CYP(3) PCC 22
Children and Young People Committee
Inquiry into arrangements for the placement of children into care
Response from Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales
Purpose
This paper summarises the main findings and conclusions from CSSIW’s inspections and regulation of agencies involved in providing placements for children who are looked after by local authorities in Wales. Foster carers make an invaluable and distinctive contribution to bringing up children and young people and many individuals have given testimony to the vital difference they have made to their lives. CSSIW welcomes the committee’s inquiry and the opportunity to provide written and oral evidence. We would be pleased to provide the committee with any further information that may be of assistance.
Background
The Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003 gives CSSIW its powers to review the way in which local authorities discharge their social services functions. The Care Standards Act 2000, The Children Act 1989 (as amended) and the Adoption and Children Act 2002 give powers to register and inspect establishments and agencies in Wales that provide social care.
CSSIW is increasingly undertaking joint or integrated inspections which provide a better view of the child’s pathway from assessment care planning through to placement. CSSIW is also undertaking more of its inspections alongside other inspectorates, such as ESTYN and HIW, to capture the experiences of multidisciplinary services.
Our evidence comes from
Monitoring and review of local authority social services,
Inspection and monitoring of 47 regulated fostering services which include 22 local authority fostering services and 25 services run by independent or voluntary organisations,
National reviews which in the past year includes a review of children’s safeguarding and a review of independent reviewing officers.
The children and young people- There were 4,704 children and young people looked after in Wales at the end of March 2009*, a rise of 1.5% on the previous year. The number has risen from 3,313 ten years ago. It is important to understand that the population of children who are looked after comprises children of different ages, needs and backgrounds and the population changes constantly. In 2008-9, 1,640 children entered local authority care and 1,566 children left local authority care. 77 per cent of children were in foster placements. There were 486 children placed with parents, friends or relatives. (205 children were placed in children’s homes).
Reference: Adoption, outcomes and placements for children looked after by local authorities in 2008-9 available from www.wales.gov.uk/statistics.
Responsibilities and accountabilities for placements. The legal framework is relatively complex but at the core is the local authority’s responsibility as a corporate parent for ensuring good outcomes for children it looks after.
Summary
Local government performance information and inspections show improvements in
the timeliness of assessments,
social workers making timely visits to children in placements ,
local authorities allocating social workers to children who are looked after as a priority,
the timeliness of care plans,
the timeliness of reviews for children looked after
stability of placements.
Local authorities are now in a better position to understand their own performance, with improved information about the needs of children looked after.
There continues to be an unacceptable degree of variability within and between services across Wales. There is a clear responsibility on the local authority, as corporate parent, to lead further improvement. Placement instability has gradually improved although 10 per cent of all children looked after experienced three or more changes of placement in the year 2008-9 and 34 per cent of children did not have a personal education plan within the prescribed time limits. Too often, inspections find that care plans show little relationship to the assessment which has been completed. The quality of assessments and care planning, though improving, is variable.
CSSIW’s inspections of fostering services show steady improvement in compliance with regulations, with more moderate improvement in service effectiveness. The standards of the fostering services have been improved substantially since the fostering regulations were introduced in 2002. The systems and procedures are more embedded within the services. The main improvements have been in
the statement of purpose of the fostering service,
the written guidance provided to children,
the suitability of the manager, particularly in respect of training/qualification,
the quality of respite and short term placements,
the support provided to carers by independent and voluntary agencies and
the written agreement between local authority and independent fostering agency about the child’s placement.
The main areas for further development in fostering services are in
the recruitment of appropriate numbers of carers to provide an effective match for the needs of children,
giving foster carers all the necessary relevant information,
support to carers during child protection or complaints processes,
delegation arrangements between the local authority and independent fostering agencies,
checking references and criminal records of prospective carers.
Many local authorities have struggled to recruit a sufficient number and range of foster placements over the past decade. Inevitably, this limits the choice of placement available to meet the needs of looked after children. Given the sustained rise in the population of children looked after, this continues to be a major challenge. The guidance and regulations, Towards a Stable Life and Brighter Future 2007, was intended to improve local interagency planning. Generally, children placed outside local authority boundaries, who comprised 29 per cent of all foster placements in 2008-9, continue to be most vulnerable. Accessing the range of health, education and other services which these children need is generally more difficult.
