Over Promised, Under Cared

Marion MacLeod and Mark SmithMatters relating to children in state care offer some worrying insights into way in which policy is made and implemented (or not) in contemporary Scotland. To recap on some recent history, Nicola Sturgeon commissioned an Independent Care Review in 2016. The Review, in its deliberations, claims to have listened to the experiences of around 2500 young people in care or with care experience. Many of these, we presume, were accessed through the children’s advocacy organisation ‘Who Cares? Scotland, which receives a substantial portion of its income via Scottish Government grants. The Review came up with a number of recommendations, which were framed and institutionalised as ‘The Promise’, a ‘flagship’ policy intended to drive forward the findings of the Care Review and to ‘improve the lives of our most vulnerable children’.‘The Promise’ has been hitting the headlines recently, and not in a good way. The Herald has published a number of pieces in the past few weeks, some reasonably analytic, others rather less so. The Ferret – an online investigative site – uncovered the extent (£2 m and counting) to which money was not being applied to the support of the ‘most vulnerable’ but instead being funnelled to external costs, including to consultants being paid several hundred pounds a day. Common Weal, through a Freedom of Information request, was able to obtain a report for which one consultant (who subsequently became the CEO of the delivery body, but more of that later) had been paid £50,000, and which up till then had been concealed from public scrutiny.The quango charged with the implementation of The ‘Promise’ has been on the go now for four years (with an annual budget of £2.8 million for its office operations alone) without any evident improvements to children’s welfare. There are probably a couple of factors that have brought about this fact to the public’s attention. One is Nicola Sturgeon (who, we might imagine, had concerns of her own from which she might want to divert attention) bemoaning the failure of her successors to follow her leadership in this matter. The other is the ‘report card’ issued by ‘Who Cares?’ on progress to date. Common Weal, has, of course, issued detailed critiques and commentary on the ‘Promise’ – how it either completely misses the point about problems in the care system or makes erroneous assumptions about their nature and how it completely fails to take account of the substantial body of existing evidence about what actually works in protecting children and strengthening families.The ’Who Cares?’ report is interesting in that it focuses only on performance in relation to the specific matters set out in the ‘Promise’ delivery plan. It provides no critique as to the relevance or appropriateness of these issues to the apparent headline objective of improving children’s lives. Of course, as ‘Who Cares?’ was instrumental in supplying the ‘lived experience’ of the individuals which formed the basis of the policy, it is probably unrealistic to imagine it going on to take issue with it. The evaluation of progress is based on crude and often incomplete datasets, with conclusions that seem to bear no connection even to the limited data supplied. An example is the issue of separation of siblings where it concludes that “progress is being made in the right direction” despite that fact that the data cited has no starting point for comparison and the one piece of comparative data referenced would seem to indicate that things are getting worse, not better. Of course, no explanation of context is offered; it mentions that fourteen local authorities had separated sibling groups “for reasons other than safety” but gives no indication as to what other reasons might lie behind this (almost invariably, the lack of availability of a resource where a family might be kept together).Other matters such as cessation of both school exclusion for children in care and the use of physical restraint of children in care are judged by numerical data with no comment as to the appropriateness of these objectives in the first place. If school exclusion is a bad thing for children in care, it is a bad thing for all children and performance data should reflect the whole school population. Data appears to indicate that children subject to child protection measures who are not in care experience similar outcomes in education and health to those being cared for outwith their birth families. The problem we should be trying to solve is how to ensure equity of life chances for all children, not just those in the care system.Regarding restraint, its use is strictly governed, and monitored at national level. It is not used as ‘punishment’ but to protect children who may otherwise seriously harm themselves, other children or staff who are working with them and when attempts to deal with such situations through other means have failed (and not necessarily due to the lack of skill on the part of staff). Local authorities have strict recording and debriefing procedures when restraint is used. A local authority having no recorded restraints is not necessarily a good thing. It could be because it does not provide direct care to its children but farms this out to private providers (which would have to record restraints). It could also be that in failing to use restraint it may be failing in its obligations to keep children safe. There is no recognition of any of this complexity in the ‘report card’, nor any suggestion as to how such dangerous situations might otherwise be dealt with.The section on ‘Whole Family Support’ contains nothing at all about supporting families in their communities but focuses solely on financial arrangements for out of home care.So how do we start to address the right issues, and do so in the most effective way? Well, The ‘Promise’ appointed as its CEO, Fraser McKinlay, a management consultant who worked for Audit Scotland and who has no background in research on child welfare, delivery of children’s social care nor any track record of effective support for strengthening families, to do so. He is interviewed at length by Neil Mackay in a recent issue of the Sunday Herald. He certainly does not understate his abilities and attributes and has clearly convinced Mackay that “if anyone can pull of this miracle, it’s McKinlay”. This might be seen as a tad disrespectful to the skills and knowledge of those working in children’s care services – the managers trying to do more with less each year, the front-line workers who constantly go above and beyond for the children they work with despite these constraints and the many innovators and pioneers of radical and positive change for our most vulnerable children. The whole article is littered with so many inaccuracies, misconceptions, wrong assumptions and confusion of what is cause and what is correlation that it would require a separate piece to provide sufficient comment.Prior to being appointed to his £100,000 a year post, Fraser McKinlay received £50,000 from the ‘Promise’ to produce a report advising local authorities on how to ‘Use Money Differently’. Common Weal recently obtained this report. It contains nine pages, six of which are background and three of which restate factors known about and articulated over years – many were referenced in the 2001 ‘For Scotland’s Children’ report produced by the Scottish Executive as it then was – such as the need for clearer budget data, better partnership working, pooling of resources across agencies, more prevention and less reaction and so on. Disappointingly, these objectives are apparently to be achieved through yet another relatively small pot of money to be bid into for projects, despite the fact that this approach has been singularly inadequate in the past in achieving positive and sustainable change, never mind transformation.Common Weal and others have set out visions of what meaningful transformation would look like and it is neither about a proliferation of small scattergun projects nor about somehow redirecting a grossly inadequate level of resourcing that barely keeps the head of public services above water as it is. If the ‘Promise’ is worth the paper it is written on it must ensure that public services are adequately funded, that services are put in place that optimise every child’s chances of doing well, that families are supported to bring up their children well and that all members of the workforce have the time and resources they need to be able to do the job in the way they all want to.We know what is required; there is a strong body of evidence that tells us what this is. However, evidence is not the strong point of either of the reports we discuss. Fraser McKinlay’s £50,000 report to the ‘Promise’ does have a few in-text references but no reference list. The Who Cares? Report has two pages of references, only one of which is to a piece of objective research, all the rest being to government reports or newspaper articles. We should expect better from those funded by the public purse. Instead of evidence, we are faced with a self-referential and self-congratulatory system talking to itself and failing to ask any of the difficult questions about what is really required to improve the prospects of Scotland’s children.