Education Committee
Oral evidence: Residential Children’s Homes in England, HC 716
Wednesday 6 November 2013
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 November 2013.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Dr Roger Morgan, Children’s Rights Director (RCH6)
– British Association of Social Workers (RCH12)
– Local Government Association (RCH14)
Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair); Bill Esterson; Ian Mearns; Mr David Ward
Questions 1-84
Witnesses: Dr Roger Morgan, Children’s Rights Director, Office of the Children’s Rights Director, Richard Servian, Member, British Association of Social Workers, and Tom Rahilly, Head of Strategy and Development for Looked After Children, NSPCC, gave evidence.
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Q1 Chair: Good morning. Welcome and thank you very much for joining the Education Committee today as we start our inquiry into residential children’s homes. The reason for this inquiry is the Government proposals for reform and change. Let me start by asking: are the Government’s proposals ambitious enough and rounded enough, and are they going to make a fundamental difference? Roger.
Dr Morgan: I am always encouraged to say “not quite”, but overall they are a very positive move in the right direction. We have consulted children on them, which will not surprise members of the Committee. We selected 12 proposals and they supported 11 of them. We will, no doubt, come to the one they did not support later.
There are two major points I would make in response. One is that some of the issues that apply to making a children’s home a good children’s home or not, and that keep children safe in a children’s home or successful in a placement in one, are the less tangible things that you cannot really regulate for very easily: the quality of staff and the personality of staff.
Q2 Chair: You can change the training requirements for them, and the Government is doing exactly that.
Dr Morgan: You can change the training requirements for them, but there are at least two other factors—perhaps three. One is experience and the quality of that experience. Another is the personality. Is the member of staff the sort of person who can gain trust from children, is perceived as firm but fair, is knowledgeable, etc.? The other is the skill of being a good communicator and a good person at developing relationships. That is not the same thing as qualifications. A qualification is a part of that matrix.
The other thing I would say about whether the changes go far enough is that, whereas the test of a pudding is in its eating, the test of a change is the extent to which it is implemented and happens. I will not quote lots of evidence unless you wish me to, but we know that there are quite a lot of expectations and requirements set out in regulations where the implementation still falls quite short of 100%, and that clearly makes a difference. Yes, it is making the changes to the regulation, but you certainly then need to follow through with the implementation and monitoring of that.
Q3 Chair: Are they ambitious enough? Yes or no.
Dr Morgan: Yes, with a qualification.
Tom Rahilly: Like Roger, we broadly welcome a lot of the proposals and certainly welcome the focus on residential care. It is important to state, as I am sure others on the panel would agree, and to put on record the positive experiences that many children within our care system do have and the safety it provides for most of those. Quite often, and rightly, inquiries like this come about as a result of some of the most horrific examples of abuse that we have seen of some of our children in residential care, and we welcome them because of that abuse. We have specific questions about the practical implications of a few measures; things like the consequence of a local authority being asked to consult before it makes out‑of‑area placements; or the consequence of risk assessments that a home would have to carry out during the year.
I have two broad points about where we think these proposals possibly do not go far enough, one of which really echoes some of Roger’s comments. One relates to the focus on quality, and in particular the quality of the relationship that children and young people experience. In some of the work that we have do, which in particular is focused on children who went missing from care, children talk about the desire for that kind of relationship with someone that they can trust, someone that they can turn to, someone that understands their needs and that they feel they have that relationship with and can confide in. The measures on qualifications are welcome but, as Roger said, qualifications per se are not the same as the slightly more intangible factors that that relationship entails. We really urge and recommend that the Government, when they are taking this forward, has that element of quality of relationship central when deciding how this is implemented and in the measure of success.
Chair: We will come back to that later. How you deliver that would be of interest.
Tom Rahilly: The other point is the potential narrow focus that some of these proposals have on residential care and providers alone. If one thinks of the needs of children coming into residential care, the data from the Department showed that 29% had five or more placements before coming to residential care; 70% were having mental health difficulties; and the average placement length was only six months. There is a lot that providers need to be doing, but this is about the role of everyone—the local authority; the health services; the police—and them all working together with the providers and how commissioning relationships are supporting that. We would recommend that things such as the risk assessment and the response to that assessment should be owned by people like the LSCB as well as the provider.
Richard Servian: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here. BASW’s and my main concern is whether this is overly compliance‑oriented.
Q4 Chair: What is BASW?
Richard Servian: Sorry, I have been asked to be here by the British Association of Social Workers. We have 15,000 members, most of whom are front-line social workers. Others, such as myself, work in supporting social workers in placements and in the commissioning of placements. Our social workers are doing quite a difficult job of supporting young people who are coming into care in a very difficult situation. They are working with them to build their care plans. They are talking to the young people and finding out what they need. Many of these are compliance‑oriented actions that add a lot of bureaucracy, you might say, to the professional process of what social workers have to do. Before identifying the placement, the social workers will already have done a lot of work with the young person. They would have identified whether fostering or residential care would be appropriate. The real issue is whether these proposals are consistent with Eileen Munro’s proposals about getting away from compliance-driven to professional relationships. We would rather like to see the emphasis being put on social work relationships with residential care and young people, but really upping the ante in terms of the qualification and training of residential workers.
Q5 Chair: We will come back to that in more detail, but are you happy with the qualifications? There is a requirement to up that—an insistence that managers should have a high level qualification.
Richard Servian: There certainly should be a high level, but it may be that we need to have a look at it in the round. I was re-reading the Utting Report, which was a report to the Secretary of State on residential care in 1991, in which Bill Utting recommended that a third of all residential workers should be qualified social workers. In those days, there was more of a residential bent within what was the CQSW, etc. We need a far deeper view about the qualifications. We need to recognise residential work not as a Cinderella service, which is what it tends to be seen as, but as something really valuable where we want to see the best‑qualified people working with the most vulnerable children in our communities.
Q6 Bill Esterson: Tom, you talked about this desire for a trusted relationship from children. That is not new; that goes back many years. That has been a very large missing element in what happens in the care system. Richard, in the evidence that BASW gave, you said that the proposals are “largely reactive and remedial” and “they miss the point”. What is the missing ingredient? What is the key thing that the Government have not recommended that they need to do?
Richard Servian: From my point of view, we have got to recognise that there have been big changes since the Children Act and even since the Care Standards Act. Back in 1998, 80% of residential children’s homes were in the local authority sector. Now, I think 72% are in the private sector. That is a massive change in 15 years. This really elongates what local authorities have to do to get the right placement in the right place. What this change has meant is that local authorities have had to move on from local placements to regional organisation, with the development of whole new classes of staffing in placement and commissioning, looking beyond the local authority. At the same time, we have got a whole new group of senior managers in the private sector. These are key people to where we are going in terms of the planning of residential care, but they do not appear in these proposals at all. To some extent, this is an unregulated area because we do not regulate the owners of the organisations and say, as we might do with a bank, that if they have got ownership of 10% or more, there is more responsibility attached.
Q7 Bill Esterson: Your earlier point was about compliance, so regulation not just in terms of compliance, but also in terms of quality?
Richard Servian: It is about the quality and qualifications of the people who are supporting both the residential workers and the social workers, involving them in the wider organisation of services, but recognising maybe that we have gone beyond the local and now local authorities are organising themselves in regional commissioning networks, which are contracting with the private sector. That has been a massive change, particularly in the last five to 10 years. To us, the regulations seem to miss out the whole picture of how children end up in residential care and how residential care happens these days. Hence, you might say, we get distortions in the market, with more homes being in Stoke or the West Midlands than in London, whereas maybe 15 years ago every local authority would have had their own children’s homes. There are big changes. The regulations and the quality-assurance issue should look at the wider picture as it really is, and I do not think these current proposals reflect that.
Q8 Chair: What would that look like?
Richard Servian: That is probably the million dollar question, but, for instance, on the local authority placements and commissioning side, work needs to be done on looking at the qualifications and experience of the workforce. These homes are very expensive and we get very worried that it is more about money than it is about the quality of care. There should be more social workers involved in that.
Q9 Chair: You have said you want regulatory change, so I am just trying to tease out what that would look like. The Government have made a series of regulatory changes, like requirements for CPD for managers and certain base‑level qualifications for others. What precisely is it that you would like to see added to what they are proposing?
Richard Servian: As I said, in the past, social workers would have dealt with one provider—the local authority provider. Now, the authority I work with deals with 60 private‑sector providers. There is a whole new very small bureaucracy—usually two or three people—in those authorities that are helping identify the placements and are doing the contract, but there is no agreed qualification level for that group of people, whether these are money‑oriented contracts people or whether they are social‑work‑oriented people.
Chair: If you were able to send a note through to us on any thoughts as to how that could be framed and who precisely would be caught by it, that would be very useful.
Richard Servian: Certainly.
Tom Rahilly: You are right that the issue of central importance—the quality of the relationship—is not something that is necessarily new; it is set out in research. Our experience is that there is still a gap in terms of reaching that. I suppose what I was trying to say is that the Department’s suggestion or solution for trying to deal with that has been to say, “Well, we will change something about the qualifications.” We welcome that and I agree with Richard about the general need to improve the general standing and image of the workforce, but that alone does not address all the issues of quality and the needs. From some of the work we have done and discussions with providers, there is some thinking about the understanding and assessment of the needs of children prior to their coming in, and how they are best met.
Q10 Chair: Is that met by Richard’s proposal that we should have specific qualifications for those in the local authority—the small teams—who are doing the placement management?
