This Parliament will be crucial for young people in care and leaving care. We need to ensure that new legislation works for them and we must undertake a programme of modernisation and cultural change that will be necessary if we are really to make a difference to their lives. There must be an end to the poverty that has been one of the major problems facing more than 6,000 young people usually aged between sixteen and eighteen who leave care every year.
The shocking facts of care, the legacy of abuse and neglect, are becoming well known and properly documented. The Waterhouse report – the inquiry into the abuse of children in residential homes in North Wales during the 1970s and 1980s – describes a situation which is far from unique. There are currently police investigations taking place throughout the country into events which go back decades with witnesses, now women and men in their 30s and 40s, coming forward to relate appalling details of ill treatment which ruined their childhood and has undermined their adult lives.
The Care Leavers’ Association, a group of adult survivors, are rightly calling for an apology from the Prime Minister and a proper system of compensation for people who were abused in care. This is a model which has been pursued in the Republic of Ireland and I believe that if such a system were introduced here it would help to draw a line under the past and assist the public care system in moving on.
There are currently 58,000 children and young people who are looked after by local authorities in England and Wales. This is a figure which has risen steadily since the mid-1990s following a period of steady decline. It seems a hopeful indication that while fewer children are coming into care in the first place, those who do enter the system are staying for longer.
It is really important not to be ground down by the failures of the care system so that we miss the qualities of young people within it. Care leavers have gone on to achieve great things in the worlds of fashion and television, writing books, holding down good jobs, although I think that we are yet to see the first care-leaver MP! No-one who attends the All Party Group for Children and Young People in Care could fail to be impressed by the intelligent and articulate participation of young people who have gained resilience from experiences which would have floored many of us from more settled backgrounds. Nor should one overlook the committed work of those who continued to care despite the system and continue to do their best by children who palpably need their support.
Many people would not have survived childhood if they had had to remain with their birth families, the vast majority of young people who have been ‘looked after’ will have known nothing of physical or sexual abuse within care, most will be managing their own lives and their own families. However, a greater proportion than the population at large will be in prison, homeless, receiving psychiatric help or involved in prostitution, and a very large number of care leavers will constitute the poor and unemployed.
How could it be otherwise? Young people leaving care may well have experienced multiple short-term placements on top of the trauma of coming into care, itself often following a lifetime of neglect and abuse at home. Last year 70 percent of young people left care without gaining any GCSE qualifications and only 270 (four percent) obtained at least 5 GCSEs at grades A-C.
Most worrying of all, almost 25 percent of those care leavers left care at sixteen, some to return to families but many to fend for themselves. Last year only 180 young people remained in care beyond their eighteenth birthday.
Family problems are unresolved for many and they are inadequately prepared for ordinary life, often with little follow up support. With no qualifications they are ill-fitted for work or training, and may be housed in bed and breakfast or short-term private tenancies. Many young people leaving local authority care have brutal experience of poverty at an age when one would hope that most would be enjoying the sixth form.
This should begin to change. Government guidance now sets targets for local authorities to improve the educational attainment of young people in care from this summer. However, it is to be hoped that the new Social Exclusion Unit review of the education of looked-after children sets a higher standards than the pitiful goal that 50 percent of children should attain one GCSE which was laid down by the DfEE in 1999.
The change in homelessness regulations now give care leavers a statutory right to local authority housing. Most importantly, the Children (Leaving Care) Act comes into force in October extending the statutory duty of local authorities to young people up to the age of 21 years and up to 24 if they are in further or higher education. This is a major piece of reforming legislation enacted by the last Labour government. However, so much depends on its effective implementation by local authorities.
As Secretary of State for Health, Frank Dobson gave the clearest, simplest message to chairs of social services that they should act as any good parent would in relation to children and young people in care. A simple enough yardstick one would have thought – measure everything one does by what you would offer your own child in similar circumstances. Unfortunately, this often seems to be impeded by the decision making of local authorities and the lack of joined-up government between departments.
As regulations are being prepared to guide the Children (Leaving Care) Act there is an issue about whether its provisions will apply to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who have been looked after by local authorities but who are liable to dispersal by the National Asylum Support Service if they have not been accorded status by the time they reach eighteen.
There is also concern that local authorities will increasingly offer support and guidance to older young people under S17 of the Children Act 1989, maintaining them in bed and breakfast establishments rather than looking after them under section 20. Thus they will ensure that they are ineligible for the provisions of the Act. It will be vital that neither of these matters are allowed to undermine the commitment to improve the opportunities of care leavers. After October, all this will require comprehensive scrutiny from a government which must fully fund the provisions of its own first class legislation.
It’s a shame that the corporate parenting duty under the Act does not encompass another of Frank Dobson’s telling injunctions to ‘slip them a tenner when they’re skint.’ One of the main functions of parents of older teenagers is given a very mean cast by the Act’s ability to provide financial support only in exceptional circumstances. I am convinced that this latter issue is one to which government will have to return and I hope that it will not be too long before it does so.
However, if we are to really address the matter of poverty of care leavers we must address some major issues of cultural change. How are we to ensure that young people in and leaving care get the same life chances as those growing up in ordinary families with their birth parents?
For a start we need to recognise that social work, residential care work and fostering of young people living away from home are highly skilled and worthwhile occupations which require first class training, decent pay and a proper career structure. We must stop stigmatising young people in care. There is a huge publicity job to be done here to carry the message that young people enter care because of parental problems which are not of their making.
Young people must be involved in the decisions that affect their own lives, in their personal reviews, in the way that those caring for them do their job, in the policies of local authorities and, yes, in government, too. Those living in the care system generally have a much better idea about how it works than anyone else so let’s make sure that we really listen to what they have to say. Government are funding A National Voice, the new national organisation for young people in care. They’ve gone a little quiet lately, but it is vital that they become a really vibrant and exciting organisation which engages young people in care throughout the country.
On the same principle, far more people with care experience need to be employed within the care system. I’d like to see a lot more people leaving care to become brain surgeons, astronauts and MPs. However, one fundamental way of addressing the culture of care would be to employ people within it who could vividly recall their personal experiences of admission, birthdays, leaving and just getting by everyday.
We should recognise that access to the internet and IT literacy are of fundamental importance. The government’s announcement of £200 million investment in IT access for young people in care and, in particular, the development of CareZone by the Who Cares Trust are of profound importance. CareZone can give every young person who is looked after by local authorities their own space and their own ability to make contact with priceless information and support. This can be a major empowering experience.
All ‘looked after’ young people should be afforded access to the services of an independent advocate. We might then ensure that young people have all the life chances available to all young people while recognising that these may need to be slightly delayed. We may just begin to reflect that expecting a young person to cope independently at sixteen, seventeen or eighteen is a very tall order. Whoever we are, our first steps into the world are often faltering ones and many of us require a place to return to when things go wrong.
The care system has been a dreadful place for some children and young people and it has comprehensively failed a great many whom it should have properly prepared for independence and adult life. There is now real life hope that we can address the problems of care and care leavers. We must end the poverty of some of our most vulnerable young people as the grand project to end child poverty in this country moves on and we ensure that young people in care have access to the same life chances we are seeking to make available to all.