Education Committee 

Oral evidence: Fostering, HC 681

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 February 2017

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Neil Carmichael (Chair); Lucy Allan; Ian Austin, Suella Fernandes; Lucy Frazer; Lilian Greenwood.

Questions 1 - 81

Witnesses

I: Michael Fesemeyer, foster carer, Brian Roberts, foster carer and Chair, Bedfordshire Foster Carer Association, Gemma Ronte, foster carer and Vice-Chair, Wandsworth Foster Carers’ Association, and Anne Sayer, foster carer.

II: Chloë Cockett, Policy and Research Manager, Become, Jackie Edwards, Professional Advisor, FosterTalk, Professor Harriet Ward, Professor of Child and Family Research, Loughborough University, and Kevin Williams, Chief Executive, The Fostering Network.

Written evidence from witnesses:

–        Karen and Mike Fesemeyer [FOS0044]

–        Brian Roberts [FOS0059]

–        Wandsworth Foster Carers’ Association [FOS0034]

–        Anne Sayer [FOS0068]

–        Become [FOS0089]

–        FosterTalk [FOS0053]

–        The Fostering Network [FOS0085]

Examination of witnesses

Brian Roberts, Gemma Ronte, Michael Fesemeyer and Anne Sayer.

Q1                Chair: Good morning and welcome to the first session of our inquiry into fostering. We will probably have another two or three sessions. We intend to produce a report around June. We will therefore have a session like this probably most months. I do want to say this is a very important inquiry. The purpose for today is to look at the wider issues around fostering. We are interested in the foster care system in terms of foster carers themselves and organisations that represent the views of foster carers and looked after children.

We are going to divide the two panels and by about 10.30 am we will switch over to panel 2; that gives you some idea as to the length of answers that we would like. I am also keen to impress upon my colleagues the length of questions as well. We have seven or eight questions, or themes, to get through with you.

Would you like to start off by saying who you are and what you represent, starting with Michael?

Michael Fesemeyer: My name is Michael Fesemeyer. I am a foster carer with Worcestershire County Council. I have been a foster carer for about six years, both with IFAs and with the local authority for the last year. I currently have three children in placement.

Gemma Ronte: I am Gemma Ronte. I am a foster carer for Wandsworth Borough Council, with my husband and my two birth children. We specialise in babies, newborn to two. We have been carers for five years.

Brian Roberts: Hello. I am Brian Roberts. I am Chair of Bedfordshire Foster Carer Association. We have had 70 child-years’ worth of fostering. I also sit as a volunteer as the Chair of The Fostering Network (England) Advisory Committee. I was previously a virtual-school head, so I have worked inside local authority children’s services as well.

Anne Sayer: Good morning. My name is Anne Sayer. I am a foster carer for Surrey County Council. I have been fostering for about seven years. I have done a range of fostering. More recently I have specialised in providing emergency placements.

Q2                Chair: Thank you very much indeed. You have a good coverage of England there. That is quite interesting.

What I would like to know is how you feel about the view of the current situation, as a foster care system, that we have before us. Michael.

Michael Fesemeyer: It is a situation where at the moment we are trying to put sticking plasters on it. There are an awful lot of people—foster carers, the various associations, the local authorities, the social workers—working extremely hard, there is no doubt about that, but it is not working. There are fundamental problems here, right throughout the whole system. What needs to happen is we basically need to tear the piece of paper up and start again. It is not going to happen immediately; it is going to be a five to 10-year period.

Our assets in this country are our people. We are looking at the people at the very bottom end; children who have been taken away from extreme circumstances and who need great support. We need to channel the huge amount of effort that is going in, in the right direction, and manage it properly, finance it properly, organise it properly, and properly protect the people in it because, as you will see from the evidence here, foster carers do not feel they are protected; we feel we are very vulnerable.

Chair: Right. You are definitely radical and very rational about the way in which you see this.

Michael Fesemeyer: The children must come first. When I came into fostering there was a document called “Every Child Matters”. That document seems to have been thrown out of the window. I thought it was a brilliant document; a great idea. What I do is for the children. It is not for the social workers, the local authority or for Ofsted; it is for the child who is knocking on my bedroom door at night crying and having night terrors.

Q3                Chair: Michael has said fundamental reform is required. Do you agree, Anne?

Anne Sayer: I would agree with that, definitely. First, what we need to do is look at what we are trying to do for the children who come under the support of the local authority. At the moment there is a big emphasis on frontloading fostering through recruitment, a very wide, broad-brush, recruitment drive. This focuses on the idea that you can be a foster carer if you have room in your heart and room in your home. It does not come close to the complexity in any shape or form of what foster caring involves. So, first understand what it is we are providing for the children. That will help us understand what we expect from foster carers.

Finally, we need to better support, better recompense in all different sorts of ways, and better develop, the fostering workforce that we currently have and not lose them just because of poor recruitment practices.

Q4                Chair: Brian, wearing your hat, what would you say?

Brian Roberts: I would agree with what people here have said, and on a wider national thing Kevin will talk to you from The Fostering Network, but in the 20 years I have been fostering we have always claimed there has been 9,000 to 10,000 fostering families short and that has caused major problems. There has been a massive investment from central Government, local government, and from charities, to promote fostering, recruit and retain, and it still has not got there. I sit on fostering panels and quite often quite a few foster carers will come in, have one placement, and will leave because they do not feel adequately supported. What fostering is is not what has been explained to them in their training, and that is a huge waste of potential as well. I would agree with everything that has been said but on a national stage we still have not managed to get it right in terms of getting the right people to foster and stick so therefore I think there now needs to be a root and branch look at a change in what we are doing. We have been trying one way for 20 years; it is now time for a change.

Q5                Chair: Gemma, we have heard, so far anyway, a case for reform. What kind of reforms do you think are in the frame to be implemented?

Gemma Ronte: That is a huge question to ask at 9.40 am so I want to preface what I am going to say by saying that it is the very nature of foster caring that it looks after children with such diverse needs. They are such individuals, the children who are in care, and the carers that care for them are also extremely diverse. Before you can even begin to say what needs to change, you need to understand that and to understand the variety of practice that there is across different local authorities in the length and breadth of this nation. It is such a complex area and I would not claim to have my head round it, even after five years. Even as we were sitting outside we found the experiences that we four have had are wildly different; they are wildly different depending on the children that we care for, the social workers that we work with, whether you work for a borough that has just had a terrible Ofsted or a great Ofsted; it is very variable. That said, there are some really consistent themes that emerge when foster carers get together and talk.

As an indicator of the state of health of fostering, you have to take into account the fact that just at the end of last year foster carers voted overwhelmingly to unionise within the Independent Workers of Great Britain. Whether you are pro-union or not is a separate question, but as an indicator of the strength of feeling and the desire for representation and change, it is a very significant development.

We do one of the most demanding jobs you could ever conceive of, with children who are the most vulnerable and the most needy in our society, and yet in general carers are paid an absolute pittance. In Wandsworth, the fee for a carer is £150 a week. What kind of service can you get in England for £150 a week? It is not that carers do it for the money but so many of our carers cannot do it without the money. Often, therefore, we find that our carers feel under pressure to take more placements than they should, or really can, because they need to establish a minimum income for the household.

There are lots of other things. I don’t want to take up more than my share of the mic, but that is just two.

Q6                Chair: You have put down a very good marker there. Does anyone else have any quick recommendations that you would like us to consider as we go through this inquiry?

Anne Sayer: Very briefly—I am sure this will come back: because you are tied to a local authority or an agency, it very much limits the placements that you can offer. I live on three borders. I can only offer a home for a child that lives in one of those three counties that I am on the border of.

Q7                Chair: So, you feel constrained by the local authority system generally?

Anne Sayer: That is one element. The most important thing is that those children do not have the choice of placements because of those constraints.

Michael Fesemeyer: A point very similar to that is a key question. The Children Act only allows you to have three children in placement. If you have four, you become a children’s home. Now, most of the people we foster have come from big sibling groups, usually, say, four, and it may be four out of eight. Therefore you are splitting children up. I currently have one boy in placement who was split up from his brother. We only have three; we cannot have the fourth so we can’t reunite those two boys unless there is an exemption. However, local authorities do not seem to want to make exemptions in our area because Ofsted appear to not like it. I can’t find out why. I have the capacity; I have the rooms; I have a large house; I don’t work; I have the resources; I could look after his brother—

Chair: That might be a risk averse strategy in place.

Michael Fesemeyer: There are all sorts of things. What I am saying is, there is a lot of capacity within our system that we are not using. This is one of the problems.

Q8                Chair: Right. So more fluidity is basically what you are saying there.

Brian Roberts: I would go a step further than that. It is not that you cannot have more than three children; there are foster carers who perhaps have three beds available, effectively, but they only have one person in placement and just over the local authority border there would be someone who might be able to go into that placement, which cannot happen at the moment. We are in the unusual situation, as local authority carers, having children from two local authorities, because the local authority that we originally fostered for split and the kids that were in placement were from two different local authorities. That is really unusual; quite difficult but really unusual.

Q9                Ian Austin: The first thing I want to say is thanks, initially, for coming to talk to us. I find parenting really difficult so I can’t imagine how difficult the work that you do is and it is important. I want to say that first.

I think, Brian, you talked about the shortage of numbers and others have suggested changes that could be made but I would like to ask this. Fundamentally, would you encourage other people to become foster parents, based on your experiences?

Michael Fesemeyer: It is very difficult because the risks are so great. We came into fostering late, to protect our two sons, but we thought when they reached the age of 18 they would be fairly safe. As it happened, we were investigated after a year, a huge investigation for nine months. My son was studying at the LSE and it destroyed his second year. It cost him a grade at university, from a 2.1 to 2.2—it took him a year to find a job as a result, for those eight marks—because he was appalled at how his family was destroyed by an investigation. The social workers were told that the allegations were untrue by the children concerned on the day they made them, but we were still investigated for nine months. The impact on people is enormous. My wife has lost her job. She was employed by Countrywide plc on one of their oil teams. She would not move to flexible hours to work weekends because of fostering. They sacked her. Where she is now she cannot come and support me today. She sells new houses for Bloor Homes. She has asked once for a morning off to go to a LAP meeting. Her sales manager said, “No, you can’t”. The public sector is not supporting fostering, in my experience. It is really quite bad. All you are asking for is a couple of hours, once in four years, and they say, “No”. This is a real problem.

Brian Roberts: I would talk to people about their desire to work in fostering if they came to me, and also adoption is the same, but I will tell it like it is and certainly that appears to be very different, in our experience, and in the experience of other foster carers, from what is the marketing drive for fostering.

Q10            Ian Austin: Could I ask you how you would encourage people to become foster carers and how you would encourage foster carers not to stop fostering?

Gemma Ronte: When you ask carers why they do the job, why they keep doing it, it is because they are rewarded by the changes they see in the children that they care for. The key point is to get a good match between carer and child so that there can be stability for as long as that is the right answer for the child, so it can be a rewarding experience for both halves. When you hit that sweet point, then everybody talks positively about the experience and naturally foster carers advocate for the role. We can see a bow wave in Wandsworth where you have carers volunteering to participate in recruitment events and then not volunteering and it is very interesting to track how that volunteering plays alongside with morale overall and Ofsted inspections and in the wake of Ofsted inspections. You can track it very clearly.

