Cutting care home offending needs greater focus, says DfE

The Department for Education’s report on behaviour management and reducing offending by children placed in children’s homes, says that partnership working between social workers, youth offending teams, police and independent reviewing officers (IRO) is the key to minimising the risk of children in care being criminalised.

However, the report concludes that while there are examples of good practice where agencies work together in a coordinated way to improve outcomes, this is not happening consistently.

The report states: “Whilst in well-managed children’s homes, child-centred practice helped minimise challenging behaviour and prevent incidents escalating, partnership working to encourage young people to develop positive behaviour and avoid needless criminalisation could be greatly improved.”

Many children in care homes have suffered neglect and abuse, and will have experienced multiple foster placements due to residential care often being used by local authorities as a last resort when other options have failed.

As a result, emotional and anger management problems are common among looked-after children, and the report says care home staff must recognise and understand residents’ needs so that they can spot potential triggers for disruptive behaviour.

The report found that a range of issues influenced whether the police were called to a home when an incident occurred, such as the severity of it, whether it had happened before and what the impact would be on the child. There was evidence that where community police officers had been invited into homes to discuss “low level” incidents this had helped reduce the number of formal calls for help made.

It also recognised how the use of verbal conflict management and de-escalation techniques by staff were particularly useful in reducing the need for physical intervention and defusing situations that could have turned into violence.

The DfE has recommended that measures such as these should form part of a local authority’s corporate parenting vision that is “championed by elected members, officers and partner agencies setting out their commitment to reduce the risk of children being criminalised in residential settings”.

It also calls for the development of multi-agency protocols to reduce offending; for IROs to look at how a home’s approach to behaviour management affects individual outcomes; and for Ofsted to inspect arrangements for reducing challenging behaviour and minimising the potential for criminalisation.

The report pulls together findings from a survey of children’s homes managers, a workshop with practitioners and visits to four residential care homes.