Thousands of vulnerable children placed miles from home, Children’s Commissioner warns
Fiona Simpson
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Thousands of looked-after children living more than 20 miles from home are being “passed around like parcels”, the Children’s Commissioner has warned.
Some 41 per cent (11,352) of children in care are placed at least 20 miles away from home with 2,075 living 100 miles from home and 963 over 150 miles away, commissioner Anne Longfield warned in a report highlighting the trend of children in care being “moved out of area”.
The number of children living out of their area has risen by 13 per cent since 2014, Longfield warns.
Children moved “out of area” often need to be kept safe from criminal gangs or sexual predators who pose a serious threat to them, the report says.
However, “their vulnerability also means that they are easy targets for exploitation by criminal gangs, who are expanding drugs markets through ‘county lines’ activity into semi-rural areas,” Longfield warns.
In most cases children are placed away from home because “there is nowhere suitable for them to live locally”, Longfield adds saying they are more likely to be placed in a children's home than children who stayed in their local area.
“Many of these children end up going to live in children’s homes run by private companies in cheaper areas,” Longfield said warning that children placed “out of area” are more likely to go missing than those placed closer to home.
More than half of children (52 per cent) living out of their local area have special educational needs and a quarter (24 per cent) have social, emotional and mental health identified as their primary need, the report says.
The report highlights the views of children placed away from home.
One teenage girl living 100 miles away said: “I feel like a parcel getting moved around all the time, getting opened up and sent back and moved on to somewhere else.”
The commissioner has called for an urgent Department for Education (DfE) review into residential care and more incentives to councils to find local homes for children in care.
She said: “The government has a manifesto commitment to review the children’s care system. They need to launch it in the New Year and it must be wide-ranging, independent and lead to concerted action and improvement.
“The present system does provide love and support to thousands of children, but there are also many others who are living very vulnerable lives, many miles away from anyone they know. We have to make the state a better parent for these children.”
Rachel Dickinson, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said: “Many out of area placements are made in bordering areas and this can be a positive thing for children. This reality isn’t reflected well in the report and some of the figures lack context, kinship care and youth custody placements are included here.
“As the number of children in our care increases so too does our need for high quality placements, in the right places. The government has, at times, overlooked its own role in tackling the issues raised here. Placement sufficiency continues to be a key issue for virtually all councils across the country but there is no national strategy to recruit more foster carers, to increase capacity in children’s residential homes or to address geographic mismatch of placements. Other challenges include the fact that councils cannot direct an academy school to admit a child in care as they can a maintained school meaning it can take several weeks or even months to secure a steady school placement.”
A DfE spokesman said: “The safety and suitability of a child’s placement in care is our absolute priority, and moving a child away from home is always a last resort.
“Placements are signed off by directors of children’s services, and Ofsted will rightly challenge decisions if they believe poor decisions are being made.
“We know there are challenges in finding the right placements, and we’ve already pledged an extra £1.5bn for child and adult social services, as well as a review of the system so children receive the best possible care.”