The challenge, in my mind, is that this is a role that suits—I was going to say specific types of people but it is not specific types of people. There are the practical things of having a spare room, although those are variable across the councils because some councils allow children to share rooms and some councils do not. Then there is the financial aspect, which I won’t overegg but you do need to be able to still run your household and have the right kind of income. Then you need to have the heart for children and that is the bit that is really hard. There are some horrible stories about things going wrong in foster care and people doing it for the wrong motivations or running into a wrong motivation. If we are looking for a formula, there isn’t one, but getting your carers out there to advocate when they can tell a good story because they are having a good experience, that is always the most powerful thing, in my experience and in Wandsworth’s experience.

Michael Fesemeyer: Can I just show you something? Here is how you get people to do it. This is what this little boy wrote: “Karen and Mike, thank you for fostering me. Thank you, Karen and Mike”. It brings you to tears. This is an eight-year-old boy who has been taken from a family with four siblings; he has been split up. He saw his step-dad attack his mum and then attack himself with a claw hammer. He has witnessed all this. He broke two placements in two weeks. We volunteered to have him but we were told we did not have the capacity; that we were overstretched. However, a week later they phoned us and said, “Mike, would you take one?” They split these two boys because they think the problem was they could not be together. We have turned him round in a few days. He is the most brilliant little boy. He is now at a special school. His behaviour is impeccable. He supposedly had ADHD; what he had was lack of parenting. When you get that, that is why you do fostering.

Chair: Very nice. Thank you.

Anne Sayer: On a more general level, when I was going through the approval process and I was buddied up with a foster carer, I remember that she said to me, “Nothing ever prepares you for that first moment, your first placement” and I also remember thinking, “Meh”, but when I had my first children come through my door, I did think, “Well, this is like nothing I could possibly, possibly imagine”. I say that to anyone that asks about fostering. Nothing ever prepares you for the reality of it because it is like being at a cliff edge because you transfer from your old life to this completely new life. Fostering can become a very all-consuming thing, especially if you are a new carer, especially if you do not have a good support network, and maybe you do end up caring for children that perhaps you are not ready for. There are lots of elements. Matching is certainly key.

What I would like to see is somehow an easier transition from that old life into the new life. Let’s not throw carers in at the deep end. Let’s help them learn a little bit more about what foster caring is all about. Get them to do respite for other foster carers as a pre-requisite for becoming short-term carers. Let’s not set them up to fail. That is where lots of cares potentially leave, after their first placement, because it is so overwhelming, so all-consuming. We need to protect them from that. We also need to ensure that they remain foster carers and get over that first hurdle.

Brian Roberts: Can I speak on that? I do support experienced carers who want to leave. Usually by the time they come to the Foster Care Association—I don’t know whether you meet it—they are so battered and so—I will use the word “abused” by the system—that whatever you say will not get them back. The best you might get them to do is to do switch to another fostering agency, either an independent agency or another local authority, and hopefully there is a question on that because that is incredibly difficult to do. However, most of them, if they been experienced—you either get the ones who leave after their first experience or the ones that are so incredibly unsupported, neglected and are feeling totally overwhelmed and then there is very little you can do to get them back. That is really sad because it is a huge waste of expertise and personnel.

Q11            Chair: Brian, I see that you also have been a virtual-school head.

Brian Roberts: Yes.

Chair: Has that experience been helpful to you in fostering?

Brian Roberts: I am a trained teacher. I married into fostering. My wife was an officer in charge of a children’s home; they wanted to close that children’s home and she took on a sibling group of five, 25 years ago, when the regulations were different, and I met her through a girl in my tutor group. So, we married in. We did not come in the same way.

As a teacher, then, I didn’t know what those children in my school who were in care were going through; I did not know that and it was a big eye-opener just to become a foster carer to Bengali children. Then all the other looked after children in the school recognised, or thought, that I knew something different and came to talk to me about their experiences. As a virtual-school head, it was quite interesting in that what I could see then, close up with many workers and teams around the children, was what was deeply buried in two local authorities, the attitudes about foster carers, where they were just seen as a resource to be utilised, not professionals. Very often I had to say, “Excuse me, could you please remember I am a foster carer too, and what you have said is incredibly insulting?”

There is a flipside. Some foster carers did things that I thought, “Well, I would never do that”. However, when you got down to that, you usually found out that they had not been supervised and had not been told they couldn’t do that. So it started to spiralise a concern, and it was interesting from that point of view, very much eye opening. Because I have five damaged children at home—we adopted two, and we have three in placement—I can’t do a full-time job now. I am lucky enough to have the expertise to be able to work as a sole trader, training on vulnerable children, and I can pick up enough, alongside the fees I get—which is only £150 per child per week—to be able to continue to foster, but many people are not in that position.

Q12            Lilian Greenwood: I recently met with Nottingham foster carers and they were adamant that foster caring is not a job, it is a vocation, and they are obviously incredible professionals. However, when I asked them what were the things that needed to change they were very clear that financial support, support with the work that they do, and training were really important. The written evidence that we received highlighted significant issues with levels of financial reimbursement and employment status.

With current working conditions, do you think the current role of foster carer is viable? Maybe if I start with you, Anne.

Anne Sayer: Whether it is viable? I don’t know. It must be because there are foster carers. However, in terms of making it better, fundamentally, as you will know, foster carers are classified as self-employed, they manage all their own tax affairs and so on, but if you checked the description of what self-employment is on the Government’s own website, you would see that foster caring probably breaks every single one of those definitions, so I don’t think it should be.

I will let other people talk about finance. Finance varies so much. However, the employment status I think is the crucial thing. Because you are not an employee but you are still tied to one agency or local authority, it limits what you can do but it also offers you very little protection when it comes to allegations. I know that one of the things the Committee is going to be looking at is that what happens when a foster carer is sick? What happens if the child cannot be with you? If there is an allegation, which does happen, the child is removed even when the allegation turns out to be completely unfounded.

So, I think that foster carers are poorly protected and their current employment status makes that so and, essentially, they are almost like a contractor to a local authority. They are there and they provide a service and once that service is over then payment stops immediately. There is no kind of follow-on.

I had a situation recently where I was looking after a child, I was approved to look after them long-term, all going well. The child chose to move out. There was no discussion with me by anyone and that means that my payments stopped immediately the moment that child walks out of the door. You commit for a long, long time but you do not get 24 hours’ notice if there is situation change from the other side.

Q13            Lilian Greenwood: Anne, what do you think the employment status should be? Do you have a view?

Anne Sayer: I think there are probably other people better qualified to answer that but I know there has been a lot of talk about worker status. I know that it is impractical from minimum wage standards to treat a foster carer as an employee. I just don’t think that would work but I think it also goes hand in hand with the idea of professionalisation of the workforce. All those elements are tied together. There needs to be some better protection.

I know recently as well that foster carers are not protected under the whistle-blowing regulations, which I think is appalling, so that if they see evidence of malpractice in a local authority they are not protected if they go ahead and report that. They don’t have protection from losing their status as a foster carer or their role. So, I think it is the level of protection is the crucial thing here.

Q14            Lilian Greenwood: Brian, is it viable?

Brian Roberts: Is it viable? It is viable because as Anne said there are foster carers. I have seen a massive change in the workload because we work really hard and it is a huge task for foster carers in terms of managing what is expected of us.

It cannot be an employee role. It cannot be a career. I have given up two careers to be a foster carer and my wife has given up one so it cannot be a career. No employee would ever put up with our working conditions, absolutely not, where you can be told by someone outside the team you are working with what you will do, when you will do it, at the weekends, with no consideration of what impact that has on you or your family or your ability to earn the money to have a big house and have a larger car. No employee would put up with that so it cannot be employment, but there needs to be a recognition that the huge impact that being a foster carer has on everything.

Q15            Lilian Greenwood: What are the things that you think could change within what you have already acknowledged?

Brian Roberts: Viewing foster carers as professionals and taking seriously their role within the teams that surrounds the child, not seeing them as some bolt-on that are there sitting there to do anything that anyone asks at any point in time. Could you have the medicals at weekends? That came up this week. Could you give up Saturday and take the kids down to where they live and have the medicals there? No, because I have other children. My own adopted daughters are there, they have other things on. We need to be treated as professionals, we need to be in on the planning and they need to understand that we do not just foster in our case for one local authority. We have our own children there. We have children from two local authorities. They all have differing needs. That needs to be put in the matrix and it is not.

Q16            Lilian Greenwood: Gemma, you acknowledge this call for foster carers to be unionised or the call from foster carers to become unionised. Is professionalisation the way of improving work conditions for foster carers?

Gemma Ronte: Foster carers are professionals. There is no doubt about it. Whether they are recognised as such by other fellow professionals is another issue. Is it viable? I will disagree with my panel members. No, it is not viable. The fact that there are carers still working is because they are committed to the children in their care. The wheel is already coming off. We do not have any employment status.

I won’t rehearse what my colleagues have already said but we are in this horrible greyness between self-employed—we have some responsibilities of self-employed, tax returns and all of that, but we do not have the ability to port our services to different local councils. So, we have the downside of it without the upside of it and we have no sick pay or pension rights that would go with employee status. I am not an employment lawyer, I am not going to sit here and say it should be one or the other. I am not even sure it has to be one or the other. Why not have people have the flexibility to choose what suits them, to be employed or to be self-employed? There are plenty of commercial businesses that have both working for them very successfully.

The professionalisation agenda is an interesting one. There are a lot of carers who come from professional backgrounds. I would suggest that if as a carer you have a professional background you have a much easier experience of caring. You have learnt to communicate in writing, communicate verbally, advocate. It is harder for other fellow professionals to label you as emotional or invested in your child. You want your carers to be emotional and invested in their children. Otherwise they cannot do the job they do.

It is too easy to see carers as well-intentioned volunteers. We are not. We are very specialised, we are very experienced. We quickly gain experience. You have to quickly gain experience otherwise you do not survive the first year. You do not continue. A lot of our carers have specialities working with disabled children, working with very troubled teenagers, working with babies coming out of drug withdrawal. Every carer I meet has some kind of specialist skill.

There are some low-hanging fruit in this area. There are some clear and easy things that can be done straight away. Tax thresholds is one easy one. Those tax thresholds were put in more than 10 years ago. They have not been increased. Okay, fees and allowances have not been increased an awful lot but they have at least been going up with inflation. You need to rebalance that urgently. You have people paying tax on money that they are being given as their children’s allowance and that is absolutely wrong.

I hope we will talk about Staying Put as a subject, but we have strange practices going on inconsistently across boroughs that mean that a clock clicks in when a child in your care turns 18 in a way that would never happen for a birth child. We do not throw children out of their school when they hit their 18th birthday but suddenly from one day to the next their whole status changes, their financial situation changes right in the middle of that critical year when they are trying to do their A levels and BTECs.

Lilian Greenwood: We will come back to Staying Put later.

Gemma Ronte: I will say more about that one.

Q17            Lilian Greenwood: To you, Michael, professionalisation of the role, what will that look like and how will it change working conditions of foster carers?

Michael Fesemeyer: I am a chartered accountant by profession, which is a sort of trade union for accountants. I think it would be quite nice if we had either a college or an institute for foster carers and let them be responsible for the registration and the deregistration and setting standards across the country. It does not cost the Institute of Chartered Accountants an awful lot. Our fees are not very high. A small fee each year would cover those things. Let these people be responsible for the Form Fs. Then let the foster carer own the Form F.

