Welcome to another week.
A report by Oxford University’s Rees Centre, based on several international studies looking at placement and outcomes of siblings when they are fostered highlights some serious concerns about the separation of brothers and sisters in social care.
The findings support current government policy which is that siblings should wherever possible, be placed together.
The report tells us that about 19% of children and young people entering care, assessed as needing to be placed with siblings, are placed apart from them. It also offers a call to action, urging social workers and fostering providers to focus on facilitating sibling placements.
For Social workers –
Involve young people more in placement decisions. Involving young people in their placement
decision leads to better outcomes and this applies equally to sibling group placements.
For Fostering providers –
Recruit foster carers who are able and willing to foster sibling groups, such as those with greater housing capacity, and those with more experience in caring for multiple children with a range of needs. Foster carers should help facilitate contact between siblings placed apart where appropriate.
Identify incentives for foster carers to take sibling groups. Consider financial benefits, training and adequate support.
To help inform service planning, consider the developing body of evidence around the impact of
intervention programmes designed to support siblings in foster care. The intervention studies in this review show promising early findings in relation to the greater frequency of sibling co-placements, but also improved quality of the sibling relationship for children in foster care.
We think these suggestions are in the main positive, however the offer of financial incentives remains, to our mind, a problematic solution and one we have written about many times in relation to different child welfare topics.
Our question this week then, is this: do you agree with all the suggestions above, and do you have any of your own you would like to add?
Thank you to the National IRO website for sharing this report.
Researching Reform 
It may be government Policy to keep siblings together but it certainly is not “social worker Policy”.They split them up whenever possible to crush sibling joint opposition to their transfer from loving parents to strangers doing it for money ! Even Narey ex Barnardos and chief government adviser on such matters has said it is better to split them up ! Divide and rule seems to be the order of the day !
Don’t believe me?Then read this……….
By Hannah Richardson
BBC News education reporter
Brothers and sisters facing adoption should in some cases be split up for their own benefit, the government’s adoption adviser has said.
Martin Narey said the presumption that siblings are kept together can sometimes “disadvantage children”.
There are too few adopters willing to take brothers and sisters together, he said.
He also warned that keeping siblings together may not always be in the interests of individual children
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Martin Narey can only be described as a despicable excuse for a Human being and is obviously speaking for the preservation of the Evil industry Forced Adoption.
i wonder how he would feel if he had it done to him!
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I wish social workers, the courts and local authorities would take notice of the concerns and suggestions of therapists who work with the victims of the high-handed rulings meted out as a result of the all too often cavalier attitudes of social workers who are convinced only they know best.
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Reblogged this on tummum's Blog.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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“highlights some serious concerns about the separation of brothers and sisters in social care.”
This is the norm where Social workers are grinding for an Adoption order. children are being Unlawfully separated from eachother and their ties severed from all their family members so they cant air their thoughts and feelings about whats going on. we know this to be true when we had a NYAS member ask the S/worker to refer our son who has been missing from contact for over 2 yrs to them so that he can have a voice. the S/worker declined. the NYAS person was not happy at all. it suggest they are deliberately denying access by anyone not inside their SS circle of control. this is to make shure he never gets to talk to anyone who is not on their side.
they ignore FOi requests re Adoption targets.
Corruption is widespread but how they never get looked into is a total mystery.
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