Tom Rahilly: The more general point that I was going to make is that some of this is not necessarily about the changes to the regulations. I think this is one of the points that Roger made. It is about what support is being provided to help people improve that assessment process and to help people understand and improve the commissioning process. Again, from the local authorities that we talk to, actually understanding what is being provided by that home and that kind of quality still remains a challenge in some places. The Department has set out a number of changes to the regulations. They have yet to set out some of the wider programme of how they will support local authorities or, indeed, providers to improve that practice. There should be a wider focus on some of that slightly softer, slightly more intangible stuff, rather than different sets of additional changes to the regulations per se.
Dr Morgan: There are three areas. Firstly, there is a huge focus on qualifications. Listening to children, they feed two other very significant factors in there, which flow from some of the things that we have already said. One is increasing the focus on getting recruitment right in the first place. Recruitment should not be solely qualification‑driven. Qualification is one of the factors, but we have talked about a lot of other factors in recruitment. Secondly, in terms of training, qualifications, yes, but more emphasis on induction training. There used to be quite a lot specified about induction processes and training, but induction has a particular role. There are still quite large numbers, for example, of temporary and agency staff working in children’s homes, so induction then becomes rather more important for day-to-day practice.
Q11 Chair: Are there authorities where there are excellent programmes of induction that could be better spread?
Dr Morgan: I cannot identify specific authorities. There is certainly a lot of variety in the quality of induction and, indeed, the content of induction. Sometimes it is focused primarily on safeguarding issues or process issues; other times it is focused very much on individual children’s needs, care plans, etc. I have produced a schedule of what children think ought to be in induction. Everything I have just said is on that, and more. I will not go into the full list just at the moment unless you wish me to.
Chair: No, we have quite a lot to get through.
Dr Morgan: We have, so I will move to the other two areas. The second is the planning and placement process. We still do not get the placement of children right, so the issue of quality of care in children’s homes is not solely to do with the children’s homes themselves or, indeed, the commissioning of children’s homes; it is to do with the individual child placement. We still have children being moved to new placements with less than a week’s notice. 43% of the children that we have asked have said that they had less than a week’s notice of a placement move. There is frequently only one choice of a placement: “It is Friday; we have found this placement for you”. There is not a choice and a balance of two. Children are also very often removed from placements at fairly short notice and for policy or financial reasons, or because the placement perhaps was supposed to be a short-term placement and the child did better in it than they were expecting. Then, there is a removal of the child and the child contacts my team and says, “My wishes were to stay here, my review said I was doing very well, and now I am being shifted and I have been told it is to do with the fact I was not supposed to be here for more than six months” or whatever it may be. With that, care planning needs to be improved. That is entirely an implementation issue. The regulations are fine, but we still know that nearly two-thirds of children in children’s homes say that they have a care plan; that leaves over a third who do not even know they have got a care plan. Of those who have care plans and know what is in them, 81% told us they thought their care plans were being fully implemented in their placements, which leaves the other 19% to worry about.
Finally, one of the messages that comes time and time again from children about the quality of care in a setting—children’s homes or others—is, yes, about the quality of staff and relationships, but also the extent to which there is listening to children. That comes up whether you are talking about running away, whether you are talking about a children’s home or whether you are talking about placements. To what extent are children listened to and heard—not always agreed with, but their views validly factored in?
As a final point on that, we are very good at having complaints procedures, but children’s experience is that they find that a complaint is only slightly more likely to improve things than make them worse. What is likely to improve things more is making a positive suggestion. The legislation is there. It is a representations procedure.
Q12 Bill Esterson: Coming on to some of the high profile issues—Oxford, Derby and Rochdale—the NSPCC say that the changes do not do enough to address the weakness in culture. Richard, you have touched on this already. Tom and Roger, you both touched on geography and the way that you get these clusters of homes in some areas. It is a huge undertaking to turn that around. Can that be addressed in the recommendations without a massive overhaul?
Tom Rahilly: There are two things to consider. One touches again on some of the issues of culture. There were shocking examples in the Oxford case, which you talked about, of the attitudes of some staff towards children in their care and of their understanding of what was happening in those children’s lives, and even where they were understanding what was happening, thinking that in some way those children had responsibility for that behaviour and it was acceptable to some level. That comes back to the understanding of the workforce. In some cases, it is very simple things like understanding what some of the signs of a child being at risk of sexual exploitation are and how to spot those—things like children coming home with gifts or marks of harm about their person, which are not consistently picked up. The training and understanding of the workforce lies within that.
Q13 Bill Esterson: Does a lot of that come back to the issue of trust between the worker and the child?
Tom Rahilly: It comes back to trust between the worker and the young person in terms of the young person explaining what is going on in their life, and also just to general awareness and understanding among the workforce of issues such as sexual exploitation so that they can spot some of those signs and understand that they should be acting upon them.
Q14 Chair: Is there systematic training for that kind of awareness?
Tom Rahilly: We, as the NSPCC, have recently done some work showing that there is a gap in the workforce’s understanding of those things and more needs to be done to increase that awareness and to provide that kind of training to them.
Within the proposals, one of the main things the Department for Education are proposing is this risk assessment for the location of homes. We have questions about how that works in practice for an existing home and what happens if a home that is established identifies risks within that area. The proposals are not clear on who then has responsibility for doing what as a result of that. There should be a clear responsibility on the home to address issues identified within that, including issues around the awareness of their own staff and demonstrating they are making that difference, which is not quite set out in the proposals. As I said in my earlier remarks, there is also a responsibility on the partnership within the area and a clear role for an LSCB—a local safeguarding children board—in addressing some of those risks. Again, that is not necessarily explicitly set out within the proposals. So, some of the response to that risk assessment will be around what the role of the police is.
Chair: We will come back to that.
Tom Rahilly: In some of the work we did on children going missing from care, a lot of the time they felt that the response to them going missing was punitive rather than understanding of their needs; they were sanctioned or told off as a result of going missing. Some of that comes back to this issue of relationship and trust, but there is a thing that also came up about the general provision of activities and things to do, both for the children and young people themselves and their experience of the physical environment, but also the kinds of activities that they would do with their workers.
Richard Servian: To us, representing social workers, one of the most important issues is understanding the culture of a home. That is very much one of the issues that we try to look at when making placements. In terms of how we measure that and find that out, we rely on communication with other local authorities, particularly if we are looking at distant placements; we rely on good communication with the homes; we quite frequently rely on Regulation 33 and 34 reports; and we rely on Ofsted. But we are not too clear that those ways of getting things, particularly the Ofsted and 33 and 34 reports, really point us in the cultural direction. The Ofsted reports tend to be compliance‑driven rather than looking under what is happening. The format of the Regulation 33 and 34 reports differs at every organisation you go to. It becomes quite difficult to work out what is happening in those homes.
Distant placements are attractive, particularly where we have not got the right place for the right child locally and somewhere does seem to have the right provision, although we rely on the information that we have. If we are to continue making distant placements, we think local authorities should be encouraged to develop their quality assurance processes, along with Ofsted, and there should be more communication with Ofsted. When the NCSC started and the Care Standards Act was passed, I, as a commissioning person, would meet with them every six months to share information about homes. Ofsted took a completely different view and we had to go through their Manchester office and there had to be an email. To be frank, whether we got any response from that was inconsistent. We think there is a whole layer of work that needs to be done on Ofsted’s role, the quality-assurance role of local authorities, and Regulation 33 and 34 reports. We welcome that people who do Regulation 33s should be registered by local authorities, but it should go further than that.
Q15 Mr Ward: Roger, I think referred earlier to listening to children seriously and properly, and particularly to the concerns of the children. Is there anything in the proposals that will support that, help that to happen and ensure that there is a response to the children when they are listened to?
Dr Morgan: Let me go back to the responses the children made to the 12 proposals that we put to them. Yes, there were two proposals that, as far as the children were concerned, could be described as “more iffy”. They were in support of 10 of them. In some cases, for example an independent person visiting, they said, “How is that different from now?” They made comments about some of those proposals, which I reflected earlier, that, “Yes, that is the right thing to do, but will it happen?” and, “How is it going to happen?” The two they thought were slightly iffy were the ones where there was an escalation of a decision to a director of children’s services.
Q16 Chair: Sorry, Roger. The specific question was about how the proposals will help strengthen the voice of the child. You are taking your soundings from that and taking us on to other issues.
Dr Morgan: Yes. I was getting excited about it, but I will come back to that point. The proposals in themselves do not specifically address the increase, which I mentioned earlier, of listening to children about placements, about placement moves and about the quality of care in a home. There are developments on those fronts—Ofsted is increasing its degree of child listening; I have been doing my little bit in my patch on that—but the proposals themselves do not specifically address that point. To answer the unasked follow‑on question: yes, I would like to see more in the proposals than there is specifically on—and I think the Chairman put it very nicely—asking but also hearing and taking notice of what the children are saying.
Q17 Mr Ward: You have painted us a picture of really unsatisfactory situations in terms of short-term placements and being moved on a Friday because it is somewhere to go. That does not indicate that things are very good and that children are being listened to in those situations.
Dr Morgan: No, it does not. There are three specific aspects on which they are not being listened to. There are decisions being made—and my evidence for that is that the children very often contact us for assistance with this, which, incidentally, usually results in a change of the decision—to move a child against their wishes and feelings, and sometimes the decision is made without validly checking on their wishes and feelings. They are very often told they are going to be moved rather than asked what their position is on their current placement and their future plans.
Secondly, there are a lot of situations where the regulations that already exist—the planning, placement and review regulations, which require factoring in the child’s views—are paid more lip service to than in actuality, certainly for the children who contact us, although I cannot put a numerical figure on that other than to say it is about 400 children a year.
Thirdly, I used the word “choice” earlier. There is very little choice currently available to a child. Whatever their views are, there is very little choice. When we ask them about, as we do every year, choice of placement, 47% say they were told there was one placement, so it was a choice between going there and coming up with something totally different.