We ought to be self-employed because it is just the nature of the way it is but you must remember what we are doing here. I have made a commitment 24/7 to two children until they are 18. That is a 10-year period. You do not do that in any other job. Yes, I can say tomorrow I am going to resign but when you resign from a job, you think, “I can’t stand the place, I’m off”. But when you have children there is an emotional attachment to those children and huge emotional implications, and there are lots of people like me, 70,000-odd of us, who are making these commitments 24/7 for 10 years or longer. It could be 15 years and then you have the Staying Put thing. This is enormous.

So, I think you need to get the structure right. If you took away all this bureaucracy about registration, deregistration and Form Fs from the local authorities you ease up some of our most skilled people from boring administration. It is very important to get the right foster carers and the right Form F work done but all this stuff and these decision-makers you have and all the rest of it they are highly skilled people. Perhaps they are doing the wrong jobs in the local authority. You see what I am saying. It is not just about putting more money in, it is using the funds you have at the moment effectively.

I think a college or an institute would help us enormously. It would give us status, it would give us professional standards, it would not be very expensive, it would give us a huge amount of camaraderie as well. This morning 15 minutes talking to these three people I learnt so much. I did not even know until I read the evidence in this report there were such things as county foster care associations. I have been doing it for six years. We do not have one in Worcestershire.

In fact to a certain extent they sort of like you talking, but they don’t want you to. Every time when I worked for an IFA and we had a forum they always had staff in there to make sure we were talking about the agency. They did not want us to discuss what was going wrong. You are chaperoned the whole time. My wife describes fostering employment as the equivalent of domestic service pre-World War One. The LA is your employer, the prosecution, the judge, jury and the executioner. You have no rights, you have no claim. You can be sacked on the spot, children taken away, your money is taken away and effectively you can lose your home. Who else would do that for 10 years, 24/7?

Q18            Chair: It is like “Upstairs Downstairs”, isn’t it? I noticed when I was reading this paper that you, Michael, also were in school governing and NGA and so on and that is how you became involved in fostering. That is not a direct way, is it?

Michael Fesemeyer: Yes. We were talking about this this morning funnily enough because, for example, when I was a governor I then joined the Gloucestershire Governors’ Association. I then became an executive on the South-West Governors’ Association. If all the local authorities had foster care associations and we had regional groups I could talk to these people. I have three more friends. They probably know the answers to problems I have. I might know the answer to problems they have. The wealth of experience we have is enormous but we are not utilising it. There is no management. The skills you have in this room are phenomenal but I don’t know.

Q19            Lilian Greenwood: Do the foster carers in your area not get together and talk?

Michael Fesemeyer: We do but we are chaperoned.

Lilian Greenwood: Right, okay.

Gemma Ronte: I think that is a very good indication of where there is huge variability across the country. So, in London most boroughs will have a foster care association and we have a London Carers Association where the chairs or the vice-chairs meet and I think it is quarterly, Reuben, yes? My chair is sitting behind me here. I think it is very valuable. We do network in London well.

Brian Roberts: Regionally there was a project run by the Foster Care Network that created the foster carer associations. Kevin will probably talk about it later on. It dried up and we are trying to drive it again because it is important. With our foster care association it is totally independent and we are not chaperoned. We have a closed Facebook group, which we did think would have lots of problems coming through, but it is just a training resource that we put lots of stuff on. So, it is very variable right around the country in terms of that kind of getting together.

Chair: In a sense what you are looking for is a structure that overcomes some of the barriers, problems and restrictions that you have been highlighting.

Michael Fesemeyer: You have a Royal College of Nursing. Why can you not have the same for foster carers?

Gemma Ronte: It is very interesting to draw the parallels with education. We have a national pay framework for teachers. We have training establishments. We do not have anything like that for carers.

Chair: You are all part of the education structure because you are in front of the Education Select Committee.

Gemma Ronte: Absolutely.

Brian Roberts: I was going to say are you going to ask about taxation because if not I do want to make a comment about taxation for foster carers? There are allowances, as was said. It is in there for a long time. I have three children in placement. I pay tax so £3,500 of local government money was passed straight on to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. So do the kids get less of an allowance? Of course they don’t. It costs me to foster. The fees I got were reduced by £3,500 because I had to pay tax on it. As an adopter the allowances I get for adopting are untaxed and that is a huge area.

Chair: Lilian, do you have any more questions?

Lilian Greenwood: No, unless the panel wanted to add anything on the specifics.

Chair: Next in line is Lucy Frazer.

Q20            Lucy Frazer: I will just reiterate what Ian said. I think bringing up your own children is hard enough. You clearly do a great job in bringing up some of our most vulnerable children, which is really great so thank you. Just picking up on some of the things you said, in terms of training, Anne, you said you need more than a heart and a home. Then you came up with an idea in answer to another question about respite, doing a short placement, short-term fostering before you go deep. What sort of training do you think would be good for foster carers?

Anne Sayer: At the moment all foster carers do Skills to Foster training, which is very much focused on meeting the needs of the children in care. Absolutely essential, but I would say there needs to be more training about how you as a foster carer manage yourself and that is things to do with self-care, how you develop support networks.

On top of that there definitely needs to be an element of professional training. We talked about training and attachment theory, child development, post-traumatic stress disorder. These are all things that come up time and time again when you are looking after these children. So, in terms of actual training there are many ways you can do that but in terms of actual experience I think it is very hard in any job. You always learn on the job, as it were, and in fostering it is very, very difficult to learn and make mistakes because you run the risk of losing your way or the placement going wrong.

So, I think that needs to be recognised that there needs to be a lot of support the first time you are ever looking after children. I talked about respite as an opportunity to look after a child, to give another foster carer a break just over a weekend or for a few days and that will help give you some insights to what it is like day-to-day caring for other children.

Q21            Lucy Frazer: You mentioned you already have training so how long is that training?

Anne Sayer: That is a good question. Skills to Foster is delivered over—I think it has changed a little bit—six evenings and then there are a couple of weekend sessions.

Lucy Frazer: That is not a huge amount.

Anne Sayer: It is not.

Lucy Frazer: I have been on more parenting classes than that.

Anne Sayer: Yes, absolutely.

Q22            Lucy Frazer: Do you need more initial training or do you think that is sufficient? What does anyone else feel?

Michael Fesemeyer: I think more realistic training. One of the problems is the people who are training you have to be open, honest and transparent. What you are trained for is a very nice world and it is not the same. When you have children come to you from broken placements you have real problems. You cannot be trained for that. You just have to pick it up. It is one of those things. It is seat of the pants stuff.

Lucy Frazer: So, the two days—

Michael Fesemeyer: I had four days.

Q23            Lucy Frazer: You had four days. Would you have wanted more? Do you think you need to start doing it and then—

Michael Fesemeyer: I think four days is adequate but I would have liked them to cover other areas about what can go wrong and what you have to do.

Q24            Lucy Frazer: Who do you want that support and training from? Is it a peer to peer or is it professional?

Michael Fesemeyer: I think the first thing that should happen is if you have an institute or a college they should set the standards of what training you must achieve before you can do it. We need some professionals to sit down, a mixture of all the people involved, to set a proper training package and not just have it piecemeal across the country, some will have two days, some will have four days. A foster carer should be able to pick up a child in any part of the country and have the same skills but we don’t.

Gemma Ronte: I would say training is like one of these buzz phrases. It means different things to different people. I have to applaud the ones who have put a huge amount of effort into changing the approach to training and development. I think you have to use those two terms together. All children’s needs are different so I am wary of an idea of one size fits all.

But what I think has been so successful in Wandsworth is a combination of the ways in which training is delivered. So, you obviously have your formal classroom-based training, which is what Skills to Foster is. I would suggest there is a limit to what you can learn in a formal classroom when you are talking about children with these kinds of needs. Then there is online training for those who are still working in a full-time job and where they have to fit their caring around that. So it is not realistic to expect them to take a day off even every two months to sit in the classroom for formal training or online training.

Support groups that meet once a month, once every two months where we can get together with carers who care for children of similar ages with similar issues. We have a baby carers’ group that is very successful and strong in Wandsworth. We can replicate that with teenagers or primary school group. We are not there yet but we are working towards it.

Then maybe the most powerful is having a mentor, someone who has walked that path before you who knows to a certain extent how the system should work because what you experience in your first year, you would assume as a carer that is how the system should work. Then when that is not replicated with the second placement you have, was I wrong the first time? Was the system wrong the first time? How is it? So, having an experienced person to walk with you and who you can have a hotline to is incredibly powerful and having all those things together is really powerful.

Q25            Lucy Frazer: Do you do that in Wandsworth?

Gemma Ronte: We have a mentoring scheme, yes.

Q26            Lucy Frazer: Does anyone else have it? You all have it?

Gemma Ronte: Yes. In some boroughs it is financially rewarded. The mentoring you have to reach a certain level of experience and skills. It is not in Wandsworth, it is more casual. Then just to answer your question about who should be doing the training there is a role for carers, the peer to peer, there is a role for professionals, fellow professionals—sorry, I do not want to fall down the trap of suggesting that foster carers are not professionals. They absolutely are.

But what we often find with children’s social workers and supervising social workers is a huge degree of turnover. There is a lot of inconsistency in the quality of performance of staff and experience of staff. Some of our supervising social workers and children’s social workers are just relatively new to the role so it has to be delivered by the right person with the appropriate skills and experience.

Brian Roberts: In my professional career, in terms of the other career that I now have picked up, I do train right around the country in schools and foster carers and social workers. Things like the Attachment Aware Schools project I am contracted to lead some of those particular developments. In my evaluations, which are completely separate and I do not have any control over what is said or I do not have any say, the thing that comes through very consistently is that I am doing it as opposed to knowing about it and that is the thing that comes through. We need a whole range.

On our foster care pages when we put our training stuff up it is not about just sitting in rooms listening to people, which is what I do as a job. But it is not about that. It is about experts. It is about people getting information from everywhere and putting it together. The big challenge is getting the training for foster carers and we need that.

When I worked for Bedfordshire, which doesn’t exist so I will talk about Bedfordshire, I worked for Bedfordshire as a teacher and I fostered for Bedfordshire. As foster carer there was a requirement the council wanted me to train and do the other things that foster carers did. As a teacher the council refused me time to do it and that is happening still all the time. You have that hit that things cannot—

Lucy Frazer: So, people are busy and they do not have time to commit.

Brian Roberts: People are busy and lots of foster carers have to earn a salary elsewhere to do it. Their employers will not allow them time off even with fostering children.

Q27            Lucy Frazer: What is the answer to that?

Brian Roberts: Fostering friendly employers, which is very difficult, where they realise the value that foster carers put into the communities. The value they can add to the work that is going on.

Lucy Frazer: Isn’t there legislation that if you want to take time off to look after a child under five—

Brian Roberts: It does not apply to foster carers.

Gemma Ronte: It has to be your child.

Q28            Lucy Frazer: Okay. Brian, you talked earlier about being battered by the system and you said no one would put up with the conditions you have. So it is not just that the system is not supporting you, it is that you are worn down by the system. What do you mean by that exactly?

Brian Roberts: I support lots of foster carers all around. There are lots of ways—unreasonable expectations, expectations of writing reports overnight because they have to be into a panel and being given to potential adopters. Should you not be able to stay up until 1.00 in the morning doing it, the foster carer who will appear to be failing. Short notice on turn rounds, all those kinds of things.

Q29            Lucy Frazer: Who is putting that pressure on you?

Brian Roberts: It is the pressure of the system.

