Centre For Social Policy Debate Issues Affecting Children in care

Unit staff members Vashti Berry and Sarah Blower present at this year's Centre for Social Policy autumn seminar, which explored two major issues affecting children in care in the UK; achieving long-term security for young children and educational success for those of school age.

Opening speakers included – social worker Margaret Adcock, lawyer Richard White and researcher Elizabeth Monck - who reviewed the needs of young children in care, changes in social work and legal approaches to ensuring their welfare, models of achieving security and research evidence on outcomes. They argued that thinking had oscillated over the years due to increasingly sophisticated knowledge about child development, attachment, effective parenting and risk of harm. It was suggested that the family justice system was based on sound legislation but dysfunctional in its operation.
 
Research into ways of achieving security for young children, such as in concurrent planning, was also reviewed. Responses to their presentation came from Mervyn Murch and Roy Parker who have undertaken previous studies of these issues. They suggested that the discussion was often too broad and there was a need to consider different forms of security for different groups of children.
 
The meeting ended with contributions from John Simmonds, Director of Policy and Research at BAAF, who spoke about the current government initiative to increase the number of adoptions from care, and from Sarah Blower of the Social Research Unit, who presented findings from the Unit’s current studies of very young children admitted to care in three English local authorities. These findings show that solutions such as adoption were rarely proposed early on (with the exception of children given up before birth) but emerged later and that much of the early social work activity was more concerned with rehabilitation and contact. Hence the numbers of young children in care readily available for adoption may be lower than that suggested in many estimates.
 
The second session focused on the education of children in care. Speakers were Sonia Jackson and Carme Boada Monserrat from Barcelona who have been involved in a cross country study of policies and outcomes with regard to pathways to education for children in care (the YIPEE project). They showed that in all five countries studied, inauspicious background characteristics interacted with policy and institutional factors to depress children’s educational performance. Statistical information on achievements was also varied, and often very poor. Policies were needed to prevent the low expectations implied from family backgrounds from limiting what children could achieve. Responses to the results came from education specialists, James Wetz and Peter Mittler, who both spoke about the need to hold onto children from unpromising backgrounds in their schooling and what could be learned from those who buck the statistical predictions.
 
The seminar closed with a lecture by Vashti Berry from the Social Research Unit on the problems of analysing and presenting findings from Evidence-Based Programmes, that have been deemed successful around the world, in situations where the results are less clear-cut.