Q18 Chair: Is there anything in the Government’s proposals that will strengthen the voice of the child in determining their placement?
Dr Morgan: Not specifically.
Q19 Mr Ward: Where is the role of, and how consistent across the piece is the role of, the advocates—those who are supposed to be there to support the children?
Dr Morgan: Again, there is a patchy advocacy service and patchy access. A lot of children do not know about their right to advocacy even where it exists. I think there is another person in that, who is not the advocate but the independent reviewing officer.
Richard Servian: Absolutely, yes.
Dr Morgan: I would very much like to see such a recommendation for advocacy from this Committee in relation to improving the current proposals. I will be brief, because I know that this Committee has heard this from me in the past, so I will be stopped in a moment, but I would like to see the IRO playing a greater role in two things that are already in their remit. One is making sure that children’s views are being taken into account. That is the proactive, “What do you do about it?” rather than just saying, “Let us have it more”. The second is in monitoring that the care plan is being implemented in the best interests of the child and, if not, is being reviewed.
Q20 Mr Ward: My wife is CQSW and her first job was in a residential children’s home, but many years ago. What is the situation with it? Is everyone immediately given a named advocate? How does it work now?
Dr Morgan: No. Every child should have a named independent reviewing officer. They will be allocated an advocate, or they have the right to be allocated an advocate, at the absolute minimum when they make a complaint or representation, although, for a lot of children, there are much better services than that, and credit for that. Quite a lot of children’s homes do have visiting advocates, for example, from outside organisations, which is a good move. The independent reviewing officer is the one person who, apart from their social worker, they will be statutorily allocated. Having said that, one in five did not know that and did not know they were allocated an advocate.
Q21 Mr Ward: Tom, you have identified children who have had five or more placements. There is no relationship‑building possible in those situations, is there?
Tom Rahilly: Where a child is having multiple placements, no. That comes back to the point that this and the issues about residential care go beyond just what is happening within that home, and some of that wider consideration.
On your points about advocacy and IROs, we provide advocacy services in a few local authorities around the country as an independent advocacy provider, and I would echo Roger’s comments that it is not always the case that children know that they have that right to an advocate when they are making a complaint. I also do not think that the role of the advocate, in the way in which it is currently structured, addresses all of those points about children and young people’s voices, because for all of those decisions we were talking about, they do not have that access to that advocate. In all of the understanding about why placement choice is being made, access to an advocate is not there.
Q22 Chair: What about Children in Care Councils? Are they working well for children in residential care?
Richard Servian: That is one of the issues about children placed at a distance. When you have children who are mostly local authority, you can organise them. The better external providers have their own children’s groups for children who are staying with them in groups, who do feed back. Every local authority is meant to have a contract with an independent advocacy organisation, which might be the NSPCC or many other organisations. Indeed, independent visitors who visit children particularly in residential care who have nobody else to visit them also have a strong role. What I am not aware of is the extent to which the advocate and the independent visitors have a route into the quality‑assurance process. I am not sure that Ofsted talk to them to see what the issues are that they are picking up from that. Just adding to what Roger was saying about the IROs, my view is that the IROs are gradually building up their confidence and taking a different view from management and social services.
Q23 Mr Ward: Are you in a position where, in this area, you feel you can make recommendations? We need to know what we should be doing better.
Chair: That is the business end of what we do. We conduct these inquiries; we write a report; and we make recommendations. What should they be?
Dr Morgan: Just to turn what I was saying about IROs into a recommendation, IROs should have a statutory duty to challenge if they consider that a child’s best interests, wishes or feelings are not being properly taken into account. At the moment, they can challenge, but there is a lot of feedback that IROs are somewhat fettered in that ability to challenge and it is not an absolute statutory duty. Allied to that—and I am aware that I am talking about primary legislation here—there should be a statutory duty upon a local authority receiving a challenge to a child’s care plan or placement or decision affecting child from an IRO to resolve that in the best interests of that child, in accordance with the planning, placement and review regulations principles rather than other factors such as policy or finance. In very basic business terms, at the moment IROs are very largely deployed to chair very large numbers of meetings. That is a key role, but I am not sure it is as high a priority as what we have just been talking about.
Tom Rahilly: My understanding is that when the Department for Education published its data pack on residential care, they also said that they would be reviewing the national minimum standards and changing them to quality standards. My recommendation is that when those standards are being reviewed, this issue of children and young people’s experience, their voice and the extent to which they are listened to becomes one of the central things that that review of those standards should look at. But it is also about whether or not they have been achieved and delivered. We hear of too many instances where it is still a process exercise, rather than understanding the experiences of children and young people and taking the time to listen to them, so it is about how we know those things have been achieved.
Q24 Chair: Our witnesses have grasped the importance of being holistic and answered many of the questions we were set to ask later anyway, so the Committee should feel no need to repeat them, especially if we are going to get through in a reasonable time. One question you did not answer was my question about Children in Care Councils. I was very impressed when I went to my local one. I was impressed by the seniority of the councillors who were there. I was impressed by the fact that they already had a personal relationship with the children who were there, so they knew each other’s names and they were familiar with each other. I was quite positively affected by that. What I cannot remember—which I ought to do better—is how many of the young people there were actually in residential care.
Richard Servian: Nationally, it is something like 9%, but more teenagers. That is going to vary locally. I do think one of the great changes has been local councillors generally getting involved and taking their responsibilities up as corporate parents. That has really been a big thing for moving looked-after children as a whole out of Cinderella status and getting them on to the agenda. Where there is a big question is whether we should really be talking about regional or national corporate parenting, bearing in mind that children from different local authorities are scattered across the piece.
Q25 Chair: On the very narrow point, Richard—this is your second chance; you are refusing to answer—do Children in Care Councils work well for those in residential care? That is what we are looking at today. I will ask Roger.
Dr Morgan: Overall, they do. They are—this is a term I have used before—patchy. Some are brilliant; some are less so. You would expect that.
Chair: That is fine. Short answers are okay. Tom.
Tom Rahilly: It is more difficult for children where the local authority does not have a relationship with that home. It could be the home is provided by the local authority or they have a commissioning relationship for all the places in that home. Where they have spot‑purchased placements, it is more difficult for a Children in Care Council to have an impact.
Q26 Ian Mearns: On that issue, I think you are right, Roger; different local authorities take their corporate responsibility differently. There are some that are very, very good indeed and there are others that are not so good. In my own local authority, children in care and children who live in residential units have direct access to the scrutiny committee that looks after children’s issues within the local authority, and they meet about three or four times a year. That is an example of good practice. It breathes transparency into the system. Should there not be, though, a direct relationship between the local authority from that perspective and any children living within their geographical area? It does not matter who the setting belongs to—whether it is the independent sector or the voluntary sector—but if they reside in that geographical area, surely that local authority should have a responsibility for overseeing what happens there.
Dr Morgan: The short answer is yes. There was a rule of thumb across local government very strongly not long ago that if a child was in your area, however temporarily and even if placed by another local authority there, you had duties and functions towards that child. Obviously, if you have placed the child, you have got parental functions. To come back to the practicalities of this inquiry, one of the things that has never worked well, and it is being looked at again and addressed again in these proposals, is that it is already required that, when a local authority places a child in their care in another authority’s area, they notify that local authority. Frankly, not a huge amount is then specified or responded to in those notifications, and there are moves to address that, but getting that bit right in practice is important.
Q27 Ian Mearns: In essence, what I am hearing there is a hidden recommendation that those guidelines need to be beefed up somewhat.
Dr Morgan: I will make it less hidden and say yes.
Richard Servian: I would very much welcome that. Even though we have had the arrangements for placements regulations for 22 years now, under which local authorities who place children in your area have to tell the local authority that they are there, there are still major issues about keeping to that, and that does mean issues about trying to support those children. It is very important that children whom we place—who we place for good social work and professional reasons—have access to support and are not subject to political issues about, “Should we be supporting these children?” To my mind, and I think to BASW’s mind, we have got a small group of very vulnerable children on whom there should be a focus, wherever they are living. There may need to be a financial relationship with the previous local authority in some way to make that happen, but it is very important that those children are supported wherever they are.
Ian Mearns: Maybe I am a different sort of politician to some, but I am not sure, “Should these children be supported?” should be a question in anybody’s mind.
Richard Servian: From a social work point of view, it seems to be an issue.
Q28 Ian Mearns: Moving on, in terms of establishing a new placement, for instance, do you think the DfE’s proposals for area risk assessments are likely to be workable and beneficial? What would you like to see included in the DfE guidance on these particular proposals? I think you referred to this earlier, Tom, to a certain extent.
Tom Rahilly: I have touched on it already and will not repeat myself at length.
Chair: No, you will not.
Tom Rahilly: At the moment, the proposals have a requirement on the home and the provider to carry out that risk assessment. It is not clear within the proposals what then happens as a result. Our recommendation is that part of the responsibility for that needs to be taken by the LSCB because it is to do with the way in which the police are working with that home and the way in which the local authority is working with that home. We have seen some great examples of police forces working in partnership with workers in residential care to understand each other’s roles, for example, when a child goes missing. That is, for us, some of part of what is missing in the response to risk assessments.
Dr Morgan: I have two quick comments. One is: add to, or put in that guidance the need to secure the experience, concerns and views of children already placed in that area, because very frequently there is an addition when those children are already placed. Secondly, to reinforce what Tom was saying, when we have asked children about that proposal, they too have said, “Yes, we support it, but what are you going to do if, once the home is there and we are in it, it turns out to be risky? Are you really going to be able to eradicate the risk? Are you going to move us, close the home, or what?”
