The betrayal of 60.000 children by daily mail
The Daily Mail 18th September 2006
Read this article by Steve Doughty social affairs correspondent
My comments will follow in a response to this article
60,000 children in care ‘betrayed’ as three out of four fail at school
The shameful betrayal of more than 60,000 children caught in the state care system is exposed today in a damning new report.
It shows that just a quarter of children in care manage to leave school with as much as a single qualification.
And those who are brought up by the state have no more than a 100 to one chance of going to university.
Instead of education, the report found a care home system where the rule is that "the boys do crime, the girls do sex."
The report by leading writer Harriet Sergeant, serialised in the Daily Mail today, points to a system in which half of the 6,000 young people who leave state care every year to make their own lives are unemployed within two years. It found:
A quarter of girls in care have been pregnant by the time they leave and half are single mothers within two years.
Half of all prisoners under the age of 25 have been through the care system.
A third of the homeless are people who were brought up in state care.
Only 60 out of 6,000 young people leaving care each year goes to university. The Government’s target for young people as a whole is that half of them should go to university.
The analysis of the Dickensian brew of official indifference and everyday squalor and violence that haunts the lives of thousands of children in care comes as ministers prepare a Green Paper intended to improve their educational chances.
The plans to be published next month are expected to include new rules to ensure children with foster parents or living in care homes always get their first choice of school, and an ambitious pilot scheme to send children in care to state or independent boarding schools.
But the Green Paper - it will be the fifth major initiative in just five years aimed at improving the pitiful state of the care system - is likely to prove a sticking plaster rather than a solution, the new report suggests.
The report, to be published in full by the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, points to a world in which children trapped in the care system where they are moved rapidly from foster home to foster home without thought for their welfare, where many may have been through as many as 10 schools before they leave care, and where children’s homes are rife with violence and indiscipline.
Miss Sergeant said: "Over-stretched, badly organised, lacking direction and a clear sense of priorities,the current approach to looking after neglected children is patently inadequate.
"The full scale of this failure is rarely exposed in public, with ministers and social services chiefs preferring to drown out any argument with blizzards of statistics and paper policies.
"But the raw experience of those taken into the system points to an expensive disaster which is storing up more problems for the future."
Her report said that the care system costs the taxpayer £2.5 billion a year, or more than £40,000 for each child.
The cost of looking after those who stay in children’s homes is far higher than the boarding fees of the most expensive public schools.
Since 2000 the Government has passed a Children (Leaving Care) Act meant to improve the chances of those leaving care; it has appointed a Children’s Commissioner to look after their rights; put through an Adoption Act intended to find permanent new families for more of them; and passed the 2004 Children’s Act which requires new monitoring and safeguards which have cost each local council an average of £832,000.
At the same time the Government and major charities have campaigned ceaselessly for children’s rights.
New legal curbs on parents’ powers to smack and constant charity advertising about violence against children has developed sensitivity to the point where last week six detectives were assigned to investigate a public horseplay between Cherie Blair and a teenager.
But Miss Sergeant found that little of this has made any difference to the lives of children in care.
She identified a series of intractable difficulties in the system.
Among them is the rights culture that has meant children are subjected to repeated attempts to re-unite them with parents who are incapable of looking after them.
The report said that social workers interpret the Human Rights Act as saying that parents must have the right to form a relationship with their children.
But, she found, even social workers think this is "a crazy system".
The report cites children distressed and traumatised by the experience of meeting violent and drug-addicted parents who in reality have no hope of ever reclaiming custody of their children.
The rights of children also mean discipline is absent and violence among residents common in children’s homes.
Miss Sergeant said: "Care homes have no means of controlling their charges. They are unable to keep young people safe in the home or to stop them wandering off."
One worker told her: "Young people are very up on their rights." Rights culture, she found, has developed to the point where children in care homes have the right to refuse to go to the doctor or dentist. As a result, many of them have bad teeth.
Her report exposed the frequent moves to which children are exposed when in foster care: often for reasons of social services policy, or because a social worker doesn’t like the foster parents, or because a child is sent back to inadequate natural parents, or to save money with a cheaper placement.
Many children are torn from loving homes with highly destructive effects on their lives.
The report also investigates the chaos in children’s homes, where untrained and frequently-changing staff keep uncertain watch on very troubled children, at a cost of up to £6,500 a week for each one - a sum which spent otherwise would be enough to pay for a place at Eton, a full-time personal mentor, and intensive psychotherapy
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On 19th Sep 2006 at 12:14 AM Teresa Cooper said...
After reading this report published in the daily mail I have to commend the Daily Mail for exposing this in the public domain.
Most of us from the care system have struggled and survived when leaving the care system with no help or very little help at all. We have faced being branded publicly by those who were our carers, namely the government. We start off abused in one form or another, then taken into care with a view to protecting us and then face the abuse the system then puts children in care through.
Sexual abuse is rife, phisical abuse is rife, mental abuse is rife which I might add is one of the reasons children are taken away from parents who fail them in the first place, and the government then dares as to condemn those children who grow into adults that go onto to fail not only themselves but in many cases, their children too and the whole process starts all over again. The lack of education and lack of being taught "life skills" and the serious lack of stability also gives them a serious disadvantage when compared to a child from a "normal" home when growing into an adult.
The human rights act could do with a shake up too and sadly the government and social services hide behind this so they can justify whats going on and there is no excuse at all. And in the case of Becky we have already seen a government official use this stance.
Yes the parents can be blamed for part of the initial problem but when a child is put into care who is their parent then? It's effectively the social services/government.
I spent over 17 years in care and I saw the social services as my parents because thats all I knew growing up. They then threw me out into the big wide world and basically said get on with it and we don't want to know you anymore although it didn't stop them from adding to my file. They gave me something like £67 to set up my own future with.
Care workers who abuse hop from one social services to another and in the year 2006 you would think with advanced technology the government would of evolved and yet they are like cave men, and provide a combined system that keeps tabs of all care workers who abuse then hop, abuse then hop. But lets face the ugly truth here, the government doesn't care for the children in care because they are branded, they are the rejects of society and yet those "rejects" are what the government made by their own shoddy system.
So they should accept fault and repair the damage before it is too late.
Children from the care system who try and fight for their rights and the rights of other children are penalised and made out to be "loonies" with hang ups and the police who try and help are quickly moved on so there is no continuity, or the police often think why should they waste their time on a system they know fails, social workers or care workers who speak out are given a life of hell as whistle blowers and are then anialated and shunned from the system they work for. This is all done to prevent the exposure of truth, the real facts behind the scenes of our so called government.The real ugly truth behind the care system that effectively promotes abuse of all kinds and has unfortunatly been part of this shoddy system for at least 30 years and probably much longer.
The reason the government makes life so protract and difficult for anyone wishing to expose the ugly truth of child abuse in the care system is because of money and thier political agenda and so we don't mess up the lush life they are accustomed to but fail to give children in care.
The big wigs will go out of their way to stop this being exposed because of money, power and political power. They care for their big cars, their fancy life, their positions of power and they care not for the hidden children of society.
The government made this mess so lets see them sort out the very large problem they themselves created.
What also makes me so angry are the parents who allow their children to run amock, who don't care what their children are doing at 11pm at night, not caring when their children are asbos and they blame everyone but themselves and not all of those come from the care system and they too need to be brought to task and I welcome parents being prosecuted for not keeping their children under control because parents also have a duty of care whilst they sit indoors procrastinating.