Written evidence from Dr Sylvia Schroer and Julie Samuels (MPhil) (CFA0095)
HOUSE OF LORDS CHILDREN AND FAMILIES ACT 2014 SELECT COMMITTEE INQURY
Dr Sylvia Schroer and Julie Samuels (MPhil) - Written Evidence
The Children and Families Act 2014
Overview of Individuals Submitting Written Evidence
Dr Sylvia Schroer is the co-founder of Special Guardians and Adopters Together (SG&AT) and Julie Samuels, the Head of Research (voluntary position). SG&AT is a group of adopters and special guardians working together as a collective voice to campaign for better understanding of the needs of our children and families, to improve services, support and legislation that is designed to meet these needs and achieve positive change.
Since 2018, the SG&AT lived experience research programme has explored the health and wellbeing of parents and caregivers learning about the most significant challenges for parents/caregivers; school exclusions; building trust with special guardians and adopted children; partnership working; birth family contact; birth parent support; accessing and receiving support for adopters and kinship carers and explored stakeholders’ views about policy evaluation. It is from this lived experience perspective that SG&AT is able to provide a powerful and authentic collective voice that offers unique insights, which can contribute to research and policy change within the field of adoption and special guardianship.
Dr Schroer has a PhD in health research. Her research interests are on the impact of care separations on adopted and special guardianship children and families when children have suffered trauma and neglect and become harder to care for in adolescence. Ms Samuels is the author of Adoption in the Digital Age: Opportunities and Challenges for the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her research interests include the transformation of adoption due to the Internet, digital technology in child development, neurodiversity, narrative and digital life writing.
Why we are responding to this call for evidence
We are responding to the call for evidence because we feel that there are manifold challenges faced by adoptive and special guardianship children and families, which are extremely complex and require further legislative and policy intervention and support. Often “Negative experiences, particularly when many respondents report experiencing similar difficulties, are invaluable to identify systemic problems and failings where policy reform is most required and are of much interest” (2019: 6). It is through understanding where, why and how the system is failing those children it is intended to protect that there can be ethical and supportive policy and governance.
Whilst the implementation of the Children and Families Act 2014 has been largely successful, its areas of failure continue to leave many children vulnerable. The vulnerabilities of these children when support mechanisms are inadequate can have severe and negative lifelong consequences and unfortunately there are many adopted children whose parents and guardians continue to feel unsupported by social services. Parents and guardians struggle to maintain a safe environment for themselves and their child/ren due to the impact of the child’s early life trauma (Elias 2018, Bulman 2017). SG&AT’s research supports these findings (2019).
For adoptive families, continued lack of support can swiftly result in a crisis situation, particularly during adolescence and it is during these transitional years that most often re-enter the care system. The DfE commissioned research by the University of Bristol (Selwyn et al, 2014) found “that teenagers were ten times more likely to experience an adoption breakdown” (Donovan, 2014). Risk factors associated with children prematurely leaving the adoptive family home were identified as the child’s pre-care experiences of abuse and neglect including child sex abuse, the number of moves in care, older age at placement, a difficult adoption journey and/or lack of support, parents often feeling blamed, and children displaying extreme behaviour that can lead to criminality (Selwyn et al, 2014: 284). For those with parental responsibility, “confidence and resilience, in what is for some, a challenging and demanding role, can easily be eroded by professionals who take a critical approach with us, and/or have poor understanding of the realities of parenting or caring for a traumatised child” (SG&AT 2018). An important question to consider is why are some parents and guardians who need help in what can be an incredibly demanding role ending up feeling unsupported, criticised and blamed? Discussions between those with parental responsibility and the professionals within social services that they reach out to for support may provide a solution to this issue but may also be unproductive and the disputes become intractable with polarised views. Parents/guardians may be confronted with organisational defensiveness and closing of ranks.
Selwyn et al 2014 estimated children prematurely left the adoptive family home in 3% of cases. However, the true figure, nearly a decade later, may be higher and there is uncertainty about it because of the way data is collected and monitored by the DfE, with data missing on the legal status of 3-4k children entering care each year (SG&AT, 2022). Legislation and policy reform appear to have made no discernible improvement to what appears to be a tide of children, mainly teenagers, re-entering care from adoption. What does it say about the government’s commitment to post adoption and special guardianship support that there is no accurate data on the number of children who re-enter care? How and what changes to legislation can revert this increasing trend? To what extent is current legislation and policy supporting or failing these children who go back into care from adoption and special guardianship?
One of the most controversial aspects of adoption is the severing of the connection with their birth family - this connection is an integral aspect of the child’s identity development. Whilst it is recognised that “An ongoing challenge for adoption service providers is how to keep abreast of reports by adoptive families of contact that has not been managed” (2018: 11), one must ask what can be learned from special guardians about their experiences of direct contact with birth parents and other family members, given this is often ordered by the court. A recent pilot survey (April 2022) has indicated that direct family contact is one of the most stressful aspects of special guardianship, and for adopters, direct birth family contact can put children and young people in harm's way when it is unsupported and unplanned. Evidently, “Due to concerns about contact that is not managed between children that have been adopted and their biological family, proposals for more openness within adoption necessitate serious consideration” (2018: 1).
Other concerns about vulnerabilities of children who are adopted or under special guardianship orders to emerge from SG&AT surveys, and discussions, are centred around the provision of support, and contact with birth, adoptive and special guardianship families, particularly when the children are no longer able to live within their families. Findings from the 2019 SG&AT survey noted, “Parents would like to continue to support the child in care and ensure they obtain the help they need, which made living in the family home unsafe” (2019: 5). One must ask, how can this be achieved? Are the legal frameworks that are used (section 20, public law orders and in rare cases wardship) working in the best interests of children who re-enter care from adoption and special guardianship?