Q29 Ian Mearns: From my perspective, in the guidance, surely the welfare of the children should be the upper-most thing that any decision is based on. A placement can also have within it a whole range of things. Will the setting provide a culturally rich environment for children to thrive in? That sort of stuff. What we are all saying is that the decision should be around the children.
Richard Servian: The questions for us about the safety thing are: what is the definition in the era of social media, etc. of a safe placement, and will this regulation be used for a NIMBY-type approach? Whose safety is it? Is it the safety of certain communities or is it the safety of the young person? We think that this proposal may just be another bit of bureaucracy for providers to have to live with and do their annual safety environment on, rather than necessarily meaning very much. The better local authorities and providers have good relationships already with their own policemen, as Tom was just saying, and with their community safety and anti-social behaviour people. We would want to emphasise relationships, rather than legal compliance issues.
Q30 Ian Mearns: Within this area, if we are looking at risk assessments regarding new placements and new establishments, that begs the question: what do we do about existing establishments? What do we do when we find that existing establishments have become settings within areas that are regarded at risk? What do you think we should be doing about that?
Dr Morgan: The straight answer to that, with brevity, is: if the area changes or new risks emerge—something inappropriate opens next door or something—then the only valid response is to do exactly what you were saying earlier, which is look at the welfare and the implications for each individual child. There may well be different implications for different children.
Ian Mearns: Hidden within that also, by the way, is the fact that an established children’s home in an area should be a consideration when making any planning decisions for nearby facilities.
Dr Morgan: That would be a very significant point, yes.
Q31 Bill Esterson: Moving on to leaving care, children in care are very often emotionally less mature than other children, yet we still often expect them to leave care at 16 or 17. That is the underlying issue. This is a simple question, really. Is one of the answers here just to raise the care‑leaving age?
Dr Morgan: I am going to say, “Yes, but”, I am afraid. Yes, most of the children that we have spoken to about leaving care say that they are leaving care too early—that 16 or 17 is too early—for all the reasons I do not have time to go into but we have discussed before. However, a blanket setting of another age is not quite the issue. Children are saying, “You need to leave care at the right time for you to leave care”. That depends on you and your level of maturity and on the preparation and experience you have had.
Bill Esterson: It comes back to the individual child point you made a few moments ago.
Dr Morgan: Yes, absolutely.
Q32 Bill Esterson: But unless you have some kind of rule, how do you make sure it is not the lowest common denominator?
Dr Morgan: The answer is you set a default rule and if the default rule is increased, yes, but you have within that variations such as leaving care but on high support, which still qualifies. One of the things that happens when you leave care is a lot of support drops off and you are left very isolated at an age when very few people in this room would have been coping on their own—although some would—in accommodation that maybe is in an area that you were moved from in the first place for your own safety.
Tom Rahilly: I was going to say, “Yes, and” rather than, “Yes, but”, not in the sense of leaving care directly, but the principles are the same. We have been doing a lot of work on what happens to children when they leave care to return home. As Roger has just said, quite often children’s needs increase and the risk that they face increases.
Q33 Bill Esterson: What is “home”?
Tom Rahilly: In the circumstances I am talking about, we have been doing a lot of work with children returning to parents or a parent. As I say, I am not talking about leaving care, but I think the principle is the same in the sense of children moving to a situation where their needs are likely to be higher and the risks that they may face are quite often higher, but their entitlement to support and the level of support that they get drops off as a result of their legal status changing. There is a big issue about the way in which we manage those transitions and the support that we provide to children when they leave care and return home. The Government, within the Children and Families Bill, at the moment is proposing additional support when a child is adopted, and that is something we absolutely welcome, but that support should not be based on the permanence option for children; it should be based on the transition and the support that is needed for that transition.
Q34 Bill Esterson: So, the amendment that has not been accepted so far to raise the age for support to 21.
Tom Rahilly: Yes, but I think that the current amendment is specifically about foster care.
Q35 Bill Esterson: Yes, it is. But you would do something similar.
Tom Rahilly: Yes, and we, similarly, have worked with Peers to table amendments on entitlements to support when children make that transition and when they leave care or return home. It is not just about raising the age; it is about the “and” part of the support that happens for them.
Q36 Bill Esterson: When I interrupted you before, I asked you a question about what you mean by “home”. Do you mean going back to the birth family?
Tom Rahilly: I was saying the specific piece of work I was talking about related to birth parents, but some of those principles apply to how we support and manage transitions better so we do not have a situation where needs increase and yet the level of support that we provide decreases.
Q37 Bill Esterson: This might be a question more for Roger. What do children regard as their home by that stage?
Dr Morgan: That varies dramatically.
Chair: We have very limited time to move into that kind of issue.
Bill Esterson: We may come back to that another time.
Q38 Ian Mearns: There have been an awful lot of issues that have arisen about out‑of‑authority distance placements for individual young people. Do you think that the Government’s approach takes sufficient account of the needs of trafficked children and any children who may have specific special educational needs when looking at these decisions?
Dr Morgan: The issue of out‑of‑authority placements needs a higher regard to be had to the fact that some children do have needs for provision that happens to be out of authority, for example for a particular kind of schooling, and, secondly, that some children have a need for distance, which I do not think we have really acknowledged enough yet. Asking children in the last month or so who have been placed out of their authority at a considerable distance, a lot of them were saying very strongly that they had been rightly placed there because it took them away from inappropriate peer‑group influences or gang memberships, or away from risks from other peers and away from risks from their own families. In some cases, it took them away from their own temptation just to abscond back to the family they knew they should not really be with. A lot were saying, yes, they were rightly placed because of that distance.
If I may just mention two other quick factors on that, children out of authority overwhelmingly were saying that they felt they had been made safer by being placed out of authority, which is a bit counterintuitive for a lot of the discussions we have been having. 49% of those that we asked said that they felt safer, compared with 6% who said they felt less safe. The final point on that, if I may, is that the proposal is one of defining distance—children were saying that two hours’ travelling distance seemed to be a reasonable judgement—but that the decision to place the child out of authority should rest with the director of children’s services, or be escalated to the director of children’s services. Children’s reaction to that—this was one of the proposals that they felt was very iffy—was not that the director should not have a role, but that the role of the director is not properly defined. The decision should be made a) by a group and not one person, and b) by a group of people who know the child and the child’s needs—back to the points you were making. The director ought really to have a monitoring role with that, saying, “Am I personally satisfied that this decision has been made properly in this child’s best interests?” rather than the decision itself going to the director. Looking at the wording of the regulations, I am not sure that is clear enough.
Q39 Ian Mearns: Are many of the decisions that are taken regarding out‑of‑borough or out‑of‑county placements not based on the patchwork and range of provision that exists?
Dr Morgan: Yes.
Q40 Ian Mearns: I cannot remember there ever being any rational national plan about what we need and where we need it. Do you think that needs to be looked at at a strategic level?
Dr Morgan: There have been past attempts. There were regional plans at one point. They did not have a terribly good track record.
Q41 Ian Mearns: The concept of regions is alien to the current Government. Is there a danger, though, that requiring the director of children’s services’ approval for distant out‑of‑authority placements would lead to the potential for unwarranted delays to be built into the system and therefore have an effect on the individual child?
Richard Servian: That is the case. There has already been a lot of professional work into identifying the placement and several panels before it gets to the director. I think it just adds to the bureaucracy.
Tom Rahilly: One of the Government’s proposals is that an authority should consult the potential host authority. Again, it is not clear for us exactly what that means. It is probably a slight strengthening of the existing notification duty, but we know that that does not work. What happens if an authority consults and that host authority says, “Actually, we have got issues”? There is a bit of ambiguity within that. The risk is that it becomes not much different in practice to the current notification duty. In the longer term, the points you were making about where homes are located comes back to things like local authority duties in terms of sufficiency of placements and the way in which that duty to secure sufficiency has or has not happened and their commissioning arrangements. We are seeing local authorities coming together to improve their commissioning arrangements.
Q42 Bill Esterson: We had a good discussion about qualifications before. Something that occurred to me was the point about the long‑term issues about the workforce. I forget who it was who made the point that we need to value people who work in residential settings and get the best people applying, rather like the debate that we have at the moment about teachers. How do we achieve that? Also, how do we change the system and create stability so that we have long-term, experienced staff and those relationships can bed in, which seems to be one of the big themes of the discussion?
Richard Servian: There needs to be some leadership from the Government about saying that people who work in residential homes are worth it. That probably comes down a little bit to money, but also to the input those very valuable staff have into decision making and the respect that they are given. The registration of residential workers and what comes out of that would be the first step, as is already happening in Scotland. They have been brought into a professionally recognised system. A side issue of that is that abusers would not be able to go from home to home because of that registration.
Q43 Chair: Tom, are you in favour of that form of professional registration?
Tom Rahilly: I do not have particular comments about professional registration. You used the analogy of teachers, and we have initiatives like Frontline for social work at the moment. Briefly, there have not been equivalent things for residential care. I will not repeat all the points about quality and qualifications, but there is something about valuing the consistency of the team both in terms of the make‑up of that team and the consistency of their approach, and children valuing a consistent approach across different members of staff within that home and how that is valued.
Bill Esterson: Which is a training issue as well.
Tom Rahilly: And a leadership issue.
Chair: I am afraid time is so pressing we will move quickly to the issue of ownership.
Q44 Mr Ward: I will wrap all of the questions up into one. There has been a steep fall in local authority provision and a consequential growth in private‑sector provision. Do you have any concerns? In the care sector, with Southern Cross and so on, we have had scares and worries about provision. Does the marketisation of provision have any dangers?
