By
David Lane
Children’s
homes are getting in the news again. That is not necessarily a
bad thing, as, despite the best efforts of a lot of people over
the years, they still need better resourcing, better staffing,
better staff training and better management. The recent National
Children’s Bureau research report gave encouraging signals
about morale and the quality of management, but there is still
work to do.
Parliamentary Concern
As the attached item from Hansard indicates, the House of Lords
gave an airing to some of the issues in January in a debate which
focused first on staff training. Francis Listowel has taken a
particular interest in residential child care, which is a good
thing, because it is a subject which the powers that be usually
ignore unless there is a scandal. A further debate is to follow.
Professional Views
There have always been a few active advocates of residential child
care, people who are aware of its potential as a treatment medium
or understand that for some children it is the placement of choice.
A lot more senior managers and field social workers in the United
Kingdom have accepted that it has to be available as a last resort
or because of the shortage of foster carers. A sizeable handful
of people have actively opposed residential care for children,
seeing it as institutional and damaging to children’s rights.
Historically there were attempts by some authorities, such as
Warwickshire, to close all their children’s homes, but the
effectiveness of this approach was questioned in Professor David
Berridge’s research. Many local authorities have reduced
the number of homes they run, but they have had to turn to a growing
private sector to provide the residential services they find are
still needed for children in their care.
Plus Ca Change
An examination of the last few decades shows that despite fashions
in professional thinking (such as preference for foster care),
the overall numbers in all types of residential services remain
remarkably constant. Other forms of residential care emerge to
compensate if one type is closed down.
*
Thus, when local authority social service departments closed down
community homes with education, there was a commensurate increase
in residential schooling.
*
When social workers advocated fostering and argued for the closure
of children’s homes, a proportion of foster families became
so large that they were virtually identical to the badly staffed
small group homes they were replacing.
*
When local authority secure units were shut, the numbers of children
in the penal system rose.
*
When local authorities closed their homes because of the cost,
they found they still needed to place children, and the private
sector has flourished.
In summary, it would seem that there is a percentage of children
at any one time who need to be in extra-familial care, and the
question is what balance of provision is required to meet their
needs best.
Save the Children
Now we have a report from Save the Children, A Last Resort,
which specifically argues that there should be as little residential
child care as possible, because it leads to abuse, denies children
their rights as laid down in the United Nations Convention on
the Rights of the Child.
This report is very firm in its conclusions, and there are some
with which no-one could argue – that children should be
protected, that high standards of services should be provided
and that holistic individual assessments should be undertaken
to plan to meet children’s needs.
Unfortunately, the report offers no evidence for its main conclusion,
other than by repeating that it is Save the Children’s experience
that residential services are damaging. The aspects of care which
it criticises are certainly features of bad residential care,
but many of them are features of bad foster care or bad parenting
as well, and there is no evidence offered to indicate that they
are more prevalent in residential care than in other services.
It would be stupid to suggest that no child should be brought
up in its own family because it is in their own families that
most children are abused; it is equally stupid to suggest that,
because there are instances of abuse in residential care, all
homes should be closed. There needs to be a much more careful
analysis of the ways in which different types of care help children
or render them more vulnerable to abuse before the report’s
sweeping conclusions can be warranted. Save the Children could
do well to talk to people who are expert in residential care and
identify ways in which it can be improved, rather than simply
condemn it.
That standards of all sorts of services for children need to be
improved is clear, whether in this country or around the world,
and it is hoped the Save the Children report and the House of
Lords debate help to push the subject up the agenda.
Click
through here for the
House of Lords debate
Click
through here for
the Save the Children report (please note that this report is
in Adobe Acrobat pdf format and you will require the Acrobat programme
on your computer to read it. If you do not have it, please click
here
to download it.
