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Looked-after Children

I regret the fact that boarding provision in state schools was more or less wiped out during my years of working in schools. There were, for example, two state schools in Derbyshire with boarding provision, one of which I worked at. One had disappeared before I started working at that school and the other disappeared a few years later. There is no state school with boarding provision in Derbyshire now. That is regrettable, and a move back in the other direction would be useful. However, I disagree with the idea that provision for looked-after children should be linked only to academies, which make up a tiny percentage of the 3,000 secondary schools in this country. As I said, the jury is out on academy schools; at least a third have had worse results since they became academies. We do not want to pin all our hopes on a totally untried and minority experiment. There are questions about providing enough support for looked-after children who have come from such difficult backgrounds given the numbers of staff available. Having worked in education for a long time, I know about the difficulty of getting access to educational psychologists, for example. In Denmark, there were incredibly well-paid, motivated, intelligent, enthusiastic child psychologists in more or less every meeting we went to, and they provide a great service. In this country, they are as rare as hen's teeth. We have already heard reference to the question of whether an NVQ level 3 should be a minimum requirement for somebody working in a residential setting. The qualifications and pay of social workers are relevant issues, and the Committee is undertaking an inquiry into their training and qualifications. If we are to take this seriously, we may need to emulate many other countries across western Europe that do this so much better. The major unanswered question that came out of the Committee's report and still hangs there, perhaps for a future inquiry, is the balance between adoption, fostering or residential settings as the desired way of dealing with children who go into care, and what ratios there should be between those options. There are big differences between countries in how they approach this and, as we heard from the Chair of the Committee, between local authorities in Britain. Adoption is seen as one route, much more so in this country than in Denmark, where people were desperate to avoid any adoptions because they wanted to maintain the family link for as long as possible, if not for ever. They take a completely different attitude. On fostering, we heard evidence from several young people who, between them, had very long experience of the care system. There was some evidence of good things, but one of them told an alarming story, which was backed up by another, of being in a foster placement where the foster carer regarded it simply as a way of earning money. When there was a Christmas or birthday party, the foster child was not allowed to take part in that family event. There was a shocking example of a foster child having a separate mug in the kitchen because they could not use the family crockery. It seemed appalling that a foster carer was allowed to do that. I must emphasise that those examples are very untypical—at least, I hope so. My wife worked in social services for a long time and undertook a lot of approvals of foster parents and adoptive parents in Derbyshire. I got to know many of them in that way; some are still friends now. I have certainly never come across an example like that in Derbyshire, as an individual through my wife's work or as a politician. It was shocking to hear, only a few months ago when we were taking evidence, that those things were happening. We need to look at the standards and requirements for foster care placements across the country. On residential settings, the old, large, crumbling Victorian institution housing large numbers of children is very much a thing of the past. We saw some good examples in Denmark, but to be fair we saw some in England too, when we visited places just outside London. The nearest residential care home in Chesterfield, which is about a quarter of a mile up the road from where I live, is a modern house that has no more than six people at any one time. That is very much the direction in which residential settings have gone in this country, although there is still progress to be made. Another question raised by the Committee and left hanging is the point at which we intervene, initiate care proceedings, send children back to their families, and so forth. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who is hoping to speak shortly, might disagree with me about this. I am not saying what I would prefer, merely that these are huge questions raised by the Committee's report. In Denmark, the key appeared to be the desire to maintain the family link, even when the child was taken into care. We were surprised to hear—the Chair referred to this example—about a child who was in care because he had been sexually abused by one of his parents, yet those parents were still invited along to birthday, Christmas and end-of-school events to maintain a link with the child, whereas in this country we would tend to cut that link quite sharply. It was suggested that that was one of the main reasons for the success of the Danish system. We should not cherry-pick when we look at different ways of doing things in other countries; we have to look at the whole picture. In Denmark, we saw not only that emphasis on trying to maintain the family link at all costs, but an emphasis on intervening much earlier, with twice as many children per head of population being taken into care than in the UK. Denmark has the highest rate in Europe of taking children into care, so there is a different approach altogether. We saw that all people involved in child care were much more highly trained and paid than those in this country, so the whole system was very different. We should examine the pattern rather than pick out one of four or five matters that were different. We have heard arguments about whether we are too slow to intervene in this country. When the Committee extended its inquiry because of the baby P case, Andrew Flanagan, chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said that children were being left in danger at home. Wes Cuell, the NSPCC's director of children services, said that children""stay in dangerous families and end up getting killed."" An Ofsted review reported that thousands of vulnerable children were at risk because councils did not move fast enough to protect them. Some of the social workers who talked to us said something that I have also heard in years gone by from my wife and her colleagues—that we take too far the approach that families must always be kept together. It was suggested in the inquiry into the baby P case that the emphasis was on the mother's needs and how we could support her, and that we lost sight of baby P. Whether we intervene too late is a huge question that has been left hanging in the air by the baby P inquiry, the Select Committee's report and the evidence from bodies such as the NSPCC and Ofsted. Educational outcomes were referred to earlier. It has been said that looked-after children get a much worse educational outcome than an equivalent 16 or 18-year-old who has had a normal family background and education. A comparison was made with Germany a couple of years ago, but because Germany intervenes sooner, and for a larger number of people, the sample is not comparable. We intervene late and for a smaller, hardcore sample of more damaged and more vulnerable children. Inevitably, their outcomes of any kind, whether alcohol abuse, educational success or mental illness, will be worse than in a larger, more normal sample of children. A big question has been left hanging in the air. I certainly do not expect the Minister to answer it in 30 seconds, as it probably needs a whole new Select Committee inquiry and a national debate. It is whether we intervene too late and whether we put too much emphasis on keeping children with their family at all costs, even when the cost can be death and damage to children that could have been avoided by earlier intervention, as Ofsted and the NSPCC have argued.