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Looked-after Children

Let me make just a little more progress. I want to cover the fundamentals, which are these. First, residential care should be better, and people should be paid and supported better. I do not want to go down the road of talking about social workers too much, but when we interviewed children who had been in care, we found that the problem was the rotation of social workers. There was no one person whom they knew—no person whose face they knew; no one with whom they were familiar or with whom they had a good relationship. We cannot have a system where a child—any child, let alone a child in care—never knows which social worker he or she will meet or when they will meet them. There has to be a consistency of relationship in the caring system. That was one of our sharpest criticisms of the experience that those children had had. Consistency means knowing someone—knowing their face and knowing that if everything went wrong at midnight or three in the morning, there would be someone whom the child could phone whom they knew, respected and, hopefully, loved. That is a tall order, but the Committee decided that we wanted to make a strong point about how key that stability in relationships is.