The Narrative Around Adoption Is Changing

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

As the child welfare sector becomes more open to the idea that adoption is not an easy choice, or cure-all, for anyone involved in the experience, a growing number of voices inside the family justice system are inviting discussion on the best way forward for vulnerable children.

McFarlane, a judge now widely considered to be the front runner to replace Sir James Munby as President of the Family Division in July, gave a speech at the NAGALRO annual conference in which he offered support for the view that adoption should no longer be seen as the first option in cases where children could be at risk of harm. He appears to take an enormous amount of credit for the burgeoning movement looking at more open approaches to contact, and at times seems out of touch with modern life – he mentions adoption programmes produced by the BBC and tells the audience that they are available to watch on “the iPlayer” – but we’ll forgive him all that if he can actually effect change.

But it’s what’s going on at ground level which is most fascinating. For the first time, social workers are finding the courage to speak out about day to day practice, with some beginning to question whether what they’ve been told, and trained to do, is actually in the best interests of the children they are meant to be supporting. Jo ward and Joe Smeeton’s paper on adoption, “The End Of Non Concensual Adoption? Promoting the Wellbeing of Children in Care,” was incredibly well received by families across the country, with many praising the social workers’ thoughtful and sensitive approach to adoption.

Another social worker, Simon Haworth, has also questioned the benefits of adoption, and in the process showed the social work community that discussion and debate are vital aspects of developing and improving any system which needs to stay current in order to deliver the best possible service. These brave voices are paving the way for much needed reform and ensuring that wherever possible families are kept together.

There are however, some children who will, for various reasons, need to live with adoptive parents. The latest thinking on this form of support for vulnerable children is also changing, with the once taboo view of contact with birth parents – which has been largely prevented through legislation and policy – now taking a more central role.

A report by the Centre for research on children and families (CRCF) looks at contact after adoption, and concludes that contact with birth families is vital, to allow children the chance to understand themselves better and cultivate their identities. The benefits of contact with birth families extended to the adoptive family as well, with the findings strongly indicating that it improved relationships within the dynamic. Spending time with their biological families also offered children huge advantages, including developing important relationships and being able to be open and honest with their adoptive parents, too.

It’s a slow and winding road, but we are getting there.

Very many thanks to Dana for sharing the CRCF report with us.

adoption

Department For Education Breaks The Law On FOI

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in FOI, Researching Reform

≈ 7 Comments

The Department for Education has broken the law, after it failed to answer a Freedom Of Information request (FOI) about a controversial new body created to regulate social workers. The breach now means that there will be an investigation into the department and its handling of the request.

Before making the FOI request, Researching Reform wrote to the Department for Education to ask for a full breakdown of the management team at Social Work England, the new regulatory body that is set to replace The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).

The Department did not confirm or deny that a management team was in place and refused to offer us any further information on developments at Social Work England, so on 26th February, 2018, we made a Freedom Of Information request and asked for details about the body’s management team and its partners and committee members.

A reply to the FOI request should have been sent by 27th March, however the Department failed to respond.

Government bodies who do not reply within the set time period can be investigated for their failure to reply to requests, and under current legislation, that failure to respond is also breaking the law.

Social Work England has sparked concerns amongst child welfare professionals, with some taking the view that it is part of a wider government agenda to take over the social work sector completely. Currently, the only known member of SWE is Lord Patel, who was formally announced as the organisation’s chair last week.

Researching Reform has requested an investigation into the Department for Education’s handling of the FOI request.

Hot Topic: Media Access To Family Court Evidence

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in Family Law, Researching Reform

≈ 9 Comments

As the family justice system faces renewed pressure to take a good look at its working methods, calls to open up family courts so that journalists can analyse evidence in these cases are coming from home, and abroad.

The President of the Family Division, James Munby, will be retiring in July, and whilst he has become increasingly vocal about the problems inside the Family Court during his term as president, he’s clearly chosen to use his last few months to push for more radical reform. We announced at the start of 2018 that Munby was our judge to watch this year, and he isn’t disappointing.

His recent comments about allowing journalists to have access to evidence in family cases, which he made at a seminar on13th March, have been followed up by another push to allow this access. Munby repeated his stance at a lecture he gave at Edinburgh University last week, telling attendees:

“A vital aspect of the ongoing transformation in the family justice system has to be reform of our still creaking rules about access to and reporting of family cases. Nothing short of radical reform will enable us to rid ourselves of the relentlessly repeated and inevitably damaging charge that we operate a system of private – some say secret – justice.”

