Children and Young People Committee
Inquiry into: The Placement of Children into Care
Response from Christine Abbas and serve on the Bahá’í Council for Wales
RESPONSE TO CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE COMMITTEE
PERSONAL BACKGROUND
I am an agency foster carer of 6 years, in a mixed race marriage. My husband and I are members of the Bahá’í Faith and serve on the Bahá’í Council for Wales. I also serve on the Interfaith Council for Wales and have worked in a family centre for Action for Children. We have fostered teenagers, the longest being for 4½ years, who stayed in supported lodgings with us for a few months and we are still in contact with him. We have also had unaccompanied asylum seekers and recently we have undertaken respite care.
We are in the category of two thirds of carers who are over fifty, yet, despite the shortage of foster places we have experienced periods when we have not had a placement.
My submission covers experience of fostering in general (Question 9). Whilst we have had very positive experiences of fostering, for the purposes of all-round improvement this report may highlight more negative aspects than positive.
I will try briefly to describe some of the issues:
The requirement for foster children to have a safe and stimulating home environment necessitates there being sufficient places for them to go to. Carers are at the heart of this system and the parenting role they play should be highly valued. Any examination of the effectiveness of the system needs to consider this aspect.
Fostering is considered a profession, and whilst it is important to train and develop the carers, nevertheless, they remain essentially private families who open up their homes to one child, or more, to experience a healthy family environment. The term ‘professional’ appears to be applied as a means to enforce an increasing amount of tasks and expectations on the family, which eventually means its normal life cannot be maintained. Whilst the professional social worker leaves the office at the end of the day, the family has 24/7 care. It is possible that increasing workloads on social workers, combined with the more challenging behaviours of many of the children and concerns about saving money, have caused them to off load pressures on themselves by fielding them to the foster carers and justifying this by stating “You are professionals so you should be doing this...” Many families will find these pressures too onerous to continue fostering, and I feel the whole attitude towards the carers requires examination. An example of this would be arrangements for contact. Some authorities undertake the responsibility, the costs and transport arrangements whilst others expect it to be part of the fostering contract. The commitment may be two or three time weekly over distances of 50 or so miles.
After the ending of particularly challenging placements a carer can experience a period of traumatic stress. On reflection I have found it is not so much the child’s challenging behaviour but the actions of the agencies working for the child’s interests that contribute to the stress.
It can be hard for a carer to call social services to request help if they feel what they say will be misinterpreted. A simple request for a listening ear can be mistaken for a call to hold anti-disruption meetings and the carer finds the child is moved on, or their abilities questioned. Carers can find themselves guarded in what they say to social workers, incase a complaint is made, although they might have a need to say what is on their mind in order for the placement to continue successfully. They may not feel the social worker is impartial enough to hear what they have to say, especially if they are under stress at the time.
Experience working with various local authorities shows that there is a wide range of working practice. A good relationship can be built with those who are not only flexible in their approach but have good team work and where the practices are not chaotic, or staff appear over cautious or nervous.
Principality-wide basic standards of practice might be helpful. These standards need to be across the wide range of services offered to the child. For example: one child placed, out of area, by an authority had not attended school for over 3 months, despite statutory requirements to provide education. The host authority appeared not to act as quickly as it would for one of its own children. Placed in another authority, once contact was made with a pupil referral unit, the child was placed the next day.
Getting children registered with doctors/dentists can be difficult, especially when children are only placed short term. Some carers may live in areas where there are shortages of places anyway.
Social Services departments can appear not to trust the abilities of agency carers if they have never worked with them before. Good reputations and recommendations are not passed on from authority to authority.
Social services departments need to have a basic understanding and information on the faith communities in order not to treat faith beliefs with suspicion or to act in a discriminatory manner.
