Why it’s time to put a child’s voice into their own records

Imagine, if you will, reading a history of your own formative years, and yet not recognising yourself in the words.

Imagine how much worse this would be if you had grown up in care and were scouring your own records for answers to questions about your life that had burned at the front of your mind for who knows how long, about issues impossible to ignore yet apparently impossible to resolve.

The thing about being ‘in care’ is that the questions all too often don’t stop once you transition into adulthood and, hopefully, independence.

It is extremely likely that someone who has been in care will at least dip into their own records as they try to understand the journey their life has taken them on.

But even those who are familiar with the language of social work may struggle to see themselves in the files and reports.

Two examples burn brightly in my mind, although I don’t doubt that there as many examples as there are people transitioning through care.

The first concerns a social worker who had been talking with a young person who had viewed their own case records and found what they read to be alien.

They said they felt like ‘a ghost in their own files’, a phrase that has, appropriately, haunted me since.

The second example is from a care-experienced teacher of psychology, someone who knows the care environment inside out and is as qualified as anyone I know to talk about the realities of journeying through that environment.

She said she’d spent seven hours reading through her records and, in all that time, found only one line that let her know who she was as a child.

Having opened her records in the expectation they would provide answers, she instead found they made things ‘much more confusing’.

There is nothing unusual in these two stories. A lot of work goes into helping those of us in the care world create better records, and yet somehow we manage to capture the ‘what’ and ‘how’ far more accurately than the ‘who’.

Indeed, it seems we seldom capture the ‘who’. For those desperate to shed light on their years in care, that is a terrible omission.

And, on the face of it, it’s a real challenge for those who create the records. Interpretation, editing, the abilities of the writer and countless other factors conspire to disguise the person being written about, and their truths.

At Mind Of My Own, we’ve wrestled with this problem for some time. Giving young people a voice is central to all we do, and we’ve had to recognise the limitations of an imperfect system.

Until now, that is. We’re partnering with the software experts at Access Group, in a project that adds a young person’s voice – literally – directly into their own records.

We’ll be introducing software that allows us to include their views, wishes and feelings – all inputted directly by a young person into their records.

As well as helping build trust in our systems – if you can’t trust your own voice, who can you trust? – we anticipate that this will guarantee more of the ‘real’ person is included in care records.

When someone goes through their own files, looking for answers about their life and clues to the person they were as they navigated the care system, they will now hear and read their own words – unedited, raw and authentic, hopefully a voice from their own past helping them towards their future.

It’s early days yet but we’re hugely encouraged by reaction to the new approach.

We’ve learned that technology is an extremely effective way of engaging with young people, not least because they often trust their mobile devices more than they trust adults.

Now that technology is improving record keeping and putting a young person’s voice front and centre of the whole process.

The Nobel-winning poet Octavio Paz wrote: ‘Our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.’

That ‘silence of memory’ is something that rings true for far too many who have sought in vain for their own history in official records.

Now we have the ability to put the most important voice into a young person’s story: their own.

I hope – I really, really hope – that, in the years ahead, I will never again hear someone describe themselves as a ghost in their own story, for there is no longer an excuse for exorcising people from their own history. 

Jill Thorburn is a founding director of Mind Of My Own