Q30            Lucy Frazer: Who is the system in that context?

Brian Roberts: Usually the social work teams, not necessarily the fostering supervising social worker.

Lucy Frazer: So, that is the council.

Brian Roberts: The council effectively, but we also find the people responsible for scrutinising in terms of the elected members are not aware of what it is like to foster. That is quite difficult to talk to the elected members honestly and candidly about what it is like to foster because then we are chaperoned.

Q31            Lucy Frazer: Gemma, you said Wandsworth has a supportive system. Do you all have the similar experience to Brian or do you have different views on that?

Anne Sayer: I just wanted to add something that we have done in Surrey. I have been involved in developing new support structures for new carers as part of a wider working group and one of the things we have done successfully is to enable foster carers to forge their own relationships by giving carers that are going through the approval process the opportunity to meet other carers as a kind of informal support network. Put questions to existing foster carers in a non-judgmental environment to ask those questions that no one dares ask. 

It also enables carers to build those relationships with other carers going through the system because one thing you find as a foster carer is you really need to tell someone about this but you cannot because you need to respect the child’s confidentiality. There is a lot of stuff that I have not told any of my close friends or family about the children I looked after and that is a big burden to carry around. So I think one thing we can and should do is enable that support network to be in place in every way we can and the feedback on that has been incredibly positive. How that will work after all these carers are approved it will interesting to see. That is the next stage effectively.

Gemma Ronte: I will just make a small point on your question of how we avoid the burnout and the feeling of this barrage. I think what the systems in most local authorities do not allow is flexibility for carers to step back from the role when they have a particularly demanding placement or they have been caring for 15 years and they may just need two or three months off to just review. So, often their only choice is to say, “I am stepping away permanently” or to plough on because they are dependent on a particular income. I think there is something to be looked at about that paid respite for the carers.

Q32            Lucy Frazer: Do you think there should be more interaction? You obviously have your support networks in the council that are organised by the council but should you have more interaction with the council and the officials, the officers and the elected members?

Michael Fesemeyer: I came into fostering assuming very naively it would be a team effort. I would be the foster carer, there would be a supervising social worker, there would be the child social worker and there would be the education team. It does not work. The education teams do not get on with the children’s services team, there is a huge disconnect in this country I have found in several boroughs with every child I have had. There is no teamwork between education services and children’s services so you are fighting a battle the whole time.

This is the problem. This is where the stress builds up because if you had a foster carer, a supervising social worker, a social worker and the education team there, say—this little boy, brilliant little lad, right, he came to me in August and usually the system worked. He had an education, health and care plan, right? He was allocated a place in a special school. The special school would not take him so from the start of term in September until half-term they were fighting. He is at home with me. That causes pressure because you do need a bit of respite just during the day while they are at school. So, he has had the whole system work, all the paperwork is in place, the school has said, “No, we will not take him”. The people in the Education Department went on holiday. It was left, it was just put in abeyance. In the meantime I had him 24/7 literally for those seven weeks.

This is a boy, I am teaching him. I am printing off maths questions off the internet to keep him amused during the day. I asked for support. Nothing happened. On our supposedly closed link on the Facebook page I put that up and asked for help from my fellow foster carers. We have been with Worcestershire for a year. We have our panel meeting in December. At the panel meeting the chair said that we have to stop making waves and trust professionals or it would affect our career in fostering because I was shouting for a little boy to go to school. My wife is a magistrate. She fines people for not sending their children to school and she said this to the panel. We were still told to stop making waves and trust professionals. We are not professionals. We have to trust people who are not doing their job.

Q33            Lucy Frazer: Which brings me brilliantly on to the relationship you have. You have said a few times, Gemma, that you are a professional and this is a professional job. I am getting the feeling you do not feel like you are working collaboratively well with other social workers and the rest of the team always. How can that improve?

Gemma Ronte: I think it is very hard to generalise. There are a lot of very good stories to tell and there are some poor stories that get told and as is often the case the bad news flies like wildfire much more frequently than the good news does around foster networks. We want to work well with networks, the carers. I have lost my train of thought. I do apologise.

Q34            Lucy Frazer: Being treated as a professional working with the social workers and other professionals as a professional?

Gemma Ronte: Yes. What often happens in these scenarios, there are lots of constructs that are very professional. There is an independent review mechanism. Every three months your looked after child should have, if they are still going through proceedings, an independent review with an officer who convenes a meeting and all the professionals involved should sit around and agree.

Q35            Lucy Frazer: Including you as the carer?

Gemma Ronte: Including the carer. That is the theory of what should happen. Often what happens is the professionals will schedule a time that suits them because they are all on the same network and then they will let the carer know it is 2.00 on Wednesday and that is exactly when the baby sleeps or the child has to go to ballet class or whatever, or it is in the middle of your working day. So, those meetings do go ahead without the carers present.

Then there is the big question, are the needs of the child being represented because the person that knows the child best is the person who cares for them 24/7. Quite often you find you sit in those meetings and the other professionals around the table are repeating back to the group the things you have told them the week before in supervision.

If you have a different opinion because of what you have seen, if you are the person who picks the child up from a very traumatic contact experience with the birth family or if you are the person who has to load the child into the car to take them to contact kicking and screaming because they do not want to see the person who has abused them, then it is too easy to characterise that person as being emotional, too invested in the child. How can you be too invested in the child that you parent?

Those are the kind of scenarios which are, when they are not carefully handled, emotional and it is very easy for carers to feel isolated marginalised, under-respected, as if in some way being emotional and being invested is not a professional characteristic.

Q36            Lucy Frazer: How can you change it? You have identified practical things, which are logistical so there should be more attention paid to your timetable, which is quite clear. What is the other—

Gemma Ronte: Early dialogue I think is key, so when meetings are coming. There is too much last minutism. There is a lot to do, and peers could really help, working with carers to learn how to advocate in a non-emotional way, how to support their views with factual evidence, how to make sure they write their logs every week, which is evidence of the experience of contact so you have something to go back to and draw on. But these are all things that too often the carers learn on the job in the first three to four months.

Q37            Lucy Frazer: Should that be done in the training? Is that something you can teach?

Gemma Ronte: Some of that you can teach but how much of it can be uploaded? I would suggest it is very demanding to overwhelm a new carer who is going through the approval process with a load of different trainings. You will have a do a log, here is a one day course to go and learn how to do a log every week and then here is a course on how to advocate in a professional meeting. There is enough attrition through that process already that if we have any more drop out through the recruitment process we will never get anyone out the other end of the pipe.

Brian Roberts: I would like if, when you talk about individuals, there is a collective thing for the foster carers for an agency or for a local authority to have a say. It is very variable, depending on who the senior officers are in the authority and whether they are willing to go down that route. We have had situations where developed what we called the fostering strategy group. It was key foster carers taking representation back from the foster carers to the senior managers in the local authority. That was working very effectively. It nipped issues in the bud before they were blown out of all scale, looked at policy and said where policies were in conflict with the fostering role. It was very effective. As personnel changed it became seen as less important. That is now not there. That is really sad because it was making a huge difference.

We do meet with counsellors. We sit on corporate parenting but it is very much the corporate parenting agenda. However, we have a standing item on the corporate parenting panel that is the foster carers’ report so we can report back things. It is not the venue to report back everything. It is a public meeting. It is minuted and goes out so you cannot report back everything in that venue. There has to be another mechanism to do that as well.

Q38            Lilian Greenwood: Can I just very quickly jump in? You were talking about the inadequacy of support or the pressures. Your role is a local authority foster carer so this may be bit of an unfair question, but do you think that issues are different if you are working for an independent fostering agency?

Michael Fesemeyer: I worked for one first. I left because the problem is that you then have this ridiculous commercial relationship between the agency and the local authority. There is an extra cog in the wheels. They are only interested in maintaining a relationship with the local authority so they get the placements and increase their income. The reason I left was that particular group was bought out by venture capitalists. I do not think our fostering system should be supported by venture capitalists. I was an investment banker. I know everyone hates bankers but there are some good ones. I understand what these guys do and I do not think it is appropriate for venture capitalists to own fostering agencies. Fostering should not be for profit.

Brian Roberts: As an independent panel member I sit on three independent fostering panels. Their experience is different. There is not necessarily the link-up. In theory at least, if you are a local authority foster carer the people in your fostering team should be able to get information about the children very easily because they are in the same building very often and on the same computer system. That is not the case with independent foster carers. You have fewer conversations therefore with the child’s worker. It is really hard to do.

As an independent foster carer you have the claw back from local authorities with the perception it is much cheaper to bring foster care back in-house, as they see it. I am not convinced by that argument. I do not think they look like for like although there is the profit in it. They do not look like for like. As an independent agency you still have to have supervising social workers and individual independent reviewing officers, you still have to have training for your foster carers and you have to have fostering panels that are not in the mix when they talk about how much a local authority foster carer costs. They think it is just how much they give us. They do not think about the other costs that are there.

Gemma Ronte: That is a fair point, Brian. I will not go into the statistics but when you look at what has happened in Wandsworth over the last five years—where there has been almost a 50% split out to IFA because the recruitment drive was neglected for a while—that back-end, for want of a better term, has remained the same. You are still paying for the same back-end that you were when you had 100 carers but 50 of them have left, for example.

Brian Roberts: Peterborough itself, on 1 April, will be taking all its foster carers and transferring them to TACT, which is an independent agency. That is an interesting move. Interestingly, there are more children in Bedford borough being looked after by independent foster carers than Bedford foster carers are looking after Bedford children, which is interesting.

Anne Sayer: If I could just make an observation, you might even ask yourself whether it is right for a local authority that essentially provides—this is in a very broad sense as it does not capture the emotional aspect of it—a legal obligation of service to children that are in care to meet their needs in the best way possible. Should it also be commissioning a foster service within its own remit? There is a little bit of tension on a broader commissioning level. Should local authorities have fostering services in-house? There is a wider question there.

Local authorities have made much greater use of what we call kinship carers, friends or family members who know the child before they come into care who are able to care for them with the support of the local authority. I would argue that even kinship carers could be supported by a local authority. In order to have a broad playing field we should be thinking nationally about where we obtain a particular foster carer or fostering placement for a particular child and not be limited by the local authority in-house pool of foster carers. Let us look in-house first. If we cannot find anyone then we have to start looking elsewhere. It is a very long-winded process meeting the needs of a child and finding a placement for them.

Q39            Lucy Allan: What you have had to say today has been very helpful and interesting. You are fantastic representatives of your profession. Gemma, I used to be a Wandsworth councillor and it is great to hear good things about Wandsworth. I also sat on fostering panels for six years in Wandsworth so I have seen lots of foster parents through that process.

I wonder if we can move on to talk about the matching process and some of the difficulties that happen in that in you do not always secure a good match and a permanent placement resulting from that. Brian, do you have any observations about some of the shortcomings of the matching process?

Brian Roberts: The matching process is quite difficult because they will always use matching as a reason why foster carers are left with empty beds. That is an issue. I am not convinced it is necessarily as difficult as that. It is really complex. I no longer live in Bedford but we still foster for Bedford because transferring to a different authority is so difficult. We now live 40 miles away. For those babies and toddlers—we are out of their age range—that require contact it becomes difficult. Matching is really difficult. The biggest problem is where foster carers feel pushed to take on children who are outside their expertise and the age range that they are designated for.

Q40            Lucy Allan: Is that quite a common occurrence?