Extremely challenging children have been placed in our care and yet the authority may not be supportive of the boundaries felt necessary to put in place and undermine the authority of the carers. They may even suggest unrealistic boundaries or want to appease the child to compensate for what they have been through. The essential need to train the child and to make them aware that there are consequences for their behaviour may not be given high enough priority, particularly when a child is on the point of requiring residential care. When the carer needs to apply firm boundaries if the social workers are not firm enough, or in total agreement, then the child can see how to use the situation to their advantage and takes control. When discipline is continued the child knows he only has to tell the social worker he is not happy and he will be moved on. This might not always be the best solution This tendency to expect children to move on if the placement gets into any difficulty, panders to the child in a way that they learn to work the system to get what they want, whereas, children in a normal family setting do not get the opportunity to move away from their parents. They are required to stay with them and learn to work through problems.
Although children in care have had experiences of life that are regrettable and they should not be disadvantaged in any way, they can often be rescued from neglectful, harmful circumstances to one which provides an over abundance of material wealth. This brings them into the cycle of expecting everything to be provided for them without any appreciation of the value of things. All children in our society need to see that this way of life is not the experience of the majority of people, where there is constant hardship but where people have appreciation and a healthy work ethic and moral code. Alongside the visit to theme parks and holidays abroad I feel that young people need an experience of how others live and opportunities to serve others. The adventure of going to India to help children in a village or an orphanage in eastern Europe, for example, would open the children’s eyes in a way that could have far reaching consequences for themselves and for their home communities.
Children who are in need of therapeutic treatment, if they are to have any hope of remaining in a family, are waiting too long to receive help. Extra finances to help families cope with the challenges are not forthcoming although the authority is likely to face the heftier bill of a residential unit in the end.
Decisions about a child moving on can be made without consultation with the carer and even the social worker may be overridden. Our own example is a child we had for 3 months with challenging behaviour, but where attachments were developing. After a prolonged challenging episode the child was removed for 48 hours cooling off period but was expected to return. Social services decided the child would not return, although we were not given any reasons and had not requested the removal. Neither ourselves nor the young person had any say in her future, as no meeting took place following the incident. The child’s perception of being unwanted, her low esteem and sense of unworthiness would be further fuelled by such action.
In confidence a social worker explained that there was a hierarchy within her department where favouritism with certain managers yielded fewer and easier case loads, whilst others had disproportionate cases. Not only did this effect staff morale but it impacted on the children, as the disfavoured members were less likely to be listened to and their recommendations overridden. If social workers are unable to speak out about such practices, without fear of reprisals neither the children nor the carers will be certain that decisions are made solely for the benefit of the child. This excellent social worker quit.
Twice we have been considered as a placement for a child, having been highly recommended, only to be turned down because the child has ‘on occasions made racist remarks’. In the age of equal opportunities, anti-discrimination and diversity policies this should not be grounds to bar a family from receiving a child, especially when they feel able to handle it. Children who steal knives, start fires or self-harm are placed often without any regard to health and safety, whilst a child who threatens with a word is not considered suitable. As adults we are capable of dealing with this whilst the child is deprived of learning about a wider sphere of mankind than the limited view they were endowed with.
It seems all too easy for social services to make decisions about the child’s future without consultation with the carers. This decision by a panel of adults, made without seeking our opinion, seems to be more racist and discriminatory than the child’s remarks.
Many decisions about placing a child are more to do with saving money than putting a child in the right environment. Agency carers are considered to be more expensive than local authority carers. We hear that local authorities no longer wish to use private agencies, preferring to recruit their own carers, and that they only use them for the more challenging children. There are numerous agencies in Wales with a large resource of carers and there are only so many families who will be in a position to foster which may mean the authorities will never find sufficient carers. Either way this situation needs to be looked into to determine whether agency carers are still required or if we will continue to have empty rooms.
Insufficient information is often received about a child, sometimes social services appear reluctant to pass information on as if there are things to hide about the child. If the child has been with previous foster carers it would be advantageous to have information about this period to ascertain whether patterns of behaviour can be detected. To the carer it can feel like children are picked up and dropped in to families with no links between them, as if the child is supposed to forget everything that went on before.
Other considerations:
Resources to help unaccompanied asylum seekers are extremely limited outside the cities. This makes them reluctant to stay in areas where there are few incomers and they ask to be found places in the cities. The host communities do not experience the challenges or benefits of receiving people from different backgrounds nor do they get experience at providing for them.
CM Abbas
Aug 09
