The child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Child protection referrals up 125% – Report
• Judge says recent case shows how exceptional circumstances must be if court is to use its power to dismiss care proceedings without having heard all the evidence
• UK schools, colleges and universities can now apply for funding for opportunities targeted at disadvantaged students

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Review finds potentially 20,000 illegal birth registrations (Ireland)
• O’Gorman says adopted people will get birth certs and other information under new legislation (Ireland)
• Documentary: Dark Secrets of a Trillion Dollar Island: Garenne (Jersey) – BBC Four, March 15, 10pm

Many thanks to TumTum for the first two items.

The Family Justice Council (FJC) hosted a series of conferences last week which appeared to lean in favour of returning to adoptions as the first choice for placements in child protection cases.

The four-day event, entitled “Adoption in the 21st Century”, hosted by the Family Justice Council — an advisory non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice — was described in the invitation as a series of seminars that “explore adoption, not only in England and Wales but across Europe and wider.”

The seminars included a review of Special Guardianship Orders; adoption trends; tracing family members and contact with birth parents; a discussion of the Wales Adoption Cohort Study on early placement success and; testimony from one adoptive parent and one adopted child about their adoption experience.

The conference featured a presentation from Judge Anni Højmark on non-consensual adoption in Denmark, whose government recently announced that it would be prioritising adoption in the country, and that children should be placed in care at an earlier age. As part of that policy, Denmark is now actively trying to increase the number of adoptions within the country.

No standalone presentation looking at consensual adoption, fully open adoption practices or holistic alternatives to adoption implemented in other European states or countries worldwide was offered during the conference, though these issues were touched upon by some panellists who also discussed the tensions between forced and consensual adoptions as part of broader topics involving human rights and adoption trends.

Non consensual adoptions, or forced adoptions are only used by a small minority of countries, while the majority of states implement open or consensual adoptions, and some countries even offer several adoption pathways for families to choose from.

A growing body of research has begun to shed light on the negative long term effects of forced adoptions, and consensual adoptions, on children, their birth families and adoptive families. That understanding led to a gradual shift away from adoption as a perceived ‘gold standard’ in child protection cases in the UK, after landmark judgments and case precedent made in part by Lady Hale clarified that adoption orders in law were a ‘draconian’ measure which should always be a last resort.

If the FJC is pushing for a return to adoptions as the ‘norm’ in child welfare cases, it would make sense.

The conference coincides with ongoing budget cuts to the sector, and a long-established awareness among local authority bosses that children’s services within councils are expensive. Fostering services, in-home support and state-run care homes, while offering children very little in terms of support and protection (another story for another day), have cost the government billions, and councils are now looking for ways to cut back on their outgoings.

Enter adoption.

With minimal costs attached in relative terms, adoption provides the government with the most cost-effective solution, as the ‘burden’ of looking after a child is placed on the shoulders of adopters.

This is of course, a short sighted view. Adoption placements very rarely work for children, and we also know that adoptions break down too. All of this creates a long-term problem for the government, which will then have to pay for life-long medical and psychiatric support for a significant portion of the population who went through Britain’s broken child protection system.

Perhaps the most disappointing feature of the conference was Baroness Hale’s contribution. Hale, whose pioneering Children Act and progressive judgments helped to broaden understanding about how our current child welfare policies often fell dangerously short, was widely admired for her outspoken views and evidence-based approach to child welfare.

But Hale’s speech, dedicated to Bridget Lindley — a groundbreaking family lawyer who believed strongly that the law was a tool for social change — was uncharacteristically weak, only offering a summary of how family has been perceived inside the child welfare sector, and did not once, mention forced adoption and the very real damage it has done, and will continue to do, if the government does push ahead with a drive to adopt.

Links:

• Disrupted Adoptions – What Councils Don’t Want You To Know (2020)
• Adoption in the 21st Century – Invitation
• Baroness Hale’s speech

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Child sex abuse laws extended to cover sports coaches and faith leaders (England and Wales)
• Tusla spent nearly €3.6 million on sending children abroad for specialist residential care (Ireland)
• Study of children joining family in England under the Dublin III Regulation

The Children’s Commissioner has been inundated with emails days after making a call to get in touch with the Office.