Brian Roberts: It is pretty common and would be the case for figures into 40%. There is the desire now for the broad brush 0 to 18 foster carer designation through a fostering panel. Ofsted are keen to say that when you are on a fostering panel—speaking now as a panel member—you check that the foster carers coming to you can actually do newborn babies withdrawing from methadone and 18 year-olds because they are very different. That broad brush is because of the exemptions. If you go for an exemption you can only have it for seven days and then you have to go back to panels. Panels do not meet that regularly. That broad brush allows foster carers to feel pressurised to take in kids in a different age range on the grounds that they think if they turn down kids they won’t not ever be given another one. I don’t think that is true either but that is the pressure.

Q41            Lucy Allan: Is there still a problem with foster carers not being given enough information about their potential placement?

Brian Roberts: Absolutely. We get information very rarely. The last two we got, which was on Boxing Day to be fair, they only knew their first names.

Michael Fesemeyer: The children we have in place now are because nobody else could cope with them. The first two boys we had have severe learning difficulties. We were told they had slight problems reading. We were also told they occasionally wet the bed. The truth was these two boys had never been potty trained. It took me three months to work that out. They were each soiling and wetting themselves eight times a day. After three months of looking after these two boys I was on my knees. You can only change sheets so many times. I was running out of pants and nappies.

Q42            Lucy Allan: What is your access to the files relating to the children?

Michael Fesemeyer: There are not any files. This happens. You just have to survive and get on with it.

One of the boys had been diagnosed as having a blockage in his bowel. They gave me a laxative. For god’s sake, I was trying to stop him going to the toilet not increase it. Eventually I got to see the paediatrician. My local GP referred me straight away. I have to say the health service support we have had for looked after children is brilliant. The paediatrician would normally call me back, if I phoned him up, within 10 minutes for these two boys because he had looked after them their whole lives. He said, “For god’s sake, Mike, we’ll cancel this prescription and sort it out”. It was only because I said to him one day, “Did your mum never potty train you?” He said, “No”. They didn’t know what toilet paper was. They’d never used a toilet. They are 11 and eight. There was nothing on this. We were told they occasionally wet the bed. Amazing.

It is not the social workers’ fault. These things are not recorded. The family has hidden it and the schools have hidden it. They have coped with it. The problem is the reporting system coming down to the social worker sometimes is not there. It is not a witch hunt saying social workers are not doing this right. It is how do you collect the information? People do not want to write horrible things about children but sometimes, when they are going to move on, you need this information.

Q43            Lucy Allan: Is it possible that sometimes information is deliberately withheld in order to encourage a foster carer to take a child they might not otherwise consider taking?

Michael Fesemeyer: Yes, I am sure it is.

Gemma Ronte: That is a very strong thing to say. I would not want to say it without concrete evidence. When we are talking about matching we have to make a distinction between emergency placements and planned moves. They are two very different sets of scenarios.

With emergency placements you often find the child needs to be moved and needs to be moved right now, or the child has already been removed from a domestic abuse situation or whatever and effectively needs to be housed before it gets dark. A foster carer is in the scenario where they have to say yes or no within hours. The implication of saying no is what happens to that young child or teenager. We have a heart for all these children. What happens if I say no? I have to be okay with that.

It is sometimes because there is no history. If a child is taken out of a domestic abuse situation and there has been no previous engagement between social services and that family there will be no history. There is only the history of what has happened on that occasion. They turn up with what they turn up and you work it out from there. Even if there is a child who is bounced around placements and there is a history often that emergency arises out of hours so accessing those files is incredibly difficult so you are in a situation of partial information being exchanged and a bit of Chinese whispers.

We do have very concrete evidence of very partial information with teenagers being represented as being misunderstood, a bit mouthy and prone to go absent in the evening. What you get presented with is a child who is deeply embedded in gang culture, is carrying a weapon and is well-known to the local police force. Of course that placement does not even survive the night in those situations. You have to have carers in a position to be able to give informed consent to a placement.

Brian Roberts: You asked about access to files, we very, very, very rarely have access to and sight of any of the files. For our permanent placement, it is his second time with us. He came to us as a toddler and went away for adoption for two years and came back. We have recently changed social workers. We have to do a developmental chronology for him for his CAMHS worker and I have access to his files for the first time. I have learnt so much seeing those files that, when he came to us six and a half years ago, would have been really useful to know but I did not know. I have never seen anyone else’s files other than this boy’s and that is because I am doing the developmental chronology because it is a new social worker.

Q44            Lucy Allan: Anne, in terms of ensuring a successful placement do you think there is more that can be done to support the mental health and wellbeing of young people coming into your care?

Anne Sayer: Definitely. I completely agree with what Gemma was saying. Sometimes there is this distinction between people who come to you in an emergency and children who come to you as a planned move. I would like to focus more on teenagers. I have looked after a fair few teenagers recently, both through emergencies and in other ways. For me, what I feel makes a successful placement is where you get the paperwork and read about some things you would rather not think about. The most successful placements are where you have a conversation with somebody, a social worker, who knows that child and you start there. You say, “What about this? What about that?” Explore it a bit more. What does it actually mean when it says the child has a history of self-harming? What does that come to in nuts and bolts? After that a good social worker will arrange for that teenager, if it is a planned placement, to come and see you and meet you. You say to them, “I hear there has been bit of a problem with this in the past. Do you think that’s going to be a problem here? How would we deal with that?” You talk to them about it. You talk through how they would behave, what the expectations would be and already you are building that sort of relationship.

Q45            Lucy Allan: You would need to be a very experienced foster carer to go through that thought process. You might have seen it on the file and just said, “Oh, dear”. How can we get those skills?

Anne Sayer: There is a little bit more. I would add one final point—this is probably going to be a little bit out there—I would talk to the parent. I have talked to the parent both in planned placements and, I would also add, in emergency placements. I looked after a nine-week-old baby. I had a call from the police who asked whether I would speak to mum. I spoke to mum and was able to reassure mum. I was also able to say, “Is there anything you can tell me to help me to look after this child?” That immediately put her more at ease because she felt listened to and heard. She felt that I was doing a good job. That child went back to mum and I think it was one of the most important experiences I have ever had. That is crucial.

As well, foster carers communicating with foster carers does not happen as much as it should. I had a child who was placed on emergency. He had to be moved and it was something I had no control over. I phoned up the next foster carer and said, “Just a bit of information”. She said, “I am so glad you phoned”. It doesn’t happen enough. We don’t talk enough. There is this idea you cannot tell another foster carer your experiences because they have to make their own judgment. They can choose to hear and take on board what you say but this is about the child. It is how are you meeting the needs of the child and how are you supporting that carer to meet the needs of the child.

Brian Roberts: Working with birth families is very important. If it is done right they will talk to you in a different way than they will talk to social workers. That is one of the reasons we should not be involved in supervising the contact because then we are put in a totally different role. If you get working with birth parents and birth families right you get an awful lot of information that makes the child’s life with you and their outcomes much better. As soon as we are seen as being judgmental in any way it changes the whole nature of that relationship to the detriment of what will happen to the child. We should be seen in a very separate role to making any judgment or writing any report about birth parents unless they tell you something that is really, really significant.

Q46            Lucy Allan: What you are telling us are some quite simple things that could happen, rather than lots of expensive support and other things. It is to get that relationship right and to get information flowing that isn’t necessarily happening as standard. It is waiting for you, Anne, to come with, “This works really well and enhances the experience”.

Anne Sayer: It is interesting because when I first started fostering it never occurred to me to have that conversation with the birth parent. They were sort of seen—I am going to say this in the loosest possible way—as the enemy, I suppose. You come into fostering with this sort of image of what it is. There are very few people out there who have children that do not fundamentally want the best for them. You have to remember that.

Lucy Allan: That is a really important attitude. Thank you.

Q47            Suella Fernandes: You mentioned whistle-blowing and also allegations. I wanted to look at those two issues in a bit more detail. It seems there has been an increase in the number of allegations made against foster carers. There is a sense that there is a lack of support to the foster carer when an allegation is made. The child is immediately removed and payments stop. One of the studies showed that 70% of allegations are found to be unfounded but, yet, many are left unproven or inconclusive. I wanted to see from your experience and knowledge whether your concerns around this issue matched those statistics and what you thought needed to be done in order to support foster carers when faced with an allegation.

Michael Fesemeyer: Certainly the worst nine months of my life was when these boys made some allegations. They wanted to change the terms of their placement. I was not aware they had reported these allegations because, of course, you are not told what the allegations are. I spoke to their grandfather that evening as he was a good family contact because they were obviously having problems. He spoke to them. He then realised they had made allegations and spoke to the eldest boy. The eldest boy came into me crying and said, “Mike, we just told a whole pack of lies. It’s all wrong”. They told the social workers that straightaway. The boys were still removed. It went back to the local authority. They reinstigated all the allegations and it took nine months to sort out even though the boys admitted it was all lies within half an hour. This is an independent agency. You get absolutely no support whatsoever because their vested interest is with the local authority. We were literally hung out to dry. Not one person contacted us in nine months. We were accused of all sorts of things. We have never, ever received a written copy of the allegations that we are supposed to receive.

Q48            Suella Fernandes: Were you not able to put your defence?

Michael Fesemeyer: How can you defend when you have not been told what you have done? I wrote this down because I think it is quite important. If it was a court of law the Human Rights Act in article 6 says you have a right to a defence and also the right to be told. It was only when I threatened the agency under section 6 of the Human Rights Act, saying, “You are breaching my human rights” that they actually started to talk to us because they were breaking the law. You must be entitled to be told at some point. You have to protect the child but at some point in time you have to be told.

Brian Roberts: I am going to touch an awful lot of wood here because I have never had an allegation made against me but I have supported lots of foster carers who have. We need to look at the reasons why allegations are there. Some are there because they are legitimate safeguarding and some foster carers, a very small minority, do the wrong thing. They need to be investigated and everything thrown at them. However, allegations come because the children want to go home and they feel that is the case, because they are testing whether we really will care about them and will stick by them, all those kinds of things. Parents will make allegations because they see it as, “If I make an allegation against a foster carer then I can prove they are doing what I did” so their child can come back. There are lots of reasons.

Quite honestly, everybody knows that 70% of allegations against foster carers are unfounded. We are not treated like that. That is not taken into account. For the foster carers I support immediately there is an allegation the children are removed. They are not told what the allegation is, that is quite right. They have no defence. The local authority withdraws. I end up spending hours on the phone talking to them. Through my expertise I am advising them to go and pay for their own barrister. Some of them end up in court. Some of them end up with their own children under child protection legislation with threats to remove their own children from them, even when scattered across the local authority is the proof that had not happened. It is very scary. As a teacher and a foster carer I could have lost my employment and my home if an allegation was made in either of those fields. It is a scary place to be, a very scary place to be.

Gemma Ronte: We have to make a clear distinction between allegations against carers and whistle-blowing. I absolutely concur with Brian’s points. In contrast to allegations that may be made about teachers or other caring professions the issue of control is so vital. Making an allegation is a way for children and birth families who perceive they have no control in proceedings to assert a level of control. That is so often the motivation behind it. When you recognise that, that must inform the response. There should absolutely be an obligation on local authorities and independent agencies whenever there is an allegation to provide independent support for the carer who has the allegation against them. They should always have the allegations in writing within a set timescale that is reasonable. They should always be provided with it before we go forward.

