The Crisis In Foster Care In Scotland
Policy Paper
Credits — Common Weal Care Reform Group
Overview
This policy paper has been developed in response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the future of foster care.
This policy paper takes a very different approach from the consultation paper and the questions it asked, starting not just from aspirations but also from analysis of the issues affecting family-based care, how the current crisis has arisen and what steps are needed to ensure that a foster care service meets the needs of children who cannot live with their own families and delivers positive life outcomes for them.
The paper examines the nature of replacement family care, how it came into existence, its development over time and what can be done to address the critical decline in foster carer numbers, the operation of the regulatory framework, how foster carers are recruited, trained and supported and how a market that private sector organisations have been able to exploit has been created. The paper sets out constructive, evidence-based proposals for the development of a foster care service that is fit for purpose and can ensure that the children it serves are helped to achieve positive and equitable life chances and experiences.
Key Points
This policy paper was in written in response to the Scottish Government’s review of foster care.
Foster care is facing a crisis both in terms of falling numbers of carers and the increasing complexity of the demands placed on them. The Government consultation lacks serious analysis of either the patterns in foster care data or their causes. This is partly because the review starts not from the perspective of the current crisis but from the needs and interests of the deeply flawed ‘Promise’ policy.
The view of children in care is taken into account by the Scottish Government but the views of care-commissioning professionals and foster carers themselves are entirely absent.
The review expresses a goal of not-for-profit provision but fails to address the issue of for-profit foster services.
The number of children who need foster care who have experienced abuse or have substantial additional needs is increasing but neither this current review nor the Promise address this issue properly – nor do they look properly at the impact this has on foster carers.
Linked to this, the reasons why there has been a sharp decline in the number of people coming forward to become foster carers have not been explored making it difficult to solve a problem which has not first been analysed.
Children with complex needs remain placed with foster carers who have not been properly prepared to meet those needs. This is probably part of the reason that a substantial minority of cared-for children face being moved from placement to placement in any given year and over the course of their young lives.
Despite government rhetoric about keeping sibling groups together, few foster carers have the size of home to accommodate larger groups of siblings and as a result families continue to be separated when they go into care.
The regulations on foster care continue to allow the subcontracting of local authority responsibilities to agencies. While the regulations specify that these must be non-profit, a number of private companies have now joined in creating provision and these can transfer money to for-profit parent companies through service fees. These compete with local authorities to recruit care experts and foster carers. The Care Inspectorate has not investigated this practice or the often opaque finances of some involved.
Substantially more foster carers are leaving the system than are being recruited, underpinning this crisis. Independent providers spend more on recruitment and yet it is local authorities who successfully recruit more foster carers.
Forster carers differ from other care workers in that they are not employed but are rather ‘self-employed contractors’. The ways they are paid can be complex and no assessment has been made of this situation in the review.
The fees paid have been standardised to the extent that they now no longer reflect the needs of the child concerned. A residential care worker will be paid around £600 a week and gets pension contributions, sick pay and paid holidays. A foster carer is paid about £250 a week, gets none of those additionals and is effectively on a permanent 24-hour shift.
Because foster carers rely on the agency that recruited them for training, training levels vary significantly.
Those recruited to foster caring are mainly drawn from lower socioeconomic groupings so affordability and levels of support are very likely to be significant factors in the sharp decline in recruitment and retention.
Foster carers struggle to gain trade union representation because of their employment status. There is nothing in this consultation about the rights to collective representation for foster carers.
Despite the fact that the legislation and regulations stipulate the centrality of social workers in this process, they are almost completely absent from the Scottish Government consultation. Lack of social work support is a key weakness in the system as it stands.
There are therefore seven major issues that need to be addressed:
― There must be a proper review of funding to ensure that there are adequate resources in the system to deliver successful outcomes. In particular the ‘contractor’ model must be examined and an employment model of foster care explored. Funding consistency must be ensured to avoid recruitment competition.
― There must be an audit of the housing provision made available by foster carers to identify gaps in provision.
― There should be unequivocal, legally enforceable prohibition of financial gain being made from foster care. Only local authorities and registered charities should be allowed to operate as providers Create a nationally consistent curricula for training and continuing professional development of foster carers to ensure high-quality provision.
― Flexibility of role may help some foster carers make more use of their skills, but many of the issues around children in care are complex and these must not be addressed by replacing professional staff with partially-trained foster carers.
― Local control of fostering must be protected. From friends to school to access to birth family, children in care are not well served by moving them away from where they grew up. For this and other reasons, control of the system must remain local and be delivered by local authorities.
― There should be a thorough and ongoing analysis in each local authority area of the types and numbers of foster carers required to meet needs within local communities, along with the additional staffing requirements required to support them. That must mean enough social work contact time with foster children. Staffing should be at a level which will enable relationship-based practice which will require caseloads to be set at manageable levels. That means a reversal to cuts in core social work capacity in local authorities.
