Children and Families Bill must heed children's views

If and when it becomes law, it will change how they are supported, kept safe, treated and educated if they have special educational needs (SEN) or disabilities, and hopefully improve how their lives might be made stable if they have not been to date. ?

The bill seeks to change how quickly and flexibly both fostering and adoption are done, and how children affected by either of these life-changing interventions should fare. It proposes action to follow up on the SEN Green Paper. ?

It also attempts to ensure, when parents choose to separate or divorce, that for their children’s sake they access structured mediation as part of the process. Specifically, it proposes strengthening the presumption that children whose parents separate have robust arrangements for contact, and a positive experience of contact with both parents, when it is safe for the child. This includes unresolved disputes when the court directs contact. ?

This is a bill that seeks both to support rights, and to do things right, for children. They need their parents, school, social and health services, courts and the judiciary, and society at large, to stand up and act on their behalf. ?

So far, so good. Given that I am England’s statutory champion for the rights of the child, am I pleased? Do I approve? As ever in these matters, I have to say that it depends. This is a multi-faceted bill. A lot rides on getting it right. On my website, there is a children’s rights impact assessment on parts 1 to 3 of the bill. There is much to welcome in it. For example, if they are implemented, the changes to SEN provision have much to commend them. Too many children and families have waited in long and complex queues to get what they need and deserve from the systems designed to support them, but that too often deny them that help. The changes will only work if they are implemented by those in care and health, as well as those in education.

Children’s views vital
Children and young people advising me on the bill have said that whatever the system for SEN, there must be an end to children with special needs being singled out for bullying by their peers, sometimes left to flounder by the adults meant to ensure they thrive. They have been equally emphatic about the other parts of the bill. ?

These children say, and my office’s impact assessments reinforce their message: yes to keeping good contact with both parents, when it’s safe for me, but not when I become a parcel or a pawn in an adult fight that denies my rights as a child. Yes to faster adoption, but not by riding roughshod over my need to understand what is happening and why, and what this momentous change means for my birth family. Yes to fostering that leads to adoption, but not on a track that is so fast that I forget my past and my past loses me. Yes to finding a loving adoptive match for me as a child, even with a family from a different ethnic or cultural background, but not at all costs, and never without trying for a match “that understands and hears me, and takes proper notice of who I am and where I came from, as well as where I’m going”. ?

Those words from children helped all of us at my office to think through what the bill will mean for children. They say what lawmakers must hear as they make decisions on a law that will stand for years to come. Better get it right!

Maggie Atkinson is the children’s commissioner for England