Munby isn’t the only one who sees the pressing need to allow evidence to be accessed by the media. Over in Canada, where they appear to be ahead of the curve on this issue, a high profile child protection case is making waves, and not just because the details of the case are controversial.

In the case of JP v British Columbia, a Court of Appeal has granted journalists the right to review affidavits, written submissions, and other materials filed with the Court. The case itself shares many of the same desperate hallmarks of our own family cases in England. After a lengthy trial, Law Diva’s blog tells us that the British Columbia Supreme Court found the following:

“B.C.’s child protection authorities had negligently permitted a father to sexually abuse his children while the youngsters were in the custody of the Ministry. The Court found that the government’s failure to protect the children was “egregious, negligent, and a breach of duty” and government social workers showed a “reckless disregard to their obligation to protect children.””

The expert witness had also lied to the court during the trial. His testimony had played a significant role in the original finding that the father had sexually abused his children. Depressingly familiar too, was the way in which the court ignored due process to facilitate the expert witness’ point of view:

“The legal profession was shocked when the Court of Appeal reviewed the evidence and determined that the so-called expert had defrauded the court. Their awe was not a criticism of the high court’s findings, but that the lower court has been so taken in by Dr. Reeves and the utter disregard for proper procedure.”

It’s time.

Many thanks to Dana for alerting us to the development in British Columbia.

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Question It!

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in Question It, Researching Reform

≈ 13 Comments

Welcome to another week.

As the government looks set to revamp the social work sector (again), different opinions about the child protection system in the UK are emerging.

Ray Jones, a professor of Social Work at Kingston University recently wrote a piece for The Guardian in which he says that the UK child protection system is praiseworthy and shouldn’t be subject to reform. Ray also claims that the UK has the safest child protection systems in the world.

Two days after Jones’ piece was published, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew Davies, spoke to the BBC and called on the government to instigate a “thorough investigation” into councils, police and health bodies, after authorities failed to act in a case of severe child neglect. The children were discovered after a neighbour called the RSPCA, concerned about the welfare of cats inside the home.

Our question this week, then, is just this: do you think the child welfare system is in need of reform?

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Government Creates Best Practice Body For Social Work

25 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 6 Comments

The government has launched a series of measures it hopes will lead to a reduction in the number of children taken into care. A statement released on 20th March also confirms that Lord Patel, a former social worker, will be the head of the new social work regulation body, Social Work England.

The project has been put together by the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Education.

Former Children’s Minister Edward Timpson will be chairing the independent Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel to analyse and share experiences from the most serious child safeguarding cases.

The new measures also include revised standards for social workers to follow, grants for the social work sector, and a new centre to research and establish best practice in social work, with the government facilitating councils who act as early adopters and take on board the findings.

The appointment of Lord Patel as head of Social Work England (SWE) may be an appropriate choice given his social work background. Lord Patel spent three years working as a social worker in Bradford, and an undisclosed amount of time working with vulnerable children, after that.

Patel’s appointment is the only one that has been made public so far. We wrote to the Department for Education asking for a full breakdown of the Management team at SWE last month, which it did not offer. So we sent a Freedom Of Information request asking for that breakdown. We expect a response by the 27th March, 2018.

The announcement that the government will, yet again, be revising social work qualifications and training in order to improve practice misses a fundamental aspect of practice – those social workers who remain unregistered. This was a point we tried to raise in the Department for Education’s recent consultation on regulating the social work profession. If social workers remain unregistered, families and children who experience negligent malpractice have no means of redress, or support.

But perhaps the biggest news to come from the government’s announcement, is the creation of a new centre called the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care which aims to produce a best practice pathway. The government has hired an innovation foundation called Nesta, which promises to “tackle the big challenges of our time.” Nesta’s task is to assist with setting up the centre and ensuring that it is independent and effectively engages the social care sector.

So, who works at the What Works Centre (WWC)? The centre is currently being developed by a large group of organisations so it doesn’t have a set structure yet, although Nesta’s site says that the WWC should become a fully independent entity by 2020. In the meantime, Cardiff University seems to be at the forefront of the research side of things, with several other organisations working in partnership with them.