Post adoption support
There are many families fortunate enough to be receiving appropriate information, budgets / financial aid and support to assist them post adoption. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons there are still families unable to access support, therapy or funding to improve the long-term outcomes for their children. The assessment undertaken by children’s social care to determine the support required does not guarantee that support will be provided. As a direct result, families already in a fragile state can suddenly reach crisis point without ever being allocated the support they often desperately need. The ASF (Adoption Support Fund) is not set up to provide crisis intervention. Moreover, the ASF is only one aspect of the support that is needed. Still today, Special guardianship families where children were not PLAC (Previously Looked After Child) cannot access the ASF. In April 2022 the eligibility criteria were amended so that children who had re-entered care from adoption could access the fund regardless of the local authority’s intention to reunify the child with their adopters. Are such disparities between special guardians and adopters divisive when they undertake the same parental responsibility?
The police remain the only safeguarding agency that offers effective 24/7 crisis intervention. That said, police interaction raises concerns about trauma fuelled behaviour being viewed through the lens of adult criminality in children and young people whose developmental age may be far younger than their chronological age. Many of the children have ‘hidden’ disabilities with formal diagnoses including ADHD, Reactive Attachment Disorder, FASD, PTSD, chromosome disorder and Autism. How equipped are the police to support these children? What are the consequences when the police do not sufficiently factor in a child’s disabilities or the child’s early life trauma? Will adopters be expected to prosecute the children they hoped they would achieve support to continue to parent?
Teenage years are a time when most children push the boundaries with parents. For teenagers that have experienced early life trauma and continue to live with the consequences, the challenging of parental boundaries may have adverse consequences for the child and family. Parents can often find themselves in conflict with agencies and professionals that they turn to in the hope that they can work in partnership with to achieve the best outcome for the child. Evidence collected via the Connection Survey suggests that there is no partnership working under a full care order and partnership working is not as it should be under Section 20 in adoption and special guardianship.
Respite is a cornerstone of support and is available to foster carers, but for adopters and special guardians it is often extremely hard to obtain. In 2018, 73% of adopters and 78% of special guardians reported they had no access to respite. Unfortunately, many parents and special guardians are left with no option other than to temporarily place the children into care to access respite under Section 20, to safeguard themselves and the child’s siblings. Concerns were raised and recommendations were made about the use of Section 20 for respite in adoption (Selwyn et al 2014: 289) but as yet are not fully addressed by policy makers. The Public Law Working Group continues to recommend the use of Section 20 for this purpose in its published guidance.
For adopted and special guardianship children, returning to the care system, even temporarily, has the potential to destabilise and significantly harm the health and wellbeing of the child. Importantly, there is still no guidance for the reunification of children with parents and guardians who are not a source of harm to their children. Selwyn et al, 2014 recommended that reunification should never be ruled out in adoption. Under what legal framework should reunifications with adoptive families be done? Reunification with birth families is often under a supervision order, but does this public law order provide support and should it be used for adoptive families after a care separation?
The adopted child who has re-entered care is extremely vulnerable and may be drawn to seek re-connection with birth family members. Young people living within their adoptive family may also feel a pull towards their birth family and seek re-connection through social media. Because of this there are numerous questions to be answered, including - Are reunifications between the adopted child and their birth families a positive experience for the child? How are local authorities supporting such reunifications? What support is available when reunification is not a positive experience / in the best interest of the child? Research is needed to answer these questions.
Adopters and special guardians in court proceedings post the order being made
From the cases that continue to be reported, the family justice system is often viewed as adversarial. Unfortunately, it is divisive of parents and children when it is the parent who is at risk of harm from the child. It is Kafkaesque when a parent is made to feel inadequate and viewed as a significant source of harm to the child who they seek help to raise. There will be many cases of this nature that go under the radar because the adopter(s), temporarily at least, cannot continue to live with a child who is endangering them or their other children. For adopters forced into this situation, there is effectively no alternative but to accept the care order since it may successfully be argued in court that the case has met the threshold of ‘beyond parental control’. Does removal of parental responsibility in such cases leave the child with no one to fight for them?
The House of Lords Select Committee on the Children and Families Act 2014 has questioned whether legal aid restrictions and the criteria for the instruction of experts are problematic. From the perspective of many adopters and special guardians, these are two extremely challenging issues. For adoptive parents and special guardians who find themselves in the situation where they need legal help and representation, but the threshold for legal aid means divesting themselves of their personal assets, they must make stark choices. If they choose to represent themselves, they may not have the skills and understanding of the law to achieve the best outcome for the child. Regarding experts, much can often depend on the position of the Cafcass guardian and other parties, and it can be challenging for a parent litigant to argue successfully that an expert is necessary when other parties, with legal representation, contest.
What needs to be done?
Within the Children and Families Act 2014, there are many complex issues. To resolve these concerns requires stakeholders from all perspectives to bring their views to the table. We do not have the answers but feel that the focus needs to be shifted onto those for whom the system is not working to create beneficial change for all. Children who re-enter care from adoption and special guardianship, through no fault of their own and when parents and guardians have done the best they can, potentially offer tremendous opportunities for learning. Understanding how to help these children and families may bring about a better, trauma informed and less adversarial legal framework for all.
May 2022