Richard Servian: We have already identified that it has made big changes geographically. It has forced local authorities to work regionally rather than locally, because that is the only way of getting together with their colleague local authorities and the only way they have been able to contract with them. There are issues. The regulations seem to be based on the role of the social worker and the role of the registered manager, but there is such pressure on some registered managers in private organisations, because of the need to make money or because you just have another management structure that was not in there 10 years ago, that there are real questions to ask about whether registered managers can really uphold their end and make sure they are keeping to their statement of purpose, stopping the wrong mix of children being in placements and that sort of thing.
Tom Rahilly: It is worth noting there is a lot less research into issues and quality within the private sector, so to some extent there is a bit of a gap of knowledge, but from the data that are available and that DfE publish, there is not necessarily a difference in things like Ofsted measures depending on sector or, indeed, the number of homes that a provider owns.
From my perspective, the issue comes back to the nature of the partnership and the commissioning relationship that a local authority might have with a home. We have seen examples of really good practice, where they have a relationship with a home as part of their commissioning, even if it not one that they manage, rather than something where they are buying individual places and beds within that. In theory, there is also a question about what the improvement mechanism is and what the Government’s role is in terms of driving up quality within quite a diverse sector that exists.
Chair: I will give the last word to you, Roger.
Dr Morgan: I have three very quick last words. Firstly, it is the quality of the individual home and the experience of the children in it, rather than the sector that they are in; that is the children’s view.
Secondly, I have a concern that there is a different pattern of provision. There are a lot of very small one‑person homes in the private sector. To me, that is more significant, and might need looking at differently, than the ownership.
Thirdly, I have a concern about when a private‑sector home closes. At the moment, the legislation immediately switches into financial issues of receivership, etc., and that does not carry with it an equivalent duty—alongside any fiduciary duties—to continue the welfare and support the appropriate further placement of the individual children that that home is still caring for once it goes into receivership.
Richard Servian: In the fostering regulations, that is there, but not in residential.
Chair: I thank the three of you very much indeed for taking the time and giving such high‑quality evidence to us this morning.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Cllr Robert Light, Deputy Chair, Local Government Association, Jonathan Stanley, Chief Executive Officer, Independent Children’s Homes Association, Lisa Pascoe, Senior Her Majesty’s Inspector, Ofsted, and Claire Dorer, Chief Executive Officer, NASS, gave evidence.
Q45 Chair: Good morning and welcome. We are up to a full panel of four, with the clock pressing. I feel that I should apologise to the previous panel for occasionally bullying them on time, but we have a lot to cover and a limited time to do it. I will make a request mostly of my colleagues to keep their questions short, but also that you are able to do so as well.
In his speech during the launch of Ofsted’s first Social Care Annual Report, Sir Michael Wilshaw said, “We inspect all homes twice a year against the Government’s national minimum standards, but the standards themselves are part of the problem. They lead to inspections which are focused too much on compliance rather than the progress and experiences of children.” Do you think the Government’s proposals are going to fix this?
Jonathan Stanley: With regard to the national minimum standards, they probably do not fit the needs, or the task to meet the needs, of those children. They do need a review. This has been something providers have said for some long time. If anything, the drag has been towards fostering and bringing homes more in line with fostering, rather than understanding the particular sorts of higher‑level needs that children have in children’s homes. Yes, a review would be helpful.
Lisa Pascoe: I absolutely agree with Jonathan. The proposals from the DfE and the three consultations are only part of what we think needs to happen. The current NMS talk about minimum standards. We do not want to talk about minimum for our most vulnerable children; we want to talk about aspiration and ambition. We want to see that in what Government sets for children and young people.
We have continued to raise the bar in our inspection frameworks since 2011 and we will continue to do so. We intend to have a new inspection framework in place from 2014. For those providers who are not good, we intend to say that they require improvement, because that is what we think is right. That is the test we should be applying. However high we raise the bar around inspection, to take action against weaker and poor providers we need the regulations, and the standards that underpin them, to set the right aspiration so we can do that and we can drive the weaker providers out of the system.
Cllr Light: I think everyone would accept that the review is timely and important. The real issue that comes out of that is the knowledge and understanding about what “good” is. We all talk about the ratings, but what does that mean on the ground in the experience of the children themselves? That is the challenge. There is no tick‑box approach to that; it is about soft evidence, understanding culture and understanding feelings. The danger with the present trajectory is that the default position will be to have a more hard‑nosed regulatory approach to inspection; it needs more than that.
Claire Dorer: Quality standards are probably a better way of effecting the cultural change that is needed, rather than regulation itself, so it is something that we would very much welcome. I work with children’s homes that are additionally registered as schools, so we already work on a model of looking at progress. That will be helpful, but we should not be in any doubt that it will be very challenging to measure it.
Q46 Bill Esterson: That brings me to my first question quite neatly. How can providers of children’s homes be incentivised to deliver the highest quality of care in residential children’s homes?
Lisa Pascoe: There are a number of aspects to incentivisation. Inspection is one of those, but we are only one part of the picture.
Bill Esterson: Is inspection an incentive?
Lisa Pascoe: It is an incentive. Certainly, homes aspire to be outstanding; we hear about homes aspiring to be outstanding. That is one of the incentives. What I want to say is that another of the incentives should be about meeting the individual needs of individual children. Social workers and commissioners need to have oversight of what is happening and whether provision is meeting individual children’s needs in the way that is set out in their plans.
Claire Dorer: My sense is that most homes do not need an additional incentive. They want to meet the needs of the children they work with; they want to deliver high‑quality services. An inspection framework that reflected more of what they do and what they value about what they do would be helpful, because at the moment the frustration is that things are reduced to fairly mechanistic elements of service, which they do not recognise as being the things that make the difference to young people. Changing the system would be a big incentive in its own right.
Q47 Bill Esterson: On that point, in the last session we heard about the fact that things tend to be very much looking at structures rather than the quality of care. Do you find that that is a restriction on making sure care is the most important thing rather than, say, the money?
Claire Dorer: It probably does not help. Money will be a driver regardless and changing to quality standards will not stop money being a driver, but it would help us all to focus more clearly on what is important to children and young people.
Jonathan Stanley: I worry when we start using the word “incentivisation”, because in the current context it has a monetising effect in the thinking about children. We need to be thinking much more about children. We wrote a paper some years ago about commissioning as a parenting and childcare activity; it has largely become an administrative and financial activity. I worry about us thinking about that. I would be much more encouraged if we were thinking about ensuring that all homes are good or better, being very clear about what good means, and being much clearer with the thresholds and inspectorial judgements so we know. If we start talking about incentivisation, we start opening the door to payment by results. Payment by results has all sorts of difficulties for children’s homes, because we collect a lot of the previous failures of the system and it is difficult to know which are the bits of the children’s homes and which are the bits of the system. We then start talking about cost calculators and we start making a drive to the bottom, rather than supporting a sector to go to the top.
Q48 Bill Esterson: What would you like to see, then?
Jonathan Stanley: I would like us to be much clearer about asking homes to work to an outcomes‑based framework, so we can identify, assess, plan, deliver and evaluate the needs of the children, and see that they are working and that that is recognised, supported and celebrated. We have had very little celebration of the good work of some of our children’s homes. That is much more important to everybody than the maybe 2% increase that we might get.
Cllr Light: The Local Government Association is committed to improving personal outcomes for children in children’s homes. That is why we commissioned the OPM report into how we can improve the commissioning process. The reason for that was that commissioning is really important; it is how we drive the improvement. The problem is that if you do not know what you want and the person who is giving you it does not tell you, or explain fully, what they can give you, you should not be too surprised if you do not get what you expect. It is a situation where commissioning needs to be sharper. Those who are commissioning need to understand what they are commissioning; those who are providing need to be clearer about the detail of what they are providing. Woolly statements that, “We can do all of this” are no good when we need specifics so that we can match needs to provision. That is what we need. The way to incentivise improvement is to have a much more sophisticated commissioning process that starts to build in some of those areas.
Q49 Bill Esterson: Listening to what Roger said to us earlier, I am tempted to say that one of the problems is that we are not actually talking about children and children’s needs; we are talking about commissioning and a lot of the jargon that goes with it.
Cllr Light: You are absolutely right. The trouble is that the children get lost in this. That is why we always need to pull it back to the fact that these are individual children. The one thing you can be certain about is that every child will be different. Their needs will be different and their challenges will be different; therefore, what we need to be able to do for them has to be different. That has got to be the bottom line.
Q50 Bill Esterson: Coming on to the issue of consistency, Lisa, the concern that has been raised by the expert group on the quality of children’s homes is that there is a lack of consistency in Ofsted’s children’s homes inspections. How can that consistency be improved? The question that follows on from that is: is the expertise there within Ofsted to achieve that?
Lisa Pascoe: The expertise is there. We continue to refresh our workforce and we are probably in a position now where 50% of the people who are inspecting children’s homes are people who have recently moved from the social‑care sector. We continue to do that and we think it is really important.
Q51 Chair: Where have they come from?
Lisa Pascoe: They have come from across the sector: from the residential and social‑work sectors.
Q52 Chair: Fine. I was not clear. You are saying we are at 50% now; where were we a year or two ago?
Lisa Pascoe: I could not give you a percentage figure on that, but I could come back to you on it. Certainly, as you know, Ofsted inherited the staff from the Commission for Social Care Inspection in 2007, who had previously been employed to inspect children’s homes and were seen as fit and suitable to do so.