The issue of removing children is a very difficult area. You do not want to leave children in a household where, by its very nature, the children are unobserved because it is a private household. You do not want to leave them in a position of vulnerability. However, the damage is already done regardless of what then happens. So often the outcome for carers is that it is not proven or, at worst, it is unfounded but the relationships have broken down so much between the supervising social workers, the child’s social workers, the foster carers and the looked after children it is irreparable at that point and the children have to move if they have not already been removed.

Brian Roberts: Even if it is no case to answer it remains on our record that there has been an allegation. That comes through every time, even if there is no case to answer.

Michael Fesemeyer: It is totally unrealistic for the local authority to investigate. In our case we were investigated by the training manager in our independent fostering agency. It was an appalling investigation. After nine months we had to go back and work with this guy as our training manager. We had no faith in him whatsoever. We had threatened to take legal action against him under the Human Rights Act so how could we possibly have a relationship. That was one of the reasons we had to move.

Investigations must be independent. They cannot be done by the local authority who have a vested interest to defend their own staff who have come up with their own conclusions. Ofsted should review every single investigation. We wrote to Ofsted about our investigation. Ofsted did not even reply to us let alone investigate it. We offered to give them evidence to protect the foster carers. Ofsted never even replied. We have no protection. It really is sad.

Q49            Chair: We have noted that. It is a very interesting point. Thank you for exposing it and answering it. Thank you.

Anne Sayer: I do think the point is covered but Gemma has hit the nail on the head when she said you are in an incredibly vulnerable situation because you are looking after children unobserved. It is so difficult. It is a huge, huge problem.

Q50            Lilian Greenwood: Chair, I know we are concluding this panel and I can see the time has ticked on. I am very conscious that in an earlier part of the session Gemma said she wanted to make some comments about Staying Put. I said there was a question on that later but I have realised it is a question for the second panel. I do not know whether there is an opportunity to ask the panel whether they had one headline issue around Staying Put before we move panels or whether we can invite them to make written comments on that matter.

Chair: Would you like to?

Gemma Ronte: I would very much.

Chair: It will have to be quick because we are running out of time.

Gemma Ronte: I will make it brief. Staying put is a very welcome and well-intentioned initiative. Carers all around the country are behind it. There are two major issues with it. First is when it was introduced there was not the money to enable it, at least there was not in Wandsworth. The second issue is the principle of allowing looked after children to have the same experience after 18 and remain in their birth family is very laudable but the policies by which that is enacted first are worked out and the wheel reinvented in every borough individually and are wildly different. Why? Secondly, if the principle is that we do not want to change the experience just because the clock has ticked to 18 then the package that is available has to represent that. There has to be money for you to still be able to take your 18 and a half year-old away at Christmas with your looked after children who are 13 and 15.

As I said before, it is so important that we think imaginatively and creatively about when we decide that child turns 18. That sounds ridiculous but do not do that in the year when they are sitting their A-levels and their BTECs. Let them finish the year. Let them get into those summer holidays and then make plans for them going forward. That is what we would do with our birth children. Don’t our looked after children deserve the same experience?

Q51            Chair: That chimes with the point you were making earlier about the 18 year-old having difficulty halfway through A-levels.

Brian Roberts: We try to do that. We try to make it the end of the school year when things change. That has not been implemented across the country. It is vitally important.

Chair: We are going to have to move on to our second panel or somebody will be telling us that we have to change. Thank you very much indeed for all of your very helpful comments. It has been very good to hear from all four of you. I appreciate the frankness and freedom with which you have addressed these issues so thank you.

Examination of witnesses

Chloë Cockett, Jackie Edwards, Professor Harriet Ward, and Kevin Williams.

Q52            Chair: Right, good morning and welcome to our second panel on our inquiry into fostering. I think all of you were in the room when I introduced the first panel so you know the purpose of this inquiry. Obviously we are going to persist with some themes that emerged in the first half. Would you mind telling us who you are and from where you hail, kicking off with Harriet?

Professor Ward: Hello, I am Harriet Ward. I am Professor of Child and Family Research at Loughborough University. I have spent my career researching the care system as a whole and issues concerning safeguarding children, obviously foster care is part of that research.

Chair: We obviously have plenty to talk about then. Thank you.

Jackie Edwards: I am Jackie Edwards. I am a professional adviser to FosterTalk. We are an organisation that provides independent support to foster carers. We also deliver Fosterline on behalf of the Department for Education in England. It is a free helpline for foster carers and prospective foster carers. I have been a social worker for 30 years working with children and families.

Kevin Williams: I am Kevin Williams, Chief Executive at The Fostering Network. The Fostering Network is the UK’s leading charity that supports foster carers and fostering services. On a professional level, I am a social worker and a teacher with over 35 years’ experience of working with children and families.

Chloë Cockett: I am Chloë Cockett, Policy and Research Manager at Become. We are a charity for children in care and care leavers. We provide support and help to help carers and young people unleash their potential.

Q53            Chair: Quite a few themes came over in the last hour, didn’t they, issues about local government; the question of entry into being a foster carer; and variable standards across the piece in terms in terms of training, access, support and everything else. Another element was that while you are doing fostering there are issues connected to finance, support, further training needs and the role of Ofsted. There is quite a lot there actually. It is complex. One of the underlying themes that struck me was the relatively haphazard nature in which the fostering sector has emerged. Harriet, do you agree with that analysis?

Professor Ward: One of the things that struck me was the issue of status. That has been an issue for at least 30 years. Fostering was initially envisaged as a way of parenting very vulnerable children. There was very little understanding of the needs of these children. It has become much more evident that a very high proportion of children in the care system have experienced abuse and neglect and very often have complex needs as a result of that. That understanding has not caught up with the way in which foster carers are seen by other professionals. All the people in the previous session were absolutely right, they have an incredibly complex task. I suspect it is more complex than it was 10 years ago because of the population of children coming into the care system now. The complexity of their task, and the extent to which they are the only people in the professional part of the system who know the children and spend 24 hours a day with the children, is not acknowledged. The status issue needs to be acknowledged and understood.

Then there are issues about professionalisation that are related to that. As a country we have never really made a decision about whether foster care should be a voluntary occupation or whether it should be a professional occupation. The moves to unionise foster carers and to have a professional body for foster carers are very welcome. There is a downside to professionalisation too. That is related to some of the comments you have heard about foster carers having to have heart and, “We are people where primarily our role is about the children”. Once you start to professionalise you have issues the children find difficult. We did a study, for instance, of babies in the care system. We found that quite a high proportion of babies in our sample were placed with foster carers who went on annual leave. They were in authorities where foster carers did get a holiday. They went on holiday very soon after the baby was placed so the baby moved to somebody else for a few weeks and that was difficult for the children. Meshing professional issues with children’s needs is something that is complex and necessary to address.

Q54            Chair: In short, you are talking about professionalising family life?

Professor Ward: Absolutely. That puts it in a nutshell.

Q55            Chair: On the other hand, foster carers need appropriate support, training and consistency. It is striking that balance. That is what I hope this inquiry will help to do.

The Fostering Network claims that 7,600 more foster families are required. The Department for Education does not think there is a shortage of carers. Who is right, Kevin?

Kevin Williams: Clearly, the Fostering Network is right. I want to start by saying that foster care works. We know that foster care works. The evidence is there that says foster care transforms children’s lives.

There are probably three key areas that this inquiry needs to focus on. One is, as we have already heard from Harriet and others, around the issue of status. That status needs to look at employment or worker status and to consider some of the issues that are impacted on. I would say that foster carers are unique in the way they are approved. They are not approved as individuals. They are approved as families, as households. That makes those issues really difficult and complex. We need to look at a unique system in terms of how we describe and look at foster carers. What is absolutely essential is that foster carers are protected and supported in order to make sure that they do the work they do. We have heard eloquently from foster carers. I will not repeat the issues they raised in the first session around whistle-blowing and things that are absolutely essential in terms of how people are protected.

The second issue is that we need to look at the system. The system as a whole is under immeasurable strain at the moment. Part of that is linked to the complexity of the children coming into the care system. We cannot shy away from the fact that part of the issue is to do with austerity and the impact of austerity. We did a recent report in terms of austerity and the impact of austerity on local authorities and therefore the impact on foster carers. There are real issues about how foster care is funded.

Linked to that is that we have grown up with the tradition where we talk of foster care as though it is a single entity. The reality is that foster care is very varied. There are foster carers who support people on a regular basis through particular work programmes and on short term interventions. There are foster carers who undertake respite foster care work. There are foster carers who take long term placements and may only foster one child or sibling group for life. We need to look at the breakdown of that system and how that system is structured and supported.

Thirdly, not least but on an even footing, is the status of foster carers and how foster carers are perceived by local authorities, by professionals working with them and by communities and society as a whole. Foster carers are professionals. Linked to that we need to have a real status. We would absolutely call for a college or register of foster care that recognises that. We are the only profession looking after some of the most vulnerable children in our communities that does not have a preapproval validated training course. We would absolutely call for a preapproval validated training course. Linked to that there needs to be ongoing learning and development programmes as most professions would be required to have.

Those three areas would help in terms of recruitment and retention. In terms of your original question as to who is right, The Fostering Network is right. There is a shortage of foster carers. It is not that there are not children with foster carers today. However, we know there are a number of young people who are placed with foster carers who may not have the skills required to look after their particular needs because they are outside the approval range. We know that there are not adequate support plans to support those children who are outside of that system.

Q56            Chair: Thank you, Kevin. Jackie, do you think Kevin is right? There were three points but, critically, the issue about supply of foster carers.

Jackie Edwards: It is always up for debate. We have no national overview of what the needs or gaps are in terms of what parts of the country need what types of carers. There is definitely a shortage of carers for sibling groups, for older children, for unaccompanied asylum seeking children and children with disabilities. They are the main groups of children that are more difficult to find an appropriate placement for, if we are talking about matching. It is not about a bed. We do not put children in beds. We match them with a carer who can meet their needs. I do not know about the numbers. I would certainly say there is a shortage of carers for particular types of children. We get carers saying, “I have a vacancy. It says there is a shortage of foster carers but I have a vacancy”. It will be about the age they are approved for. They might be approved for nought to five and the need is for 10-plus.

I do not disagree with anyone who has said about status. Foster carers are definitely the least valued members of the social care workforce. There is a framework—the Fostering Services Regulations, National Minimum Standards. It is meant to spell out what support they receive if they have an allegation and what training they receive pre and post approval. That does not seem to work. Those regulations need urgent review.

The payment system needs to be reviewed desperately as does the level of support foster carers get. We talk about carers who need respite. If they have a particularly challenging young person we will get calls from people who are desperate for a weekend off but they are not allowed to have respite while they are fostering. We have to look at all these issues.

Chloë Cockett: It is really important to remember what care is for, and to remember that foster carers do not just extend their family but are opening their family to children who have had the state intervene in their lives in the most significant way; they have been removed from their birth parents. We need to remember that what we want to achieve for children is emotional security, that sense of family life, stability and relationships. When we talk about matching and a sufficiency of foster carers it is so we can match with those carers who can meet their needs so they will not be moved on continually through their childhood.

Q57            Chair: We all seem to be agreed we need more foster carers. Jackie made the point we need some in certain sectors and presumably also certain geographical regions. Should the Government initiate a national marketing strategy to encourage more families to come forward? How would that be shaped if it were to work well?