Response to particular considerations of the Committee
Gathering information about a child. The timeliness of assessments and systems for recording information have significantly improved. Delays can still occur in obtaining important information about the child from other agencies. These delays are affected not so much by legal or ethical constraints but by organisational or cultural barriers. The barriers to information are even greater where the child is placed outside of the local authority.
Placement planning – Effective planning and placement are clearly reliant on the collection of quality information about the child. The timeliness and accuracy of information given to social workers by partner agencies needs to be improved. The emergency or unplanned nature of some placements can be a barrier to sound placement planning and the provision of relevant information to carers. A further barrier can be the reluctance of family members to share pertinent information. A final barrier can be the reluctance of the child or young person to have personal information shared, especially where these are of a delicate or intimate nature. Social workers need to carefully balance these considerations. However, foster carers must have the information they need to provide for the day-to-day care for the child or young person and to understand the safeguarding issues involved in relation to the placement.
Commissioning placements - Local authorities are introducing more appropriate fee and reward structures for foster carers which recognises the need to grow and retain a broad range of skills and attitudes to meet the needs of the LAC population. It remains difficult to create a surplus of foster carers in order to provide placement choice and services continue to find it hard to keep pace with the demand. Public attitudes and economic forces play an important part in the prevailing ‘market’ for fostering and it is difficult for individual fostering services to shape the prevailing conditions for recruitment on their own. More collaboration at a national and regional level would be welcomed.
The role of the Children’s Commissioning Support Resource The CCSR got off to a slower start than expected. Progress was held back by difficulties in getting agencies to provide full information and by technical difficulties in information management. Now the system is up and running, the CCSR is in a better position to provide an accurate picture of the range and availability of placements in Wales. There are signs that local authorities are now building on the role of the CCSR and are developing the local and regional commissioning partnerships needed to plan and manage the supply of placements.
Care planning - CSSIW’s review found that the introduction of the independent reviewing officer service had led to an improvement in care planning for looked after children. However, further improvements were clearly necessary. Care plans were not always based on good quality assessments of need and the recording of care plans for looked after children was inconsistent. Care plans prepared for courts were usually of a better standard. The introduction of guidance and regulations ‘Towards a Stable Life and Brighter Future’ has rightly focused more attention on care planning, particularly for children who are placed outside of their areas.
Whilst shortages in the supply of placements will compromise placement planning, resource availability should not be the driver for meeting the child’s needs. A holistic assessment and the active ongoing involvement of the social worker are highly correlated with good placement outcomes. As part of this role, the social worker has a statutory duty to consider a placement with family or friends. Good assessments will fully engage the child and family and ensure the distinct needs of children, such as race, language, culture and religion are embedded in the care plan.
Children’s participation in placements- Local authorities have been using a range of methods to encourage children to engage with assessments, care plans and reviews. Some good practice has been seen. CSSIW’s surveys of children and young people in the past year show a mixed experience. About 50 per cent of children reported that the services are of good quality but less than 44 per cent reported that there was a clear care plan. In the CSSIW review of independent reviewing officer service, children’s experiences were again found to be mixed:
the timing or venue for the review is sometimes not to the child’s’ satisfaction and accounts for some of the non-attendance,reviews often involve too many people attending the meeting making the experience uncomfortable and they can be ‘ long and boring’,62 per cent felt they had a say in their review meeting and42 per cent, reported that they had no choice over the placement provided for them.
Engagement of social workers and the role of foster carers –
In joint reviews in Wales over the past ten years, CSSIW found that the least improvement in social services from the perspective of children was in the continuity of social workers, with 61 per cent of children looked after reporting that they had not known their social worker for more than a year. This factor is obviously fundamentally linked to recruitment and retention of social workers. We support the Minister’s decision to establish a national social care workforce task group to strengthen this area.
The quality of the services from the local authority and other agencies is often raised significantly by the foster carers themselves who can become powerful advocates for the child.
