencing rejection, building up a history and a reputation to the point of entering a children’s home, which is chronically under-resourced and where none of the senior staff responsible for managing it actually knows what goes on there. Add to this the rights of both parents and young people to complain and the expectation on staff to maintain confidentiality. Is there any wonder that a lot of young people leave care with poor academic attainments and that they are over-represented among the unemployed and the prison population?

But it should not and need not be like that. There are 74,000 or so young people in another kind of group care, which is prestigious, where there is usually competition for places, for which people are prepared to pay a lot of money, which has strong expectations of academic excellence and success in adult life. There is no reason why it cannot and should be like this for all of our children.

There have certainly been enough prescriptions written over the years.

• The Golden Opportunity in 1991 set out the requirement for all establishments to have a Training Plan.
• The Support Force for Residential Work produced a number of publications, setting out good practice guidelines on matters such as the recruitment and retention of staff.
• The Guides which accompanied the Children Act 1989 gave detailed guides to all aspects of work with children, especially on how children’s homes should be run.
• For many years organisations such as Social Care have provided ideas about the kind of support needed to produce high quality care.

For staff, these include :

* Specificity of purpose for all homes
* Statements of purpose for all homes
* Proper gate-keeping and planning of all admissions and discharges
* Good staff recruitment and selection procedures
* Full induction training for all staff
* On-going in house training
* Regular supervision
* Access to professional qualifying training
* Opportunities for post qualifying training
* As much financial control as possible at home level, for shopping, furnishing and repairs.

For young people, they include :

* Care plans which are reviewed regularly
* Full consultation with young people before statutory reviews
* Full participation in reviews
* Access to an advocate for young people where necessary
* Proper attention to health care and support in education
* Preparation for leaving care or moving on to another placement.

Much that is suggested would cost no more than current levels of expenditure. Much of it is about forward planning and control over admissions and movement of young people in or out of the home. This would really mean a change of attitudes. Sadly, a lot of departments and individual homes might claim that all of these measures are in place. The issue then is the gap between what managers think is happening and the actual service delivery. Theory does not often accord with practice. This is in part because staff are reluctant to tell it how it is and in part because very few who carry out inspections know what they are looking for and where to find it.

3. Preparation for Leaving Care

Finally, in the tragic story of the dead teenagers there was embedded the old problem of how young people are prepared to leave local authority care and live unsupported in the community. I resist the use of the term live independently because no-one I know actually does live independently. Most people have a support network, even if some are only people to pass the time of day with. The problem for our itinerant young people in care is that it is difficult to retain any social links because of the multiple moves, changes of schools and poor social skills. In some places neighbours prefer to avoid young people, rather than wish them a good day, being fearful of what it might lead to.

The average age of young adults leaving the family home in the community continues to rise, as the cost of eating, housing, clothing and recreation also rise. However, for the most vulnerable, least well prepared, lowest earners or un-waged, the age at which they tend to move “into the community” is still around 16, although the age to which local authorities are responsible for them has risen to 21.

Some places have Leaving Care Programmes, or special units to train young people for life outside. Do we send our own children somewhere else to learn life skills, or do they absorb them as part of family life? It is certainly tough trying to provide a suitable environment for a teenager within the constraints of expectations of local authority managers and elected members. O what anguish had to be suffered about giving a teenager a key to the front door and having them come in after the staff shift finished at 10 p.m.. What creative wheezes were needed to find cash money for a young person to go and buy their own food, when the rest had to come in a big van, ordered on an official form and paid for centrally.

Quite a lot of young people do not want to participate in such programmes because they see it as leading to the final rejection. Some sabotage even the most caring attempts to help them. Some, on the basis of “Get in first”, demand to be put into a flat, or engineer their rejection from the last home in order to short cut the pain of leaving. Some are genuinely frustrated by the children’s home environment and feel that life would be better on their own. A lot fail, become very lonely, don’t eat properly and some get exploited through not having the skills to get unwanted visitors to leave. Quite a lot end up on the streets and eventually in prison, or dead.

I have no doubt that most people reading this would agree that we could do better. I hope that you will also agree that you have some knowledge, skills and experience which you could share through the medium of the Webmag in order to make a real difference for many children and young people. It would cost you a little time and maybe a few pence to email a response, but only you have the ability to “tell it how it really is”, in order to turn phrases like challenging behaviour, a relatively stable environment and preparation for leaving care into hard, realistic facts so that the policy makers and managers do get a more realistic picture and hopefully join us in doing something about it. Those working directly with children and young people can actually do something to change things by starting today and writing in to the Webmag with your own views and experiences.

A closed mouth gathers no foot.