Uncompromising ambition

Over the past year, Martin Narey has come in for his fair share of criticism. He has been described in “unrepeatable” expletives and told to “rot in hell” by angry parents and social workers, he says. As the government’s adoption adviser, his recommendations to increase adoptions by slimming down assessments and relaxing rules on racial matching have proved deeply controversial.

Sitting in a small glass studio at the Department for Education in Sanctuary Buildings, Westminster, Narey has just recorded a separate interview with CYP Now – available as a podcast on the department’s own website and via cypnow.co.uk – about arguably his most contentious proposals to date.

The interview coincides with the launch of two discussion papers calling for views from the sector – one on the issue of siblings in care, the other on contact between looked-after children and their birth families.

The paper on siblings says there should be more flexibility in separating siblings; the one on contact suggests reviewing legal duties to promote contact between children in care and their birth parents.

“I was director-general of the Prison Service for seven years, so I’m used to dealing with abuse,” Narey says smiling. “I’ve had to accept that some of the abuse I get is from people who have had their children taken away. I don’t doubt for one moment, whatever their inadequacies, that they love their kids.”

More frustrating, he says, is when professionals in the sector accuse him of favouring adoption over other solutions for children in care.

Constructive criticism
“I’m very happy for anything I’ve ever written or said to be criticised or challenged,” he explains. “But I find it a bit tight when people criticise me for things that I’ve never said. Quite recently for example, Grandparents Plus suggested that I have a downer on kinship care. That is absolutely not the case.” Narey insists that there is an urgent need to make kinship care more affordable, for grandparents in particular.

“I believe that first you try to reunite families, second you go to kinship carers – and I don’t mean an uncle three times removed that lives in Somalia (because I have come across a case like that) – and only then do you look for adoption,” he says.

Being the government’s adoption tsar is a part-time job. In that capacity, Narey has spent around 90 days visiting local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies, judges, magistrates, academics and ministers since he took up the post in July 2011.

“I’ve tried to be very open with people,” he explains. “I’m going to Southend and Hampshire next week. With both, my opening questions will be: what are we doing that you like, what are we doing that you don’t like and, most importantly, what ?have we missed?”

The answer to that last question some months ago was “contact”; likewise, for the issue of siblings in care. In fact, Narey says, all his proposals result from suggestions put forward to him during visits. His excursions have also yielded many examples of excellent practice, he adds.

“For example, my visit to Somerset Council was unusually at the invitation of the chief executive, not the director of children’s services,” he says. “She rang me just after receiving an outstanding Ofsted report and said she wanted to know whether they could do anything else to improve. Rather than being complacent about Ofsted, I thought that was a fantastic approach.”

The most worrying thing he has witnessed, Narey says, are problems relating to delays and assessments for prospective adopters.

“The first thing I told the children’s minister Tim Loughton was that we should urgently reform the assessment process,” he says. “It takes a terrible amount of time, is repetitive, lacks analysis and is very off-putting to adopters. We have seen in the past few months many more children being cleared for adoption by the courts, but because of the crisis with the assessment process, we have a real worry on our hands now.

“My estimate is that we have about 4,000 children right now cleared for adoption in the UK. We have some hundreds of parents cleared to adopt them. We need to bridge that gap urgently.”

Important development
He believes the launch of a new assessment process in 2013 will be the “single most important development” of his reforms, vehemently denying that making checks quicker will remove safeguards for children.

“I actually think the new assessment process will be more rigorous,” he says. “We should never confuse depth of paperwork with depth of analysis. The current assessment process and the paperwork is bloated.

“As part of the existing assessment process, a social worker has to go into a would-be adopters garden, check whether there is a trampoline and then tick a box to say whether or not that trampoline has a safety net. People think I’m making that up, but I’m not.”

One constant criticism that has faced the coalition since the spotlight was thrust onto adoption is that more should be done to support families before they get to the point at which their children are taken into care.

“Since the late 1990s, there has been a massive investment in early intervention,” Narey says. “We now have Sure Start for example, of which I am a great fan. I learnt a great deal when I was chief executive at Barnardo’s about how early intervention can work. But also I learnt that it can’t always work. The system is gripped by an unsustainable optimism about the capacity of parents to recover and provide decent care to children.

“Although we should be concerned about the number of children in care, we need to look a bit beyond recent trends. We have 66,000 children in care in England. In the 1990s, we had 90,000 children in care, so historically the children-in-care population is relatively low.”

Narey believes that the government’s troubled families agenda will go some way to addressing the intergenerational cycles of dysfunction that cause many children to end up in the care system. And he believes that Louise Casey, programme lead of the scheme and Labour’s former “respect” tsar, is the right woman for the job.

“I’m a big fan of Louise,” he says. “She is a misunderstood woman. She is tremendous in my view. I think her analysis of the intergenerational aspect of neglect and abuse is absolutely true.”

Narey says he had a “little Twitter squabble” a few weeks ago over exactly the issues that Casey raised in her most recent report.

“Someone attacked something I’d said about the intergenerational nature of troubled families,” he explains. “I said that when I ran the Prison Service, I used to see young people who had never worked and whose parents had never worked. At Barnardo’s, I saw children who were leaving school and weren’t going to work, and neither their parents nor grandparents had gone to work.

“Someone disputed this, but I promise you it’s true. Breaking that cycle is hugely important. Much of the work that I did at Barnardo’s was about trying to get young people into employment and I hope that remains a big plank of the troubled families agenda.”

In terms of policy changes, he says the adoption reforms are “pretty much done”.

“I still want to do more work with the Department for Education on how we get greater involvement from the voluntary sector, particularly on the recruitment of adopters,” he adds.

“I’m also doing a piece of work at the moment on how you might allow adopters a greater initiative on matching. I’m very excited by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering’s experiments with adoption parties, for example.”

He admits that his siblings and contact proposals will rouse strong emotions, polarise views and put him in line for more disapproval from some quarters. But he is resolute that the discussions must be had. “You must never compromise,” he says. “You must do what’s best for the child.”