Once the centre is up and running, its remit will be to:

collate and share existing research, evidence and data
identify and support robust standards of evidence in children’s social care
develop the evidence base by conducting new trials and evaluations
translate existing and new evidence into easily accessible guidance and resources for practitioners
drive and support the dissemination and implementation of findings into practice
support practitioners and decision-makers to understand the importance and utility of research
support the development of a coherent learning infrastructure to foster learning

Nesta’s duties include:

Stakeholder engagement
Research
Testing
Organisational design

The WWC has put together a programme to start the research process off. It involves three stages:

Stage 1 2018-2019: Establishing the baseline. This looks at evidence and practice to see what is being done at the moment to reduce the need for children to go into care.
Stage 2: 2018-onwards Exploratory studies. This stage will look at what practice works.
Stage 3: 2020-2025 Establishing effectiveness. The final stage here will seek to put together a best practice package.

We have campaigned strongly for this kind of project and warmly welcome to the government’s uptake on this.

You can Sign up for news about the Centre to stay up to date with the latest developments.

The hashtag #whatworksforchildren has also been set up, to give Twitter users a way to follow developments and discussion on the centre.

Very many thanks to Dana for alerting us to this project.

Image: Cardiff University

The Buzz

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, The Buzz

≈ 4 Comments

The latest research on child welfare:

Buzz

President Of The Family Division: Give Journalists Full Access To Court Documents

20 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in Family Law, Researching Reform

≈ 17 Comments

In a speech last week, President of the Family Division, James Munby, called on the government to allow journalists to have full access to evidence submitted in family court cases.

Munby gave the speech during an event looking at ways in which social media affects the family courts.

The President also said that secrecy within family courts meant that judges were able to get away with what are sometimes signficant mistakes. Despite suggesting that factors like exhaustion contributed to judicial error, he went on to say that judges should not be immune from criticism, and that journalists should be able to access the evidence in family cases as well as attend hearings, with a view to offering an analysis of what unfolds inside the system:

“The simple fact is that at present journalists can’t do that without access to the evidence and without reporting what went on in court and saying well, this judge seems to be listening to a different witness than I, and the impression I got from listening to this witness was X,Y,Z and the judge says A,B,C. So I think there are very real problems there… We’ve got to be much more honest about this, and if we are honest about it, things go wrong.”

Munby also offered an interesting sentiment about the often confusing and overly complicated legal process in care proceedings:

“I have a terrible feeling that if you actually stopped some of the parents in these care cases as they were going out of court at the end and you asked them what was going on, what’s been happening, what’s the answer, they’d be unable to explain…And that is an indictment of our system, not of them.”

Whilst Munby is pushing to make evidence in family cases more available, he is unlikely to be suggesting that the rights of families and children, including anonymity where appropriate, should be waived in order to do this. At present, there are rules in place which restrict the kinds of information journalists can share publicly, but this latest suggestion from the President is less about exposing vulnerable families, and much more about highlighting the system’s weaknesses.

Researching Reform fully supports The President’s call to make evidence available to journalists, and hopes that this kind of reporting becomes the norm in future.

Munby

More Councils Using Section 20 Arrangements To Keep Children In Care Illegally

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 29 Comments

A damning judgment has revealed that another council is using Section 20 Agreements – which are intended to be voluntary – to force children into care indefinitely.

Herefordshire county council kept a boy in state care for his whole life without getting the consent of a court, which is required by law. The judge identified 14 other children in the council’s care who had been separated from their parents and placed in care for inappropriate periods of time.

In his judgment, Judge Keehan said he had never before come across a situation in which a council had “so seriously and serially failed to address the needs of the children in its care, and so seriously misused, and indeed abused” its statutory powers.

Unlike Judge Keehan, we have often seen Section 20 Agreements being used illegally, across a number of councils. The practice is so common that in 2015, President of the Family Division James Munby, issued a Guidance Note, explicitly forbidding councils from using S.20s to unlawfully detain children in state care. And in April of last year, the malpractice had become so severe, that a collective of child welfare professionals launched an investigation into how Section 20 Agreements were being misused.

The investigation concluded that in many cases featuring a S.20 Agreement, the parents did not have access to free, independent legal advice and there was no court scrutiny of the decision.

Section 20 agreements are meant to be voluntary arrangements between the state, the family and their child, which allows a child to access temporary accommodation where the family are finding it hard to manage their relationship with their child, or take care of them. As these are voluntary arrangements, parents can remove their children any time they wish from the temporary accommodation offered, and children too have the right to leave whenever they want, without notice. However, councils have neglected to tell parents and children about their rights, and have even used these agreements to coerce parents into handing their children over to the state.