Professor Ward: You need to start with the children. You really need to identify what the needs of the children coming into care are before you develop a strategy to recruit carers who are going to meet those needs. We did some work where we looked at this. Needs are very much related to the costs of care too. About a quarter of the children do not have very high needs but that leaves about 75% who do. At the very top of the scale there are children with emotional and behavioural difficulties who also have physical disabilities, behaviour problems and so on. Those are very high needs children. You need to recruit carers with specific training and expertise to support those children.

Q58            Chair: Thank you. Kevin, Harriet has said it is not just numbers but what they are for, so to speak. That is essentially her point. Do we need to interrogate that 7,600?

Kevin Williams: Yes, interrogation would be helpful. I agree with Harriet, we start with the children and what their needs are. I would equally say just having a recruitment strategy would not address some of the fundamental issues around the current status of foster care and the way the foster care service is delivered. It would lead to a further undermining of the foster care system. The foster care system is currently under unsustainable strain. Just to recruit more foster carers is not the answer. We need to have a fundamental root and branch reform of the foster care system. That will then support the new foster carers we are able to recruit to meet those children for whom there is a shortage of placements. It is also to make sure we retain foster carers. If you look at recruitment without looking at the issue of retention then the system will further fail. There has to be root and branch reform.

Q59            Chair: It is a wider marketing strategy based on a better and clearer understanding of what is needed, coupled with an enhancement of people’s understanding of what fostering is.

Kevin Williams: It is changing the system before you start that marketing campaign.

Chair: Yes. That would, I suppose, be a precondition. I would be grateful if you could drop a line with more detail as appropriate because we want to address this issue in our report.

Jackie Edwards: With regard to marketing, we need to say that the Department for Education does fund Fosterline. As well as supporting existing foster carers our brief is to encourage the recruitment of additional foster carers. Part of the delivery of Fosterline is the telephone and our website. There is a huge amount of resources on there. We do actively market on behalf of the DfE to encourage more people to come forward to foster, right across the board.

Q60            Lucy Frazer: Some people responded to our survey and suggested we should have a national database, a national survey and register of carers. Do you think we should? If so, why do you think we should, how should we put it together and what benefits will it have?

Kevin Williams: I am happy to go first. Yes, I absolutely think we should have a national register. It would be useful in terms of issues around portability for foster carers moving. We know there are wide issues in terms of both reassessment and the length of time for reassessment with people moving. If you are an approved foster carer in Nottingham and you move for whatever reasons to Devon you would be treated as if you had no experience and start at the beginning of that process again. That is wasteful in terms of resources. It is also wasteful in terms of human cost and all those issues.

A national register cannot work without being linked to preapproval training that is accredited and validated that gives entrance on to that register. The issue of having a national register is complex. It needs to be linked into preapproval training and then post-approval support. There are issues that have already been talked about eloquently in the previous session in terms of how that can be linked to allegations and those wider issues. In principle, having a national register would be a really helpful start in terms of understanding the system and where the gaps are.

Jackie Edwards: I agree. It would very much link to how the status of foster carers could then be improved. There would be a central database. Their skills and the types of children they can support would all be recorded. We would then have an overview of where the gaps are and where we need to focus our recruitment efforts.

Professor Ward: It would link to the issue about training and remuneration and having a national college. I think the issue of remuneration is incredibly important. I know local authorities are terribly strapped for cash and all of that but it does not make sense to recruit people to do a very complex job, and very professional job in many ways, and pay them so little. There has always been this question about if we pay them too much we will get the wrong sort of people coming in, but I don’t think that is true at all. Foster carers do need to be properly recompensed for what they are doing. That is part of the status issue and the acknowledgement of what they do as well as the fact that virtually all foster carers will be putting in their own resources because they are not paid adequately, they are not adequately remunerated. That is also a major issue with friends and families carers, which is something that you have not touched on but I hope that you will in this session.

Q61            Lucy Frazer: Chloë, do you want to add anything on the register?

Chloë Cockett: Just that we need to think about what the outcome is for the children. In anything we do we have to focus on the children as the end goal. When we are looking at having a register, what is the motivation, what will it achieve? As long as it will improve outcomes for children then definitely.

Q62            Lucy Allan: We have talked a bit about the professionalisation of the role. Could we look at it from the child’s perspective, as Chloë just mentioned? Do you think children going into a foster placement see that person as a parent or do they seem them as a paid professional who is just looking after them? Is that the right way to be looking at that relationship?

Chloë Cockett: I think it would be very individual on each child. It would depend on the time that they come into care and their experience of social care in the past. We do hear from young people who talk about professionalisation and have concerns about people doing it for financial reasons rather than real motivation. But if you have a foster carer who is a professional, they should be able to manage that within the household and fundamentally their job is to provide emotional security for that child, which is what they should be able to do as a trained professional. Equally, we speak to young people who recognise that foster carers should be professionals. I think it is individual, but it is down to the way that the foster carers themselves manage that and as trained professionals they should be able to do that.

Q63            Lucy Allan: The Fostering Network has talked in their evidence about the lack of delegated authority and really said that it is practice and culture that is an issue for status rather than a need for more legislation. Could you expand a bit more on the practice and culture and what changes could be made?

Kevin Williams: I absolutely agree with everything that Chloë has said about we have to focus on children when that is the need, but foster care is about relationships. The Care inquiry was a major inquiry a few years ago that looked at eight charities, of which Chloë’s charity was one. It identified that relationships were the golden thread that came through fostering. I think it is essential that that relationship is able to be maintained and one of the ways you do that is to empower the foster carer in order to make decisions for the young person that they have the relationship with. They will know that young person better than the social worker does and differently than the social worker does. They will have a different perception because they live with the young person and it is really important that that relationship is able to be built on. There is lots of evidence about how people can do that. The use of social pedagogy, for example, enforces the way that foster carers, through making decisions with children, build on that relationship that then builds upon trust that then helps with issues of attachment and placement stability.

What we also know is that on a real practical level foster carers not being empowered and having authority delegated to them often means that young people are missing out on opportunities. We are in a system where schools, the health service and other organisations work at such speed and with such quick decision-making. The fostering system is a dinosaur by comparison in terms of the way that decisions are made by committee, which actually prevent children from a normal-ish experience, whatever a normal family is but a more normal type family relationship. Delegation of authority is essential.

Q64            Lucy Allan: It is about greater trust in the foster carers?

Kevin Williams: Absolutely. Part of our difficulty and our challenge on a number of issues is that it is about risk and how social workers and the state are able to manage risk. With some of the issues about removal of children when there are allegations, it is about how people do not manage risk.

Q65            Lucy Allan: Presumably you can never eliminate risk. Is there wider acceptance that you are not going to eliminate risk and you have to be able to trust people to a degree?

Kevin Williams: Absolutely. Trust and working with risk are essential ingredients.

Jackie Edwards: I think it is really important that foster carers are given the right to make decisions about the young person and with the young person about their day-to-day life, such as going on school trips, staying overnight at a friend’s house, all the things that young people do in their normal lives. They have to get a piece of paper signed by a foster carer to give them consent to do that. That is one of the key things that we get calls from foster carers about, saying, “Do I have to get a police check done because she wants to stay at her friend’s?” “No, you don’t”. We will give them the relevant piece of regulation and suggest that they go back and talk to the social worker again. But it should be written, it should be given at the point of placement that they can make those decisions with and for the child.

Q66            Lucy Allan: I think what I am hearing is quite a bureaucratic, sort of sclerotic process that is not able to be as flexible as a child might need and it would enhance the relationship of the foster carer and the child if there was a little more freedom and flexibility to make decisions.

Professor Ward: I think so, but it is about striking a balance. If you are the social worker who places a child with a foster carer for whom the allegation is justified, you have to manage that too. The regulations are there for a purpose. I think one of the problems of this sort of inquiry is that you do get responses from the most vocal, most active people and you don’t hear from some of the foster carers who are not as proficient and do not have as much initiative as people who come before an inquiry. I entirely agree that foster carers should have delegated responsibility to include the child within their family and to create a family with the child. The sort of regulations that prevent that from happening are onerous, but you have to ask why those regulations are there.

I think that is an issue about training and also about status. If foster carers had higher status and if part of the contract was that they would ensure that some of these risks were adequately alleviated then you could reduce some of the bureaucracy, but because there is not sufficient confidence in foster carers’ ability and they don’t have a specific status then this risk aversity comes into play.

Q67            Lucy Allan: Are you saying the balance is probably about right at the moment for this level of bureaucracy and independent decision-making?

Professor Ward: No, I don’t think it is necessarily right. There are huge issues not necessarily to do with the regulations but the way in which they are interpreted, your point about police checks and all those sorts of things. Sometimes they are misinterpreted. There are foster carers who are told not to hug children, but that is a misinterpretation. It is not actually what is required. There needs to be better understanding of what is a risk and what isn’t a risk. There needs to be far better training of foster carers, and social workers too, to understand what these issues are. Unless you have that and a higher status for foster carers it will be harder to relax some of those regulations.

Q68            Chair: Surely effective training should lead to more confidence in the judgment of foster carers. That must be an ambition.

Professor Ward: Yes.

Q69            Ian Austin: I would like to ask about the sort of competition that exists between local authorities and independent agencies. Do you think this is conducive to achieving the best care for looked after children? That is the sort of issue I would like to focus on. I don’t know who would like to answer that first.

Kevin Williams: I will go forward. We have a mixed economy of care and the mixed economy has existed for hundreds of years with charities and, since the development of the welfare state, the involvement of the state and the increasing involvement of the private sector. Over the last few years the role of the independent sector has absolutely led the way in transforming some of the ways that we talk about professionalisation. It was the independent sector that at the very beginning was talking about the way that foster carers could have all-round support. In fact, a number of private agencies were started by foster carers themselves because they felt they were not being supported appropriately.

However, I think we are now in a position where we need to look at how commissioning and procurement work together. We have a very dated system. The way the system began was that the independent sector was there supporting local authorities. We are now in a position where over 40% of the placements are within the independent sector and yet we still commission on the basis that they are supporting local authorities rather than working together and jointly and thinking about if we had a national register that would help with a needs analysis of where we need the recruitment and retention of foster carers and those wider issues. We still have payment that is based on a child per bed per night, which does not take account of any issues of long-term fostering and the type of relationships that might be built.

Through the stocktake and this inquiry we hope that recommendations will come forward that absolutely look at commissioning and procurement as central to the issue and we don’t have a line on whether or not the local authority or independent sector is better. Ofsted clearly have some regulations. The inspection systems are different and, therefore, it is difficult to compare. Some sort of apples and pears comparisons are made. A fundamental review of commissioning and procurement based on need is essential.

Q70            Ian Austin: Does the rest of the panel agree with that?

Jackie Edwards: Some foster carers will choose to foster for the local authority and they would not dream of fostering for anyone else. Others will look at a range of options. If they are thinking of going into fostering, they will look at an independent agency; maybe they will look at one of the children’s charities like Barnardo’s. What we always encourage them to do is to ask about the support and training they will get, the types of children and young people they would expect to be looking after. For example, with an independent fostering agency they tend to be the older, more challenging children with more complex needs and you would expect a higher level of training and support for the placement than perhaps if you were looking after nought to fives with the local authority. We always encourage prospective foster carers to explore the issues and ask the questions, but I don’t see any fundamental problem with having a mixed economy. It is good for foster carers and for young people if it is used appropriately.