In terms of consistency, where we get it wrong, we will say we have got it wrong. We have said publicly where we have got things wrong and where we need to strengthen things. We have introduced a new regional structure; we have also introduced a new management structure for our regulatory inspectors. We think that is placing us in a much better position to have a stronger grip on what is happening amongst our staff and also on what is happening regionally amongst homes. We are also introducing a new senior practitioner role. In the same way the way that local authorities have that skills base that is not just about being a manager, our senior practitioners have a skills base that is about being a well‑experienced inspector who can manage difficult and complex situations to support other inspectors. We think we have got the right structures in place.
Q53 Bill Esterson: Robert, you talked before about the Office for Public Management and the issues they have identified. How can local authorities start to create greater consistency again and align the way they are working so that you have got a guarantee—I take the point about minimum standards—of high standards across the country?
Cllr Light: That is a challenge. The way we need to add to what is there through the official Ofsted process is by local intelligence, and intelligence from young people themselves. One thing we did in our report is we got the Who Cares? Trust to talk to young people in children’s homes who had been in and had also left children’s homes to get their perspective. We do not talk enough to the young people who are in homes and those who have gone through about their experience. This is something we in local government can do more of.
Q54 Bill Esterson: And you are looking at sharing tha
Cllr Light: Absolutely. One of the problems we have as a whole system is that we perhaps do not share enough appropriate information. Further work is needed as to how that can best be done, because, at the end of the day, we are all on same side here: we are trying to support vulnerable children. Sometimes that is lost in the overall thing.
How we use the Regulation 33 visits is probably also something that needs further consideration. DfE is looking at a greater question of independence. That is a fair question to raise. There is certainly a fair point to make that a greater degree of independence could give them a little bit more rigour and a little bit more benefit. We have to look at the capacity issue of that and what it throws on. You might end up suddenly creating another inspectorate if you are not careful with these sorts of things. It needs to be done within boundaries, but that is certainly a positive way forward.
Q55 Mr Ward: On that point, Lisa, you are not so happy with the local authority having that role under Regulation 33, are you?
Lisa Pascoe: No, we did not support that proposal. We think that could be very onerous on local authorities where there is high density of provision. We also think the best homes are already able to assure themselves of the independence of those reports and take action. We have just been reviewing those homes that remain adequate or perhaps even dip into inadequate, and one of the common factors in those homes is a failure to use Regulation 33 and Regulation 34 reports well. It is a common factor amongst them. Amongst those that do well, they already use these processes well to identify where improvement can happen. The important thing is making that improvement happen.
Cllr Light: Can I put a counterpoint to that, Chairman? It is really important that local authorities have a role. I recognise that, for those local authorities that have a lot of homes, it is a burden. That is a problem and we need to look at how that can be addressed. But, the issue is that, if you are a local authority, you are doing the commissioning and you need that independent intelligence for where things are going right but also where things are going wrong. I speak from experience, because I was the leader of Kirklees Council when the Shannon Matthews issue broke. At that time, I wanted to know the answers to the questions, “Is my children’s safeguarding working? Who can I believe? Can I believe Ofsted? Can I believe my council officers?” I wanted that assurance. I got all the same messages back from the same people, so I got that assurance. You need that. This is an important part of that for local authorities. Taking local authorities out of Regulation 33 would be a big mistake.
Claire Dorer: Lisa’s point was important. Often, services are not making use of Regulation 33 reports; it is not that the reports are bad in their own right. Speaking from a provider’s point of view, we would love local authorities to make really good use of Regulation 33 reports in commissioning decisions. A lot of the time, it feels as if we are sending them off into a vacuum: they land with the local authority and never get looked at again, and they do not inform commissioning, because we still do not have a lot of commissioning; basically, we have still got procurement. If we were seeing them inform commissioning, we would hugely welcome that, but at the moment we are just not.
Q56 Mr Ward: Can you make one recommendation to us in this little area, Jonathan?
Jonathan Stanley: I will try. The ICHA has put some money into developing a national‑benchmark good‑practice document, which we are about to publish. That should address many of the issues that have been put down in the paper by the Government about methodology and scrutiny, and it should raise the benchmark for Regulation 33, so people could have some greater degree of assurance. The difficulty has been that when we have been saying, “Where do we send these to?” in the proposals it talks about sending them to all of the local authorities who have children placed in the home, but we are certain that children’s homes need to send them to the local authority in which the children’s home is placed. We realise that could mean a lot of paperwork, but how is the local authority to know the quality of the home and what is going on unless they are receiving that? How are they then to make a recommendation about the safe area? The difficulty is that, as far as we understand it, the ADCS are still coming to a decision about who might collect that information and what they might do with it. That is a really important aspect. Somebody senior needs to collect that information and it needs to be used analytically to inform the service of the local authority. That needs to be beefed up.
Q57 Mr Ward: I do not know if you were here for the first session, but I asked more or less the same question, which is about the changing market and the movement away from local authority provision to the private sector. There are lots of private‑equity firms involved now. The nine largest businesses operate something like 22% of the market. Is this a concern to you at all? Are there any dangers in this?
Cllr Light: From a local government perspective, we welcome a more diverse market, but we recognise that there are challenges within that. Certainly, we have a situation where the more larger providers come in, the chance to weaken the market in certain areas is there, and we would be worried about that. At present, however, 64% of the market is owned by companies that have one or two homes. We have a pretty vibrant sector in that regard, so we could stand a little bit of larger companies coming in, but with guided terms. We need the geographical provision to be looked at, and for that to be done with a framework that does that. Reference has been made to the widespread distribution of homes and how it is very lumpy across the country. A lot of homes are located in the north-west and the west midlands and not in other parts of the country. How do you address that and how do you have the capacity to address that? Certainly, there is an opportunity for people to look at that, and I know companies have looked at whether they can strategically locate in certain places. That may well be a help, but we have got to be mindful that we do not have another provider coming in and suddenly taking over the market and then destroying the good local provision that is there.
Q58 Chair: Are you aware of that happening anywhere? Are there any private‑equity firms that have bought up all the homes in an area?
Cllr Light: I am not aware of any, but, as you move into a more complicated commissioning process, that unfortunately tends to favour those who have got the capacity to go through that process. One of the big mistakes local government makes is making its commissioning processes too complicated, which drives out the smaller providers. If you get a situation like in the north-west, where we have 22 authorities working together in a commissioning body, that is ripe for big companies to come in and outbid smaller providers.
Claire Dorer: That is a very fair point. You also have to look at some of the local authorities who have chosen just to procure from a single provider. In some cases, that has been an active local authority choice, not a response of the market.
Jonathan Stanley: We have arrived at this situation without strategy. I do not recognise some of the percentages that are being presented here. I understand about 19% have venture capital behind them. It is true that we need to understand much more about that sector.
There is also the hidden area of the use of local authority children’s homes at the moment. We have a system where we have children who go to fostering; who might then go to an independent fostering provider; who might then go to a children’s home; and who might then go to an external children’s home. We have a sequential use of our system, which might not be helpful.
In respect of the costs of private children’s homes, we have made FOI requests to local authorities and received 110 responses. Local authority homes cost around £2,500 a week, which is likely to be an underestimate. For children’s homes from private providers, the figure was £2,800. We know that the majority of the sector is solo and small providers. They are not able to roll with the financial climate that we have got at the moment. One of the messages is that we really do have a sector that is standing on the edge of a cliff at the moment financially. How we sustain it and get it back from the cliff is really important. When we look at who wins tenders, it tends to be bigger companies, because they are able to come in at a cheaper price. Maybe that is because they are able to draw in funds from somewhere else. Are we making enough use of the Public Services (Social Value) Act when we are thinking about that? We are definitely not. We need a national strategy.
Q59 Chair: Are the big companies making the system more or less resilient? If there is a financial crunch, one imagines a large private‑equity firm getting in trouble—a Southern Cross‑type thing. How much of a risk is that to this sector, where we have very vulnerable children depending on the services being provided?
Jonathan Stanley: The sector is much less resilient than it ever has been. We did have one company that went out of business some time back. We learnt some lessons then. The direction that venture capital takes is either for the longer term or for the short term and then to sell on. We are still going to be learning more lessons from this. There may be a greater aggregation that occurs. If one of these companies decides to disinvest, is it likely that there will be a whole street full of investors coming along ready to invest? No, it is not. People will be very judicious in their thinking about investing in children’s homes.
Q60 Chair: When they come in, are they predominantly coming in as a sort of revenue play or are they doing it because of the property? What are the driving forces for these people getting involved and what therefore could drive them out again?
Jonathan Stanley: In my experience, it is not usually the property, although maybe there are some. From looking at people’s websites, it is usually because they see an undeveloped sector and are seeking to create efficiencies, but also to aggregate together with different services—education, health and care—they might have in other portfolios. Each one of those big investors probably has a different reason for being there.
Q61 Chair: Lisa, do you have any thoughts from Ofsted?
Lisa Pascoe: We welcome the DfE proposal that would enable us to be more transparent about who is responsible for children’s homes. We certainly welcome that. One of the other issues we are talking to DfE about at the moment is providing something in legislation that will allow us to publish aggregate reports about larger providers. Currently, we are constrained to publishing reports about individual children’s homes. We think it would be helpful for those larger providers to be able to put something in the public domain that talked about them as a whole, but that requires a change in legislation.
Chair: It is a bit like academy chains.
Q62 Ian Mearns: In terms of the workforce within homes, are the Government’s proposals to tighten the qualification requirements for staff and for registered managers of children’s homes robust enough and aspirational enough?
Lisa Pascoe: We think not. We should be introducing those changes more quickly. 2018 is a long time in children’s lives.
