Couldn't Care Less
Couldn't Care Less. A Policy Report from the Children in Care Working Group| Published 8 September 2008
Click here for the Couldn't Care Less Report.
Couldn't Care Less Executive Summary
Couldn't care less
Children in care – those children who have been removed from their home and placed into the care of foster carers or children’s homes – do very badly compared to other children:
· Only 12 per cent gain 5A*-C at GCSE, compared with 59 per cent nationally.
· Children in care are 4-5- times as likely to suffer mental illness as other children.
· Nearly a third of children in custody were previously in care
· One third of homeless people have been in care.
Despite a great deal of well-meaning legislative attention over the last fifteen years, these results have not markedly improved, and indeed in some cases appear to be worsening. Four out of ten foster carers believe that the care system has deteriorated in the last ten years. Children in care are the responsibility of the state, but the fact is that if the state were the real parent of these children, they would be taken into care.
Our report, Couldn’t Care Less, argues that the failure of the care system should be a source of national shame, and that we ignore the issue at our peril.
We find that there are key issues which policy up until now has not effectively recognised. These include the effect on the care population of family breakdown, and the contributing factors of alcohol and drug addiction, serious debt and related financial problems, and domestic violence. We argue for a greater focus on prevention, including proposals for “whole family fostering” and a role for Family Services Hubs (first proposed in our Breakthrough Britain: Family Breakdown).
These reasons that children get taken into care are in many cases the same factors which predict abiding mental health problems and also involvement in criminal activity. Yet we found that the care system does not deal promptly or effectively with mental health problems and indeed lets children slide into the criminal justice system much more readily than parents would. Children in care are also often abandoned by the care system when they reach the age of eighteen (sometimes earlier), compared to the continuing support which parents increasingly provide for children into their twenties. We propose much more prompt and extensive mental health assessment and ring-fenced funding for mental health treatment; that Local Authorities should be directly financially responsible for children in care in custody; and that care leavers should be able to access supported housing, and assistance until the age of 25.
We also argue that the social care workforce – foster carers and social workers – need to be better supported and reinvigorated. Our proposals include making kinship care the main avenue for care, paying foster carers a ‘living wage’, and introducing ‘Care First’ and ‘Care Next’ schemes, based on the successful ‘Teach First’ model.
The report is underpinned by a determination to ensure that the state ‘keeps its promises’ to children in care. We argue for new legislation to remove the barriers to those children in care seeking to enforce their rights, and to give the courts the right to direct compensation towards them.
In this way we hope to see a transformation in the life chances of children in care.
