Call to protect children in care returning home

Returning home to a parent or relative is the most common outcome for looked-after children. Such reunions are generally considered a positive result.

But the challenges facing children who do return home from care are often hidden. A report by the NSPCC last month found that out of 10,350 looked-after children who returned home last year, about half ended up back in care. A third of those remaining at home continued to receive poor standards of care and were in many cases abused or neglected again.

The NSPCC is calling on the government to publish guidance on returning children home from care. It also wants data to be collected on the outcomes of looked-after children who are returned home, and believes families need more support to tackle problems such as poor parenting.

Making the right decision
Tom Rahilly, head of strategy and development for looked-after children at the NSPCC, says keeping children in care is often the best thing to do. “The work we have done and other academic research shows that decisions to return children home do not take account of the evidence about the risks the child will face,” he explains. “And even when that evidence is known, [the right] decisions don’t follow that.”

The NSPCC wants professionals to make greater use of the existing information in children’s case files to identify where families have been in repeated contact with children’s services, where support arrangements have failed or succeeded in the past, and where previous attempts at reunification have been made.

It also wants greater support for those involved in decision making to ensure choices are based on clear evidence of risks to the child, the capacity of the parents to change and relationships between the child and parent.

“In our interviews with social workers, they stressed the need for the supervision of decision making to improve,” Rahilly says. “There was great variation among local authorities about how that decision was taken. Some social workers said it was made as a part of a team and felt supported, but others felt the process was flawed and didn’t involve quality analysis.”

Changes to practice within local authorities will be relatively cheap to bring about, according to Rahilly. However, should more decisions be made to retain children in care, it will have significant cost implications, heaping pressure onto already stretched children’s services budgets at a time when care applications have just broken the 10,000 mark in a single year for the first time.

Nushra Mansuri, professional officer at the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), says social workers already come under pressure to consider returning children home in instances where it may be unsuitable.

“Sometimes the decision is not in the hands of the social worker,” she says. “Local authorities are under such great pressure, if they can see anywhere that resources can be freed up for other children and young people in the system, they will go for it. It’s the age-old problem where resources unfortunately dictate, sometimes at the expense of the best interest decision regarding the child.”

Access to supervision
Debbie Jones, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, agrees that decisions regarding returning children home from care need to be taken “in a supportive environment, where professionals have access to the supervision”.
 
But she rejects the NSPCC’s call for more national data on children returning home. “There is already a sufficiently robust legislative framework placing duties on local authorities to support those leaving care and we do not think that this requires another national data collection,” she says. “Local authorities should assure themselves, and be able to assure inspectors, that children who leave care do so to a suitable environment, with the right ongoing support.”

The alternative to retaining more children in care is providing better support to address the issues that can lead to abuse, neglect or the breakdown of a return home in the first place.

Enver Solomon, policy director at the Children’s Society, says professionals must focus more of their efforts on working with parents. “It is too often the case that services focus support to the child going into care rather than the birth parents,” he says. “A parallel process is needed to provide intensive support to birth parents specifically addressing their difficulties such as mental health problems or substance abuse, and providing them with the ability to be stable parents.”

Developing a new approach