Cllr Light: We have to be very careful that we do not develop a situation where qualifications are put above practical experience. We all welcome skills and qualifications being part of the process, but let us not forget that care is not an academic process; care is a practical process. One of the dangers with the DfE process across a number of areas is that it puts academic progress at the pinnacle and forgets about the more social aspects. Looking after vulnerable young people requires more than just a qualification. Recognising those life skills of a carer, as someone who can provide that, which might not always come out in a qualification process, is really important. I would hate to see really good carers, who would make a real impact on the lives of young people, put off being part of children’s care homes because of this process.
Lisa Pascoe: One of the things we do welcome in the DfE proposals for the regulations is citing experience within the regulations more clearly. We do welcome that, so we would agree with you there.
Cllr Light: I worry that citing is a bit weak. In my opinion, you have to recognise that.
Q63 Chair: Do you think some good people could be driven out?
Cllr Light: Yes, that is my fear. Look at nursing. A criticism of nursing at the moment is that medical qualifications are more important than patient care. I am just repeating an accusation, but there is evidence to suggest that the people with that strong care background have not always gone into that profession. I would hate to see this happen here.
Q64 Bill Esterson: Do you not need that?
Cllr Light: Yes, you do, absolutely. It is a balance. If you tilt the balance too much one way, you end up with the wrong answer.
Jonathan Stanley: Leadership is one of the top three issues that provides effective residential childcare, so we certainly need to make sure that our registered managers are effective leaders. We are not yet in the position in this debate to decide whether graduate status is right or not. There still seems to be a lot to be discussed. Personally, I am in favour of graduate status and I would have signed up to the 2020 Children and Young People’s Workforce Strategy and had all our managers educated to graduate level. That being said, we have to have the delivery mechanism to do that. We do not have the delivery mechanism to get our managers qualified and to continue to support them.
A previous speaker talked about registration. The registration of registered managers might be something to be pursued. That particular group might enable those other things, such as delivery mechanisms, the content, a qualification and a curriculum, which would be applicable to all registered managers. Maybe that is something, but we are still in the process of coming to a maturation of our discussion.
Q65 Ian Mearns: The Expert Group on the Quality of Children’s Homes has recommended that there should a requirement for children’s home staff to be professionally registered with an appropriate independent body. Do you think that is a step too far?
Jonathan Stanley: One of the things I have inquired about over the past years is whether we could get HCPC registration—and registration is now closed. One of the things we are considering through the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Childcare is going forward with a voluntary registration and a negative register through having a professional association of registered managers. It seems we have to go the informal route rather than the formal route.
Q66 Ian Mearns: If we are driven down a path where higher levels of qualification requirements are required by staff, what can be done to mitigate the potential effects of that more stringent regime and qualifications criteria on the supply of existing staff? What can we do to get around that?
Claire Dorer: The previous panel talked about parallels with teaching. When we wanted to improve the quality of the teaching workforce, Government invested a lot in national programmes driven through a national college, making teaching an attractive prospect. We really need something that values residential childcare workers in a similar way. That is going to be very difficult, because we do not have the same progression routes and career pathways in residential childcare that you do in teaching. Unless we can start to address that, we are always going to struggle to recruit and, particularly, to retain good people. Geographically, we have got huge issues with that. There are some areas of the country where you can recruit childcare workers quite easily and others where we are really struggling to get the people in and hang on to them, because it is low‑paid, challenging work that does not necessarily lead you up a career ladder.
Q67 Bill Esterson: Does anybody have any thoughts on how we could achieve that?
Jonathan Stanley: In terms of the public perception of working in children’s homes, if I travel in Europe it completely reverses. People say, “If you work in residential care, you must be a very skilled and qualified person”. Thankfully, I think I might be, but in this country it would be seen as completely the opposite. As we have written previously, there is something about political leadership and being able to champion the idea of residential care as a positive choice for children alongside all the other placement decisions.
We need to be much sharper in our criticism of the Level 3 diploma, which is not fit for purpose for working in residential childcare. It is too broad; it covers all young people. The young people who come to live in children’s homes are in quite a specific group and we need a very specific understanding of the qualification necessary to be working in them. For example, we need much more about trauma, neglect and abuse. Again, it comes down to the delivery, so that everybody is getting an assured understanding of what the effects of those things are and how to work with them.
Q68 Ian Mearns: There is an elephant in the room here. Earlier on, you were talking about the cost constraints and what the relative unit costs of looking after an individual child were. There is an inherent built‑in cost to trying to drive up the levels of quality and qualifications of our staff and making this a much more aspirational profession to be a part of, is there not? If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you get people who are aspirational and who see it as a qualified profession, they are going to be asking for rewards for becoming qualified, remaining qualified, doing their continuing professional development, etc. Am I right in that?
Jonathan Stanley: I would imagine that we would have to be paying people more than we currently do. What happened in some local authorities, where registered managers were paid the equivalent of team mangers in social work teams, was interesting, because team managers from social work teams opted to work in children’s homes, because they were able to work in a much more relationship‑based way, but as a result, those salaries also had to increase in the children’s homes. Undoubtedly, you are right. However, if we were to adopt, for example, free‑to‑access curriculum opportunities, we might have a once‑and‑only cost. People could access that information and it could be worked within the home, so we could be working in a very lean and efficient way with a one‑off cost for content.
Cllr Light: Whilst I do not disagree with that, the fear we have is that, regrettably, we do not see there being any great pot of gold to fund extra investment in this area, so it will have to be done within existing budgets. That means it will have to come from efficiencies.
Going back to the previous question about how the balance of providers and other investment works, effectively, if we look at the situation, a fear is that in 10 years’ time there will be much more provision from larger providers, because smaller providers will find that much harder. We have to be very conscious that that could be a side‑effect.
Q69 Chair: Is that necessarily a bad thing, if there are efficiencies to be had?
Cllr Light: It is not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to be conscious of it and we need to mindful of not trying to pretend it is anything else.
Q70 Chair: Before we come back to your questioning, Ian, can I ask you a question, Lisa? Ofsted is clear that statutory guidance for children’s homes is only applicable to those homes that are operated by local authorities. I have heard some dispute around this; it seems fairly extraordinary that there is not clarity about what does and does not apply, depending on the category of the home.
Lisa Pascoe: We currently have a system where we have regulations that all children’s homes, whoever they are run by—private, voluntary or local authority—must follow. They are the things Ofsted can enforce against. Sitting alongside that, we have a set of national minimum standards. We have already talked about our view of “minimum” and where we think those should be. It is expected that providers take account of those national minimum standards in interpreting the regulations and making sense of them. We also have another document, which is a set of statutory guidance. The legislation it is released under means that it is released to local authorities, so technically it only applies to local authorities. Ofsted expects homes to know about that guidance, to make sense of it and to use it in their practice.
We think that is a system that is too complex. We would much prefer things to be in one place so that all homes knew what was expected of them; to have regulations that had aspiration in there; and to have detailed guidance that underpinned that, which helped all providers to understand what was expected of them.
Q71 Chair: What change do we need to make in order to put everyone on the same footing?
Lisa Pascoe: We have all talked about the national quality standards. However they are branded, we would like to see them take into account the current statutory guidance and some of the very helpful information that is in there for providers put within the quality standards. We should maybe rethink that statutory guidance; instead, speaking directly to local authorities about their role as commissioners. That would pick up some of the points we have already talked about in respect of commissioning.
Q72 Chair: Some of that stuff could be written into the commissioning contracts. Is that something that is happening already or is it something that needs to happen more?
Cllr Light: It needs to happen more.
Q73 Ian Mearns: I asked the previous panel about the requirement to carry out an annual risk assessment of an area in which a home is established. Are there any particular implications in this proposal for the well‑established homes that are situated in areas that are deemed by that risk assessment to have become less safe?
Lisa Pascoe: Absolutely. It is right that homes engage with the host authority where they are based, with the police and with their local health communities to understand what is happening locally and to think about how they can best help, care and protect the children and young people for whom they are responsible. We think this risk assessment will be very informative to us when we visit. What we are less clear about is, exactly as you say, how a home will manage on an ongoing basis when the area they are living in changes. We are less clear about that; there are some ambiguities about that that will need resolving. We would also welcome something more substantive about the role of the local safeguarding children boards.
Claire Dorer: There are real issues about how you mitigate against risk and whose responsibility that is. You could argue it is a shared responsibility. The home has to play a role in keeping their young people safe, but, where an area is unsafe, you would like to see an area‑based and a community‑based response to that rather than simply saying, “This is about children’s homes”. Surely it is about all children living in the area and their need to be safe, even though some are more vulnerable than others.
Jonathan Stanley: We would echo that. There are some concerns around the country, particularly about independent fostering agencies. If a children’s home cannot be in that area, why would we want anybody to be fostered in that area? The question then also becomes about birth families. How are we going to do the area risk assessment? Who is going to do it? What is it? We have been suggesting that perhaps we need to work with the community safety partnership and the local safeguarding children board. One of the things we are actively going forward with as providers is having a bi‑monthly meeting with the local authority and the police so that we have easy and open communication. Annually seems far too long. Yesterday, we found a police authority who advised a children’s home that there was a risk in their area, but they did not know what that risk was until that day. There needs to be much more sharing of information and sharing of the risks to the young people and where they are. They may have come with a missing history, but it is decreasing and we want to keep it decreasing. If there are risks to all children, they need to be shared with professionals as professionals. We do not yet have that ease of communication.
Ian Mearns: As I understand it, the idea is that the police and the local authority would form part of the risk assessment consultation process.
Cllr Light: I do not disagree with what has been said. There is a real cultural issue with this. Is it going to be an event—i.e. a one‑off assessment—or is it going to be an ongoing dialogue? The danger is that it will be the former, when it needs to be the latter. If you have that ongoing dialogue, communities will be involved; there will be no surprises—or there should not be—and things can be dealt with at a much earlier stage. It might not give as clear a position for those looking in from afar, but if it is done right, with the local authority and the police authority working in the right way—as most do at the moment—then you can deliver that.
