Children In Care Are Being Failed By The State
Students in care achieved, on average, two standard grade passes in 2008.
On Tuesday, 10th March, 2009, former First Minister Jack McConnell said their poor results meant they were consigned to the “margins of society” and a spokesman said, “All children deserve the chance to fulfil their potential and there should be no difference between the chances of young people in care and their peers.”
But this is not just about being marginalised by society but more to do with being labelled by the Social Services. This labelling of innocent children who are victims and vulnerable enables local authority workers to take these innocent children as being nothing much and even neglecting them because they cannot defend themselves, so when it comes to potential these children are not empowered to maximise their potential since children in care are assumed as ‘less capable’ generally. So, when they don’t get the chance to do as well as other children this misleading conclusion appears correct with more children from care doing worse than the poorest within society. If the child doesn’t get the chance it is not a failure and so the facts cannot be used for comparisons since they are comparing children who haven’t been in care who are given much more with children in care who haven’t been given a fair chance.
Statistically, it would be very unusual for all children who were put into care to be less capable than the poorest within society, so for this level of consistency with underperforming there must be other factors independent of intelligence which suppress the development and progress of these children as well as damage their self-esteem.
Some of these children are victims of abuse and because they are labelled by the professionals as ‘round the bend’ to put it politely, staff and other people pay no attention to the calls for help these children are crying out for and consequently the children feel like prisoners, which takes over their way of thinking and they are more concerned with survival than education at this traumatic time in their life.
As you will see from other articles on this website, there are many children who didn’t get support or help to fulfil their ambitions when they were in care or to do well in life but ended up as punch bags for other workers as well as getting abused by other pupils, which staff wouldn’t do anything about to help resolve the problem but ignoring it made the problem fester.
Ministers need to realise that it is nothing to do with being less intelligent since not all children in care are like this, but it is the circumstances they have been put through during their years of development which suppresses the development of children from all levels of intelligence to perform below average, so the way these innocent children who are victims are treated needs to be looked at first and then education in accordance with their abilities comes next. It is no good having better educational facilities for children in care when the circumstances drive their feelings and quality of life into the ground as they are not going to bother with their education in these circumstances.
I am a volunteer teacher and have helped some disadvantaged children become more active with their education since I have managed to engage their minds with how important problem solving and understanding is, and surprisingly they perform much better than the ‘class’ within society they appear to be in or were heading, so children in care need more support in this area to engage their minds in thinking or else a lot of talent will go to waste. Children without qualifications are not children without intelligence – it just needs to be recognised and developed then put to good use.
In spite of helping disadvantaged youngsters, I was once a gifted child with a medical condition and was forced into care for over a year which I hated. It was between the NHS (medical care) and Social Services (lack of provision) why I ended up there. I regularly ran away and threatened to kill myself because of how I was being treated and felt imprisoned but eventually got back into mainstream school. I underperformed much to the shock of people who saw me on top of the class before all this happened, so this is definitive evidence that this experience damaged my education, but it didn’t damage my intelligence as I have put this to other uses such as defence and justice with the experiences and stories I have heard and this has helped me rise above many of these control freaks in authorities.
So I would like to speak on behalf of the many other children who are victims and are having their development suppressed by government officials, bodies and public sector professionals who are not acting in the interest of the child but possibly their own interests as well as being treated like criminals rather than victims. There could be some psychiatrists/psychologists who are using some of these children as guinea pigs for experimenting new drugs on which they get money from the drugs companies for their work – but in experimenting on children are destroying the lives of these children because these children are being used like animals without their consent and irreversible long-term damage can result, but where possible gets brushed under the carpet. It is only through survivors coming forward like Teresa and I who can show this goes on and more needs to be done to prevent it.
Prevention is better than cure but we need to name and shame those who have caused long term damage to children for which there is no cure to the damage caused.
In the Bridgend area of South Wales in 1977 I know of a family where a paediatrician in the NHS who took advantage of their girl who needed treatment to test drugs on her and consequently killed her. The paediatrician threatened the parents with having their girl taken into care if they did not consent to letting the girl have the medical treatment prescribed by him. It is believed that this paediatrician was getting backhanders from drugs companies so he was driven by greed and not concerned for the health of the girl.
The NHS cater for all health issues for all people, whereas Social Services cater mostly for the vulnerable, so if this practice is going on in the NHS, just think how much could be going on in Social Services with all these vulnerable people being targeted by workers motivated by greed and show no real concerns for their care needs. Since these victims are less likely to speak out or be able to defend themselves, there is too much opportunity for these workers to abuse and get away with it since vulnerable people are also less likely to be believed when they tell their stories of abuse.
Teresa and I are two victims who have been abused but had the courage to speak out and be listened to. We need more who have not had the chance to speak out or fear they won’t be believed since people who have weathered the storm are better listeners than professionals who don’t really care. The more we find out the more evidence we have and the greater the chance of bringing this to light.
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