Young carers and asylum seekers deserve better

At the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, we were “silent”, but busy for three weeks in the run-up to the local elections on 3 May. We are bound by pre-election rules known as “purdah”, a time when public bodies are required to not make public statements on policy announcements, but when lots of policy forming and announcements take place. This proved a difficult time to stay silent given ongoing announcements in Whitehall prompting discussions about children and young people, and how the actions of adults who have the power might rebound on children, who do not. 

The Department for Education published the Taylor report on improving school attendance.  Among things I would normally have publicly welcomed was its recognition that poor attendance and engagement often begin when a child is very young and that once poor patterns are set, the chances of fulfilling the highest aspirations are sadly diminished if a family’s attitudes to schooling are at best off-hand, at worst absent. 

The report calls on us all to understand why attending school sits so low on some families’ lists of things to do. I agree, but I would remind us that the reasons children don’t attend can be complex. Take, for example, those who are principal carers. Ensuring a physically or mentally ill parent, a younger and defenceless siblings – or all of these – are fed, clean, safe and taking their medication could mean a child, worn out with caring that should be provided by services and professionals, is too weary to go to school, but equally wary of telling even trusted adults what is going on at home.

From my perspective, it is a scandal that they are carers in the first place, often with schools ignorant that they are, and themselves unaware they deserve a childhood. Many miss both schooling and life as a child. School absence is rarely as simple as a child turning its back on school. The Taylor report’s suggestion that removing benefits would somehow change their lives, or that of any family struggling to get a child to school, was rejected in the ministerial statement accompanying the report. I welcome that rejection. The further impoverishment of people in dire straits appears seductively easy to propose to policymakers, but it is both negative and deeply unimaginative.

Invasion of dignity
Before purdah started, the other UK children’s commissioners and I joined the chorus of protest that, with less than 24-hours notice, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) intended to trial dental X-rays to “prove” the ages of unaccompanied asylum seekers assessed as over 18, but claiming to be children – supposedly with its subjects volunteering. Guarding the borders is a necessary activity for any government, dealing with asylum seekers being part of it. But dental X-rays invade both personal space and dignity at the best of times. Their reliability in determining age is questionable, given that dental maturity depends on general rates of maturation, and on nutrition in childhood and adolescence. In these cases, there is no medical reason for them. They would be administered on the basis of their claim to be children, when somebody in authority deems they are adults. The protests were loud, sustained and came from many quarters. Prior to the end of purdah, the UKBA announced the trials would not go ahead, at least for the time being.

Purdah provides an opportune time to pause for further thought on progressing our own activities. It is a time for work behind the scenes and away from the public eye – but never for time out. 

Maggie Atkinson is the children’s commissioner for England