Q74 Ian Mearns: Bearing in mind all of our primary concern is the welfare of children, what should Ofsted do if it comes across a home where the area has been deemed to have become unsafe in the last 12‑month period? What should Ofsted’s role in that be?
Lisa Pascoe: We are certainly interested in what the home is doing to mitigate those risks and we would certainly endorse everything that Claire said about the responsibility of everybody locally to work together to protect those children and young people. Again, we are less clear about what we could do. There would be nothing in the regulations that would say we could take action against that home. What we would have to do is inform our overall picture about what is happening for individual children and young people. It is quite a complex picture.
Ian Mearns: Quite often, the case would be that the risk has changed and the home itself has had no control over that. Therefore, you are asking Ofsted to oversee a situation that is completely outside the home and its staff’s control.
Lisa Pascoe: This is what we are concerned about. Certainly in terms of the initial risk assessment before registration, applicants absolutely should be talking locally and making sense of the areas where they want to open homes. They should be talking to the police, the LSCB and the host authority. We certainly think there is a role there for the planning authority in terms of knowing what is happening locally.
Q75 Ian Mearns: Given that these annual risk assessments are going to be a requirement, one would wonder whether a children’s home should be a statutory consultee in any planning decisions that may affect them.
Cllr Light: We would be treading on dangerous ground if we relied on the planning system to do this work. Rightly or wrongly, Government is simplifying the process of planning at the moment. This extra burden on the planning function would go against that. Planning can only take you so far. This is actually a bigger and different issue.
Q76 Ian Mearns: In that case, is it the LGA’s view that the safeguarding of children is less important than commercial planning considerations?
Cllr Light: No, it is not. What I am saying is that you cannot rely on planning to suddenly take on all the safeguarding concerns. It is a much bigger issue than that.
Q77 Ian Mearns: But it certainly should have a weather eye for it, should it not?
Cllr Light: I am not saying it should not; I am saying you should not throw it all to the planning department and expect them to sort it out, because it will not happen.
Jonathan Stanley: Perhaps quite rightly, there are implications here that we will need to close some children’s homes in some areas; that is not in dispute. There are some consequences of that. If we close a home, presumably somebody would have to open a new one. Presumably, the person running the home may want to do that. Where will they do that? We know that most children’s homes have a travel‑to‑work distance of between 15 and 30 miles, and they are unlikely to locate following a new registration. In some—but not all—authorities, there are difficulties in respect of planning, which will delay the opening of the home. We could get up to a six‑month delay while a home is closing. A new home then takes up to five years to become optimal in its working. There are some implications of following that route.
Ian Mearns: I look forward to some interesting discussions between Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector and the Planning Inspectorate.
Q78 Mr Ward: On the subject of out‑of‑authority placements, where do you think the responsibility for the notification of this issue about the registered provider and the local authority should lie? There is a proposal to place that responsibility with the provider. I know you have got some views on that.
Lisa Pascoe: It should still rest with the local authority. We are just about to publish a thematic inspection around out‑of‑authority placements. Certainly, as people know, we have found that that notifications process does not work as you would expect it to work. It would be of added benefit for the home to be involved in those conversations with the host authority, but it should not be reliant on the home.
Cllr Light: If we are talking about dialogue, communication and people working together, it is really important that the transfer of that information works. There should not be a turf war about who does what to whom; it should be an automatic process, where, if there is a change, the provider and the local authority, host and commissioner are in a triangular communication about it. Everyone should see it as their role to notify other partners of relevant information.
Q79 Mr Ward: Should it be inspectable, Lisa?
Lisa Pascoe: As some colleagues I am sure know, we will be introducing a new inspection of local authorities in November, where we will be looking across the whole scope of vulnerable children. We will be looking at commissioning arrangements and we will be having a strong focus on out‑of‑area placements, including visiting children who are placed in children’s homes out of their local authority area to look at the support the local authority is offering to them and to the home in meeting the needs of those children and young people. From November onwards, we will be able to report back on what we are finding.
Jonathan Stanley: There is more to be said about out‑of‑authority placement, perhaps. We think there should be notification about any child: those in children’s homes, in foster care, in‑house or external. It is providers who have been really wanting to get notifications working over the last 10 years. In our work with the Department and Ofsted, we have been suggesting that this is something that has been failing and we need to do it in a different way. If it is to be devolved to children’s home providers, we will take it on and we are happy to do so. We need to know, though—and we are still very unclear—what information needs to be passed across and what will be done with that information when it is passed across. We expect it to be disseminated to education, health and others. We do not yet know, but we are happy to do it if that is the wish of people.
Q80 Bill Esterson: Jonathan, you just mentioned education and health. Are they involved in commissioning consortia? How common are commissioning consortia? You mentioned the north-west before in that context.
Jonathan Stanley: It is some and some, really. There are some, but the issue is more about the consortia, how they operate and whether they are really concerned with the maximisation of care and welfare or, really, with the reduction of costs. There is the cost‑care weight: 80:20; 70:30; 60:40. Do tendering arrangements actually provide choice for a young person or do they restrict choice, which might be more open if there were more diversification within that? It is very difficult in some areas for a child in a children’s home to be attending a local school other than one provided for by the children’s home’s provider. There are still some obstacles to do with that. In terms of commissioning consortia, we are still some way away from getting an offer of care, education and health all working together.
Claire Dorer: We tend to see commissioning split into commissioning for children’s homes and then separate commissioning for children with special educational needs and disabilities. There is such a huge overlap between the two it does not always make practical sense and it does not help the joining up.
Cllr Light: The direction of travel for many local authorities is to see joint commissioning between children—safeguarding—adults and health. That is coming together. It is more advanced in some authorities than others, but, certainly, the direction of travel is to achieve that so that commissioning that was previously done by three organisations will be done by one body.
Q81 Bill Esterson: Where there is a shortage of children’s homes, should councils be running more of them themselves?
Cllr Light: If they can justify it, yes. We built one in Kirklees, believe it or not. We are one of the few authorities who have done that. We did it because we thought it was needed—and it was. We were having a problem with our looked‑after children. The numbers were rising above the national averages. We felt that it was a better investment to invest that money there, because there was not the sort of provision that we needed available in the market where we were and we were spending too much money on out‑of‑area placements. As budgets get tighter, authorities are going to be looking harder at out‑of‑authority placements. They will seek better commissioning solutions, but they will also see what the provision is in their geographical area—that is not necessarily just their boundaries, but their broader boundaries. If it is not there, they will have to look to do things. That is very much a change from what has happened in the past. Equally, I know of a company that is not involved in the education market anymore, so I can talk a little bit about what their thoughts were. Their thoughts were that it was very much a business opportunity for strategically placing quality specialist children’s provision on regional or area boundaries, where they could provide those areas that were struggling with local solutions.
Q82 Ian Mearns: How do local authorities themselves know whether young people are being placed in placements that are right for them as individual children? Where are the guarantees that a local authority knows that a placement is appropriate?
Cllr Light: There are no guarantees. There are never any guarantees in this area, I am afraid, but there are reasonable assurances. That is the best we could ever achieve. We do that through three things. First of all is having a knowledge of what that particular home provides, so understanding what is there and having regular contact in order to understand any changes to that. Secondly is talking to young people. I do not think anybody does enough talking to young people about their experiences within children’s homes. The third is an understanding of what culture and leadership drives the right settings. It was referred to earlier that leadership and culture is probably the most important thing that drives the right solutions and outcomes for young people.
Claire Dorer: We do not have anywhere near enough sophistication in needs analysis at a local authority level. That has got to be the starting place for commissioning what young people need and want; then you start talking to providers about what they can offer. At the moment, we are still tinkering around the edges and going to providers saying, “We are not quite sure what we need, but what can you offer?” and trying to make it fit; we are not starting from the right place.
Q83 Chair: Is there anything central Government can do to facilitate that?
Claire Dorer: We could make the sufficiency duty have more teeth. At the moment, there is little evidence that it is being driven by good local‑needs analysis. The Children and Families Bill and the SEN reforms are driving strategic needs analysis much more strongly than we are seeing for children’s homes. Perhaps we could do more joining up there.
Q84 Ian Mearns: What is the proportion of youngsters who are being moved around the system because their original placement was inappropriate?
Jonathan Stanley: We know that many children coming to a children’s home have had five or more placements in the previous year. We have many children who are coming to our children’s homes who have had tens of previous placements. As a system, we are clearly not getting that right. Only 21% of children in children’s homes stay longer than a year. That may be because things have improved or it may be because they have improved sufficiently for them to be moved somewhere else.
We would definitely heavily and strongly support Claire’s notion of needs analysis. There is very little, if anything, in the proposals that says, “We need to understand our population of looked‑after children better.” It is not there. We need better data, so that we are able to understand who can be placed locally, regionally and nationally; what the needs are; and where the homes need to be in order to meet those needs. We then need a strategy over some years to be able to move to that.
One of the most important parts of the Children Act is the most appropriate placement. That should be the principle by which all children’s homes operate: not the best value, but the most appropriate placement. We think that is greatly weakened and is being compromised currently. Other things arise from that, such as better social work assessment and the need for commissioning to have a social work professional involved in that decision. The way that particular group of colleagues is going, it is becoming much more of a financial and administrative group rather than a social work one.
Chair: I thank all four of you so much for giving evidence this morning. If, reflecting on today, you have any further thoughts, particularly along the line of recommendations you think we should be making to Government—we have touched on a few during the session—then please do be in touch. Thank you all very much indeed.
Oral evidence: Residential Children’s Homes in England, HC 716 21