Q71            Ian Austin: Some of the evidence we have been given as part of this showed that there is a trend of price-led commissioning, that local authorities are predisposed to place children in-house but independent agencies have been criticised for making large profits. Do you think the right factors are being prioritised when commissioning services? You have both supported this idea of a mixed economy. Do you think there is an argument for a more standardised system and, if so, how do you think that could be achieved?

Professor Ward: I think there is an issue about profits and that needs to be addressed. I agree with one of the people on the previous panel who said that the profit motive is contrary to the objectives of providing care for vulnerable children and I think that that does get in the way sometimes. I have only anecdotal evidence, I don’t have overall research of this, but I know there are concerns. If one of your issues is the finance and that takes a high priority—children are unnecessarily moved from placements, for instance—that takes priority about whether the child should stay in a placement or not. We are talking about very vulnerable children who really need stability and that question should not stand in the way of stability. I think the profit issue needs to be confronted head on and is problematic.

Q72            Ian Austin: It is difficult, though, isn’t it? It is such an important area of work and if an independent agency is giving a first class service surely that is worth paying for. On the other hand, we heard earlier that foster carers themselves are not being recompensed properly, so why should money that could go to foster carers be going to independent agencies? This is a very difficult sort of conundrum.

Kevin Williams: I think it is about a wider funding issue in terms of: what is the funding for fostering per se, how do you best use the money that is available and are we using that money to its most efficient and effective? I would say the current commissioning practice and procurement is not using that money in the most efficient and effective way.

There are also wider issues, which we have talked about, around delegation of authority, where you could see a complete shift in the way we use the money or the resources available within fostering as a whole. One of the things we would hope is that this inquiry makes some strong recommendations around procurement and commissioning but linked to the wider system and changes that could be made, which could be a more effective and efficient use of the resources within the fostering service.

To single out a single issue—are local authorities better and cheaper than the independent sector—is a narrowing of really complex issues and I think those issues need to be widened. Harry is quite right to focus on it being absolutely about the needs of children. We know that there is good practice in both local authorities and the independent sector; there is also poor practice in both the independent sector and local authorities. We need to look at the system as a whole and stop what are false arguments about how the system is funded because I don’t think they are ultimately helpful to the long-term care of children.

Q73            Chair: There are two questions there, aren’t there? There is the overall funding but it is how the funds are dealt with, dispersed and used, and that is really Harriet’s point, isn’t it, that it should be for families to be able to afford what they want to do in the natural way of things. Is that correct?

Professor Ward: That is absolutely right, yes.

Q74            Lilian Greenwood: The issue of Staying Put. I think everybody would probably agree that the spirit of Staying Put is absolutely right but as we already heard from the previous panel, its implementation appears to leave a lot to be desired. What does the Government need to do to ensure that this programme works for care leavers and for foster carers? Maybe if I come to you first, Chloë, you can speak particularly from the perspective of care leavers.

Chloë Cockett: We need to be creating stability in order for Staying Put to work. Young people need to feel part of that family; they need to feel that they belong; they need to feel like they want, and that they have a right, to stay beyond 18. I am not entirely sure that the rhetoric and that feeling of stability has trickled through yet. We hear from young people quite a lot about how they have been moved on or they move out at 17 and 18; they move into semi-independence; six months in, they realise that they want to go back. So there is something about what happened at 16, 17, 18, that didn’t make Staying Put that default position and what made them feel like that or made the decision that living by themselves is the better option. There is some work to do with stability and the messaging and perhaps talking to care leavers themselves to unpick what happened in that journey and why they made those decisions would be helpful.

Q75            Lilian Greenwood: Should Staying Put be the default position?

Chloë Cockett: It will not be right for every young person and it is about meeting needs but it should not be the automatic, “I have to”—that feeling of, “I am 18 and therefore I am now a care leaver and I am different”. That is the problem.

Kevin Williams: The policy has the ability to be transformational for long-term outcomes for children in care. We know that. The long-term outcomes for young people leaving care are among the poorest but that is not as a result of the care system. Often that is around issues of transition and poor management of that transition from care to adulthood. We should stop talking about leaving care. If you are 14 and at 14 you are told you are going to leave something, I wonder what that does to one’s psyche. We should begin to completely transform, begin talking about transitions and transition to adulthood. While I think Chloë is right, and it is about how you manage that process for individuals, the current presumption is that children will leave rather than children will remain and that presumption must change.

Part of the problem of implementation is that a new policy initiative impacts on three groups of young people in the fostering system. It impacts on the existing young people, where the plan was never to think about staying put and staying beyond 18, and yet suddenly this new measure comes in and so the care planning and changes that happen have to be implemented. The second thing is about those who will be coming into the care system today and in the next year, thinking what implications that has for planning and for planning when people are making placements for four and five year-olds, including thinking about the Staying Put issues. Then it is about that long-term future and what we want our care system to look like—do we want it a sort of system that is just based on an arbitrary age of 18 or 21—and how we enable support for life for young people who need that support for life.

The other thing around current implementation is that it is inconsistent. There are number of issues, that we have eloquently heard about already, about allowances and the way payments are made, that suddenly, at 18, their status is different, and all those things, which I don’t think have been thought through. The Fostering Network has had a working group looking at these issues. We are due to publish the findings of that inquiry soon and as soon as we do, we will share them with this Committee.

Jackie Edwards: Staying Put is one of the top five regular Fosterline queries. Foster carers are confused about what it means. They do not realise that they are no longer treated as a foster carer if the young person stays with them. Their allowances change. If they only have one placement at a time it means they cannot foster another young person. There is a raft of issues that suddenly they have to grapple with. It is not just a straightforward, “Can this young person stay with me as their foster carer?” which is how it was presented initially when the legislation was put through. Most people support it wholeheartedly. Some local authorities let young people stay for six months. That is not really staying put. Others will have it more open ended. Some will say the young person has to sign on for benefit and pay the foster carer or the Staying Put carer out of their allowance. It needs clarity. There is too much confusion. There is no consistent policy across local authorities about how Staying Put should operate. It should obviously be working for young people and for foster carers and at the moment it is a mess; the system is a mess.

Q76            Lilian Greenwood: Harriet, is there anything you would like to add?

Professor Ward: This is heartbreaking. This is really hard to hear, because we piloted Staying Put, all those issues were raised and we hoped that our report would at least encourage somebody to address some of the issues about remuneration.

Q77            Lilian Greenwood: They are all issues you identified?

Professor Ward: Yes, in the pilot and they obviously have not been addressed.

The other issue, though, that we did raise was that the young people in the pilot who had the Staying Put placements were the ones who were doing okay, basically. They were the ones who going into further and higher education; they were the ones who were getting jobs, and so on. It did not address the other young people, who were leaving care early and undertaking these compressed and accelerated transitions to adulthood.

Again, I think the care system needs to model what happens in normative families. The average age of leaving home now is about 29, so we have a 10-year gap, haven’t we?

When your own children leave home, they come back again. They go and then a year or two later they say, “I’ve split up with the boyfriend, I’m coming home”. We do not have anything that allows care leavers to make those sorts of forward and backward movements and if you do not have your Staying Put placement at 18, it should be possible to come back when you are older and go back to the foster carers.

The other thing the pilot also showed, though, was that those young people who did leave their placements, the foster carers felt that they were welcome to come back and expected them to keep in touch, but they just expected it; they were not proactive in encouraging them to keep in touch. That was partly policy. It was not so much the foster carers as policy, so that is another issue that needs to be addressed. They left it to the young people to come back and of course these are young people who have been rejected many times before and are not going to be the person who rings up and says, “Can I come back home?” or, “Can I come for Christmas?”, that sort of thing. That, again, is something that needs to be addressed.

Kevin Williams: Indeed, in terms of keeping in touch and relationships, what we know is that there is a culture within social care of ending relationships so at the end of the placement foster carers and others are actively discouraged from remaining in contact, whereas we think there needs to be a complete reversal of the culture, saying that people should remain in contact unless there is a good reason not to. We teach children about severance of relationships rather than working through challenges and difficulties and maintaining a different form of relationship.

Professor Ward: These are children who have learnt before they come into care that relationships will end, that they will be severed. We need to be encouraging them to learn that relationships are successful and a positive relationship will persist, not that it will be cut off short.

Jackie Edwards: There are lots of examples, though, of foster families who have extended and extended; they have foster grandchildren, the host families, and they have kept in touch. Whether or not it is with the agreement of the local authorities is another matter but there are lots of examples of foster carers who just extend that through the generations once young people have moved on.

Q78            Lilian Greenwood: Specifically to Kevin: the Fostering Network has been a critic of some of the clauses that pertained to fostering in the Children and Social Work Bill. Do you see a way for the Government to reconcile their wishes to enable innovation with maintaining children’s rights and levels of protection? If so, how?

Kevin Williams: Our worry is that a change in legislation, or allowing a local authority or service to opt out of following legislation, leads to a dangerous precedent. Part of the concern, as Harriet has already said, is that you could end up with a piecemeal approach rather than having levels of consistency. We absolutely are in favour of innovation. The Fostering Network has run a number of innovative projects, such as Mockingbird, which absolutely comply with the current legislation. I don’t think the right to change legislation and innovation go hand in hand; they are two separate issues and I think this Government has conflated them in a way that is unhelpful. Innovation is absolutely essential and we would not be where we are today in the fostering service had it not been for innovative practice over the last 40 years, but that does not mean that we should move away from the current legal status. I think that is a dangerous move.

I also worry about what that does for local authorities and children who may get a very different service and what that might do if innovation fails. Where does that leave the state, which is the corporate parent, if they introduce innovation that does not then follow a legislative framework and all the policies and practices that underpin that framework?

Chair: Harriet, we are very close to time, so one quick answer.

Professor Ward: Can I add that I absolutely agree with what Kevin says. I think it is a very dangerous move. I think these are very vulnerable children and delegating reduces accountability. We need to have a public body that is accountable for these children. I do not think that should be delegated.

Q79            Lilian Greenwood: A final question. The Department for Education has told us that we recognise there is a lot we do not know about current provisions in terms of fostering. Maybe one-word answers from each of you. What is the most important thing that the Department for Education needs to know about fostering and should be doing as part of their stocktake?

Kevin Williams: I worry about the word stocktake. We have had two reviews of small parts of the care system, the adoption system and the residential system. We need a fundamental review. I hope the stocktake becomes part of that. The issues are too complex to give a one-word answer, I am really sorry to say.

Q80            Chair: That is what we would say, isn’t it: a proper review with stocktaking as part of it.

Professor Ward: It should be the whole care system; it should not just be foster care. It should be the whole system of provision for vulnerable children, including provision for children who remain with their birth parents.

Kevin Williams: It should have started with foster care because that is where the majority of children in the care system are. To have started with adoption and residential care seems to me to be the wrong way round.

Jackie Edwards: I want to change the language because we talk about adoption as the gold standard and fostering as the second-class citizen. When you look at the numbers of children who are adopted each year, it is minute compared with the numbers of children in foster. It has to be given a much higher priority.

Q81            Chair: We are right up to the wire. There are two things I want to ask. One is to Kevin. I would like to know more about the 7,600 so we can interrogate that figure. That would be very interesting to us.

Harriet, I am assuming you have done some work on the balance between judgment and regulation and, if you have, I would like us to be made aware of it. Okay?

Professor Ward: Okay.

Chair: Thank you all very much indeed for what has been a very impressive session. Thank you.

Kevin Williams: Thank you. These have been very complex issues. If any member of the panel would like an individual conversation, please do contact us. We would be happy to give individual briefings.