Incoming children’s residential care regulations will soon require providers of supported accommodation to register with Ofsted in order to offer placements to 16- and 17-year-olds in local authority care. The requirement, which is due to come into effect from 26 October, was one of the measures announced following the Care Review, but it stopped short of an outright ban on such provision for under-18s which many campaigners have called for.
Under the new requirements, providers will be subject to Ofsted registration and inspection, and will need to meet a raft of new quality standards, though these are less stringent than those used for “standard” children’s homes.
Ministers say the changes are aimed at improving standards of placements and, in turn, children’s outcomes and life chances. However, some sector experts warn that the changes may prompt existing supported accommodation providers to close their settings, resulting in reduced capacity across the system.
In CYP Now’s latest video debate, editor Derren Hayes welcomes a panel of experts from the children’s residential care sector – Mark Kerr, Rebekah Pierre and Alex Garvin – to discuss whether the changes will help to improve provision and outcomes for children in care.
Watch the full debate on CYP Now's YouTube channel.
PANELLISTS
Mark Kerr is deputy chief executive of The Children’s Homes Association, which aims to drive excellence in residential child care through collaborative working. Kerr has experience across research, policy, service development and improvement, working directly with providers, local authorities and stakeholders.
Rebekah Pierre is a professional officer at the British Association of Social Workers, a membership organisation offering services that support more than 22,000 social workers in their careers. Pierre has a background in both journalism and child protection work, as well as being care-experienced herself.
Alex Garvin is a director at ILEA Palm Care, a private residential care provider with one home in Shrewsbury. The provider specialises in caring for emotionally vulnerable and behaviourally challenging children and bases its practice on the values of unconditional positive regard for the individual, equality in relationships and the same life chances for all.
CYP Now: Will Ofsted registration and the new quality standards deliver the improvements needed?
Mark Kerr: In the short term, no. I don’t think the intended outcomes are going to be achieved because of the funding environment and the current system pressures that are affecting all forms of care – residential, regulated children’s homes, foster care, and now the 16-plus provision.
We have a recruitment crisis that’s very endemic, and it’s paralysed the whole sector. For policies to be successful, you need to ensure that they are implemented at a time where they’re going to have the most chance of success.
We’ve been making calls to government to support sector-led recruitment campaigns, but there’s been no support to date, despite a wealth of support offered to foster care and a significant amount of money given to adult social care.
There are also not enough regulated children’s homes. As a care-experienced person and a child-centred professional, I’m all for raising standards and improving outcomes. My fear is that there’s going to be unintended consequences, because of the impact on local authorities, with sufficiency as it stands.
Rebekah Pierre: My answer is very simply no. I speak as someone who lived in an unregulated accommodation setting myself at that age. Also, my background is child protection social work and I can say I have never met a 16- or 17-year-old who are realistically capable of keeping themselves safe.
The risks are clear, we know that children in these settings are more likely to experience child sexual abuse, poor mental health, and go missing. One statistic that stood out to me, is that 30 per cent of children in these settings go missing, compared to 12 per cent of those who aren’t – that’s almost three times as much.
If we look at serious case reviews involving children, there have been preventable deaths, particularly where there’s been a low level of adult supervision. And children have died because simply they’ve not had access to medication or regular medical reviews.
It’s clear to me that the government standards of what is good enough or acceptable is nowhere near what many of us in the sector feel.
Alex Garvin: I don’t understand why supported accommodation has a different set of guidance and statutory legislation. I think there lies the foundation of the problem. You’ve got people thinking that suddenly, the child doesn’t need that support post-16.
They go into supported accommodation [for] potentially two years, and then when they hit 18, they enter the world with not a clue of how to support themselves. That shouldn’t be their responsibility – we’re there to make sure that they’re ready.
CYP Now: What might the impact of the new requirements be on local authorities and existing providers? Might some exit the sector?
Alex Garvin: Many local authorities are struggling with their finances, and sometimes they don’t have a choice – they have to go with an accommodation that is financially more viable. So, I suspect that they’ll have a 16-year-old that should be in a residential children’s home, that won’t be placed there, they’ll be placed in supported accommodation – they might only last a month or six months or two years. Ofsted won’t know about it because they’re not inspecting them that regularly.
Mark Kerr: It was always a risk that we’re going to end up with a two-tier residential sector, with the newly regulated, semi-independent and supported housing becoming a much cheaper form of residential care. But as Alex rightly highlights, with the pressure at the moment on local authorities, our message to them is just spend what you need to – and the government is going to have to bail you out. Because the reality is that there’s an inverse relationship between socio-economic circumstances in society and demand on social care.
Rebekah Pierre: Going back to the question of whether these regulations could make some providers walk away – it is entirely possible. However, if providers are at risk of pulling out and there’s that lack of accountability and commitment to children, then the question is were they really right for the sector in the first place?
Shouldn’t the government be pivoting and encouraging local authorities to invest in their own homegrown accommodation?
At the moment, local authorities are bound by very profitable accommodation [providers] that have a monopoly. I think that the government has a responsibility here. It needs to foresee these risks that none of us in this room can do anything about and prepare for them and invest.
The fact that £143m is being thrown at these [quality] standards, without a contingency plan or without any of these risks being factored in really shows that its priorities are not in the right place.
I would also say that if regulations are off-putting to providers, that in itself is worrying, because these standards are lukewarm anyway. You know, if you look at Ofsted, and how stringent they are with school settings, foster carers and others, the difference is absolutely vast.
CYP Now: What key changes are needed to improve things so that the regulations benefit the sector and improve outcomes for young people in care?
Rebekah Pierre: I think fundamentally to treat all children equally. When children enter the care system, often the only thing that they have in their hands, are their rights. I’m extremely suspicious of any policy or regulation that weakens children’s rights. These proposals are a clear example of that. As Alex said earlier, children at 16 and 17 need more, not less support. There’s an awful lot of adultification here, in not actually recognising that under UK and international law, these are children.
Mark Kerr: Local authorities need to be properly resourced to deliver their statutory duties and go above and beyond that. Local authorities now struggle to deliver their statutory duties. There’s lots of new stuff that came out of the Care Review, but we’ve lost the universal services that local authorities used to provide that were preventative, which I think explains the massive increase in the numbers of children in care. We need to try and work out how we keep children out of care, and that requires well-resourced local authorities.
Alex Garvin: I think it comes back to early intervention to prevent young people entering into the system. Labour implemented so many good policies and places where families could get early intervention, and then it was stripped away. That’s the root cause of the problem.
Also, for the private sector, there should be a cap on weekly fees, because at the moment providers can dictate whatever they want. I don’t do that, but I know that private providers can dictate that weekly fee, and there’s nothing local authorities can do about it because they need to place the young person somewhere.
The very least they need to do is what Rebecca said – treat all children as children and stop trying to treat them as adults.
