If children in care offend, should we lock them up?

The names of individual children only crossed my desk when children in care had been excluded. As a corporate parent, I always spoke personally to the head teacher, which, over time, had the effect of reducing the exclusion rate. This may simply have been because the schools were trying harder because they knew someone important was concerned. But the effect was real, and many of those children did better than if they had been excluded.

When I became a director of children’s services, I started to have more detailed information about children in care, and to understand their stories and the pressures they faced. I also learned how hard social workers strive to make a difference, but how very hard it is to turn around children’s lives. That’s one of the key reasons why I supported the integrated approach to children’s services, with all agencies – schools, social care, health services, youth justice – being jointly held to account together for outcomes.