Rachel de Souza, who took up the role of Children’s Commissioner on 1 March, asked members of the public to email or call her if, “you can think of an unmet need for a child you know about”, and added, “If you are a child, and you are thinking about writing to us, don’t hesitate.”

Researching Reform shared de Souza’s invitation in a post published last week and included a link to the contact form on the Children’s Commissioner’s website.

The link in the post for the contact form was accessed several thousand times shortly after the post went live, but within 48 hours a growing number of individuals, many of whom were concerned parents with children in care, had begun to complain that they could no longer submit messages to the Commissioner.

Parents reported seeing a “processing” message appear after clicking “submit”, but no ensuing message to say the email had been sent, or any change in the page to suggest the email had gone through.

The Children’s Commissioner promised to look into the glitch on 5 March, after this site posted a tweet explaining what had happened. Following a tweet on 8 March to ask de Souza for an update, the Commissioner confirmed the issue had been resolved.

However in an apparent change to the contact form, a new notice had been added, which can be seen once an email is sent.

The message says, “Thank you for contacting the Children’s Commissioner for England.”

“While we appreciate you getting in touch, we are unable to respond to all correspondence due to the very high volume of emails we receive and limited staff capacity. We will always respond to emails directly from children.”

“All correspondence is read by a member of the Commissioner’s Policy Team. We will be in touch if we need more information from you.”

The notice poses several problems. Many children will be unable to send emails themselves because they will either be too young, unable to access the internet, or too frightened to reach out.

A significant number of parents with children in care are deeply concerned by the way in which their children are being looked after, and are often the only voice their children have. That is because children in care can be wary of raising concerns about the people who are currently caring for them, or the harm they may be experiencing.

And given that the Children’s Commissioner has little to no experience of the care system, reading all of the emails she receives would be an invaluable introduction into the serious problems inside the child welfare sector. These emails are priceless.

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Report: Family law system endangers women and children, report warns (Ireland)
• Free Event: Racial disproportionality in youth diversion
• Law Society president to step down as he faces misconduct allegations

The Court of Appeal live streamed a hearing for a case called M(A child) today, which looked specifically at what kind of access journalists can have to family law cases.

This is what the Judiciary page said about the case:

4 March 2021

NOTE:  THIS IS A LIVE STREAM OF A FULLY REMOTE HEARING BEING HEARD ON MICROSOFT TEAMS

Re: M (a child)

By Appellant’s Notice filed on 21 August 2020, Melanie Newman, in her capacity as a public interest journalist, applies for permission to appeal the order of Mrs Justice Roberts sitting at the Family Division at the Royal Courts of Justice dated 31 July 2020 whereby she refused her application to be provided with permission to access court documents in relation to public law proceedings concerning a child which concluded in October 2018 save for a limited number of documents.

Background:

The child was made the subject of a placement order by HHJ Hess when she was 4 years old. The Court of Appeal quashed the order on 20 February 2018 with the judgment of the Court holding that the judge had failed adequately to engage with the central allegation advanced by the local authority namely that the child was at risk of physical or emotional harm in her mother’s care. The matter was remitted to the Family Court but no retrial took place. Instead, the local authority no longer sought orders separating the child from her mother and with the result that the child  returned to live with her mother where she remains to date.

The Appellant is seeking to investigate the case and in particular to look at how events unfolded which led to a local authority seeking permanently to separate a young child from her mother by way of a placement order, but who, a year later following the quashing of the placement order by the Court of Appeal, withdrew its application for a placement order and allowed the child to return  to the care of her mother where she remains.

The hearing was streamed here.

You can see the list of cases being live streamed by the Court of Appeal, here.

You can also look at data on the Court of Appeal’s Civil Division, here.