This abuse has been made possible because of a lax approach by government in regulating these agreements, and councils wilfully exploiting the loopholes in S.20 agreements to secure the number of children placed in their care. This is particularly beneficial to councils who work to adoption targets, which are financially incentivised.

Despite the obvious flaw surrounding the issue of consent – local authorities are just ignoring the fact that these agreements are voluntary, and failing to tell families this is the case – the Supreme Court ruled in February of last year that councils did not have a legal duty to inform parents that the agreements were not mandatory. Had the judges overseeing this case understood that the duty existed – councils are providing accommodation which is fundamentally a temporary service – they could have stopped this illegal activity by ruling that there is in fact a duty on councils to share this information.

Exasperated with the court’s judgment, families going through the child welfare system decided to take matters into their own hands. Family activist, Michele Simmons created her own S.20 Consent Forms, which have become so popular that they have been downloaded several thousand times since their publication.

This latest case is a sharp reminder that S.20 Agreements are still in desperate need of regulation. If the courts won’t commit to protecting vulnerable families under these arrangements, perhaps the government will consider issuing legislation that ensures all councils must tell parents, and children where possible, their rights under Section 20.

Independent Inquiry Into Telford Child Abuse Confirmed.

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in child abuse, Researching Reform

≈ 8 Comments

Telford’s MP, Lucy Allan, has confirmed that an independent inquiry into alleged child sexual abuse in the town, will be held, after calls from Allan and other politicians to establish an investigation. The abuse, which took place during the 1980’s up to the present day, may have led to as many as 1,000 children being groomed and sexually exploited.

The investigation is likely to be paid for by affected local authorities in the area, after the Home Office declined to fund the inquiry.

It’s not yet clear what form the inquiry will take, though it could be similar in style to Rotherham’s pioneering child abuse investigation produced by Professor Alexis Jay, the current chair of the nation’s independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Miss Allan is keen to use Rotherham’s model as a jumping off point for Telford’s own investigation:

“All parties are now agreed that an inquiry is necessary and this can now go ahead… While it would be expected that such an inquiry will take the form of a ‘Rotherham style’ inquiry, as this is a tried and tested model, there may well be alternative models that would work just as well… What really matters is that an independent inquiry is going to take place. This is vital for the victims, their families and our community. It will enable us to find out why this happened.”

Telford’s MP says that since the abuse hit the headlines, she has been inundated with calls from victims. The scale of abuse in the town has led to the media calling it Britain’s worst ever child grooming scandal.

Image: ITV News

Poppi Worthington Case Ignites Debate On Defendants’ Right To Remain Silent

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Natasha in child abuse, Researching Reform

≈ 3 Comments

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has confirmed that it will not be reopening the investigation into toddler Poppi Worthington’s death. The decision comes after the CPS could not find enough new evidence to press charges.

Poppi suffered multiple injuries, and was sexually assaulted shortly before she died in 2012. The case hit the headlines after a serious catalogue of blunders was exposed, resulting in important evidence being lost or ignored. Justice Jackson ruled that Poppi’s father was almost certainly responsible for her fatal injuries, though he is now unlikely to ever be charged, in large part because of the serious local authority and police failings.

Poppi’s mother wanted to have the case reopened, after three separate judgments confirmed that Poppi had been sexually assaulted before she died. She has also called out the right to remain silent rule, which she says was responsible for frustrating the coroner’s inquiry into Poppi’s case. Under the right to remain silent rule, an individual has the right to not answer a question or specific questions put to them during criminal proceedings, which include coroners’ inquests. The lawyer acting for Poppi’s mother told Sky News:

“[Poppi’s mother] was… left disappointed that Poppi’s father chose to rely on his right not to answer many questions which may incriminate him at the inquest… While she understands he was entitled to do this, she considers that the coroner’s inquiry was frustrated by this.”

The case raises important questions about evidence gathering and getting the balance right between individuals’ and defendants rights as set against the rights of victims. Whilst the right to remain silent protects another concept – innocent until proven guilty – adverse inferences can be drawn if an individual chooses not to answer a question during a hearing. There are specific instances where this applies, and certain conditions need to be met before an adverse or negative inference can be drawn.

The right to remain silent becomes even more contentious within the context of cases which have to rely heavily on verbal evidence from witnesses because other forms of evidence are either severely limited or nonexistent, like Poppi’s case.

Our heart goes out to Poppi’s mother.

Poppi