We are aware of the notice not to screenshot the proceedings, however there are no children or family members in the footage or any elements in the hearing which could reasonably lead to the prohibition of taking screen shots of this hearing, so we are adding a screen shot below. If the judiciary takes issue with it, we’ll respond swiftly.

The Children’s Care Review, which has been set up to examine the current state of the children’s social care sector, has launched its website and announced the individuals sitting on their “Experts By Experience” panel.

The website offers an introduction to the Review’s work, and the Review’s chair, Josh MacAllister, and provides the latest developments at the Review, much like the current inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

The “Experts By Experience” panel, comprising of 16 individuals who have experience of the care system was announced today, and include Chloe Robinson, a 17-year-old girl who is still inside the care system; Judith Denton, CEO of The Transformed You; Chris Wild, a prominent campaigner for children in care; and Sean Geoghegan, a founding member of the National Association of Young People In Care.

The panel also includes a range of people who have not experienced care directly, and include a former social worker turned adopter and kinship carer; a trustee of the charity Family Rights Group; and a researcher who has advised the current government on policy for children in care.

These appointments are likely down to the government feeling they need to oversee and steer those on the panel, which, as with the child abuse inquiry, could lead to heightened tensions and ongoing conflict within this panel.

The Review’s page for the panel, while featuring a BAME woman at the top of the list, fails to place the children and young men and women on this panel at the very top together, which seems to highlight the government’s and the Review lead’s ongoing deafness to the nuances in the sector.

Joining Chloe Robinson on the panel as a young person in care or with care experience, are: Rhiannon Parkinson, Charmaine Orchard, Asif Salarzai and Jerome Harvey-Agyei.

Another new appointment was also announced. Shazia Hussain, who is a civil servant, will head up the review team which is made up of civil servants from across various government departments but does not go on to say who has been appointed to the review team.

And we don’t mean to be picky, but, terrible URL.

You can access the website here, and read about the “Experts By Experience” panel here.

The new Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, said she wanted to hear concerns held by parents and children about the services offered to children and families, in her inaugural speech.

The statement, which was published on 1 March to coincide with de Souza’s first day as commissioner, said, “If you’re reading this, and you can think of an unmet need for a child you know about, the Children’s Commissioner wants to know. If you are a child, and you are thinking about writing to us, don’t hesitate.”

De Souza also called on child welfare organisations to work together to improve children’s outcomes, and said the commission existed “to help set a direction for you all, for us, working together, without fear or favour, in the interests of children and for the rights of children.”

De Souza’s appointment has sparked criticism from Parliament’s education committee. Her professional experience, much like current Children’s Care Review lead Josh MacAlister, stems from the education sector, and she has almost no knowledge of other sectors within the child welfare system.

Committee members raised concerns over de Souza’s ability to take on the role during the recruitment process last year, citing her lack of experience, and a lack of transparency within the recruitment process itself.

In a letter to education secretary Gavin Williamson, Conservative committee chair Robert Halfon — who did not vote on de Souza’s appointment — said that her evidence to the committee “highlighted several deficits in her knowledge and experience and she will need to address these as soon as possible” and “In particular, we were concerned at the candidate’s apparent lack of knowledge of some areas relevant to her new role. Key among these were in the fields of children’s social care and fostering and adoption, youth services, the youth justice system, child and adolescent mental health and the wider immigration system.”

Ofsted had previously criticised de Souza’s handling of Special Educational Needs (SEN) students, which the watchdog said involved a pattern by the Inspiration Trust — where de Souza has been the CEO — of off-rolling and excluding SEN children in order to ‘turn around’ the schools in her care. De Souza has denied the claims.

Despite these concerns, the committee found that de Souza was a “competent candidate”, and she has now taken up her role, which she will hold for five years.

If you’d like to get in touch with the commissioner to raise concerns about the child welfare sector or highlight a child in need, you can do so here.

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• New laws to protect victims added to Domestic Abuse Bill including non-fatal strangulation offence
• All households with children of school age to get 2 rapid COVID-19 tests per person per week
• UK’s 12th Family, Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) launched in the Midlands