Narey-Owers Foster Care Review

We are clear that it is unrealistic to believe that foster carers, however competent they are, indeed, even if they happen to hold professional qualifications, can play an equal part alongside necessarily dispassionate social work professionals, in determining what is best for a child in care. Frankly, often the last thing we need is for foster carers to be dispassionate. We need them to get emotionally involved, we want them to be subjective, we want them to fiercely advocate for the child or children in their care. Because that is what parents do. Foster carers are not professionals. But - and this is crucial - they must be treated professionally.

Statutory guidance includes lots of commendable references to involving carers. But the key document that deals with reviews of children who are in foster care is inconsistent in promoting the importance of the role of carers and fails to list them as people who must be involved in reviews. Instead, they are listed along with general practitioners and teachers, as people whose views might be relevant. And in another part of this voluminous document, although the involvement of carers is encouraged, this is subject to veto by the child in their care. The statutory guidance should be changed to ensure the involvement of carers in review meetings is the default position, and that they are only excluded in exceptional circumstances. And, although the child's views need to be listened to - and the reason for their wishing to exclude their carers must certainly be probed - foster carers should always be involved.

We think that the categorisation of types of decision which might be delegated to carers is sensibly defined in the statutory guidance. But unless carers are explicitly clear about being able, independently, to take decisions, they will continue to feel exasperated. More importantly, children will, unnecessarily, be frustrated, unhappy, and feel different from other children. The Department for Education should urgently remind all local authorities that the delegation of total authority for all category one decisions should apply automatically to foster placements unless, for exceptional reasons, such delegation is inappropriate. In those cases, the reasons for the exception must be set out in the child's placement plan.

We do not believe it is reasonably practicable for carers to be asked to parent a child, while simultaneously preventing them from making minor decisions. We would urge the Department for Education and local authorities to recognise that automatic delegated authority to carers must apply for voluntarily accommodated children too, and that birth parents should be helped to understand that is in their child's interests. Birth parents cannot be allowed to veto the ability of foster carers to provide day to day parenting.

Department for Education guidance and regulations are silent on physical affection and such silence - which is disappointing - must encourage the view that physical affection is considered inappropriate. Carers should be in no doubt that, unless it is unwelcome to the child, they should not curb the natural instinct to demonstrate personal and physical warmth. We urge the Department for Education to make that clear in future guidance.

We suggest that local authorities should decide which individual social worker is best placed to offer the support to the foster family in long-term placements. As well as resulting in a welcome reduction in family intrusion, and sometimes confusion, this change would deliver cost savings to hard-pressed local authorities. But it is important to stress that we recommend this, not simply to save money, but because we think it will be in the interests of fostered children.

Our conclusion is that, despite the commendable commitment of some individuals, there is little to recommend the IRO role and believe local authorities should be allowed to dispense with the role; re-investing savings in front line staffing.

We believe there needs to be a thorough assessment and consultation with the sector and with carers about the effectiveness, cost, and value for money of fostering panels and we urge the Department for Education to commission such an assessment.

We do not believe that Department for Education guidance on allegations needs to be changed. But local authorities need to be sure that it is followed in all cases. And carers need to be reassured that, however unlikely the prospect of an allegation being made, they can be confident that they'll be supported through the process.

All Fostering Services should consider introducing structured peer support for carers. Not all will be able to provide something as sophisticated as the Mockingbird model (and the costs are not insignificant, estimated to be more than £30,000 a year) but arrangements of this nature are likely to promote carer retention and placement stability.

We warmly endorse tiered approaches to paying fees, linked to the skills and experience of the carers. Implemented widely, such models could drive greater consistency in fostering, aid better matching between child and carer and would provide improved knowledge about the skills of the foster carer population.

We do not believe current payments to carers - when considered in the context of HMRC's helpful tax and benefit arrangements - are inadequate. Nor are they an obstacle to recruiting high quality carers, particularly if the tax and benefit treatment of fostering income is better publicised.

It may be for the courts to determine the employment status of carers. But we believe that were it to be obtained, employment would radically and negatively affect the heart of fostering and would not be in the interests of children in care. We encourage the Government and local authorities to resist such a fundamental change.

A number of organisations called for a national register of carers. They suggest that such a database could hold details of their fostering agency; the date of their approval as carers; where they live; the number of beds and bedrooms in their home; the number of vacancies for children; personal characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, religion and language) and their level of training and expertise. Such a register would provide vital information which could improve recruitment. And, as we explain in Chapter 5, such a register could also provide a vacancy management system and radically improve matching. We see great merit in the proposal and urge the Department for Education to evaluate the costs and advantages.

We believe that greater regional cooperation could concentrate marketing expertise and make better use of marketing budgets and we urge local authorities to consider combining their recruitment efforts.

We recommend that the Department for Education consider re-branding and re-launching First4Adoption (F4A) to improve foster carer recruitment. The Department for Education would have to provide a substantial amount of the funding but local authorities and IFAs might be expected to contribute to a service which should help them to reduce their own marketing spend.

We urge all local authorities and IFAs to review and, where necessary, improve the way they handle initial enquiries. Established evidence and our own survey suggest there is the scope to convert many more enquirers into foster carers. And we recommend the greater use of mystery shopper techniques to monitor the quality of response to enquirers.

Too few carers who leave are given exit interviews, as few as 5% according to the Fostering Network. We recommend that local authorities and independent agencies should invite a much larger proportion of resigning and retiring carers to such interviews.

Our perception is that there is rather more poaching from IFAs to local authorities, but relatively little of either. But sometimes, local authorities will be acting prudently in seeking to transfer IFA carers to them when a placement is considered to become long term (because the marginal costs of an additional in house carer is much smaller than a fee paid to an IFA). When that happens, we believe local authorities should compensate the IFA for the recruitment costs of replacing that carer. We suggest the transfer protocol be amended to reflect that.

Quite a lot could be achieved in terms of price reduction were local authorities to share their framework contracts with one another. The secrecy and the variation in prices negotiated by different local authorities benefit providers, not councils.

Many of the 152 separate local authorities are too small to effectively plan and commission fostering. It could be better planned and commissioned if they were to come together into about 10 consortia with critical mass. They would be better able to understand commissioning requirements; concentrate expertise; discourage local authority versus local authority competition; and negotiate with IFAs to provide placements at a significantly reduced cost, almost certainly through guaranteeing particular IFAs a certain level of business. The routine absence of such arrangements is extraordinary. There is the potential to significantly reduce spend on fostering.

We recommend that the consortia should also appoint national account managers for the larger IFAs. This would reduce the likelihood of consortia competing against one another as local authorities do now. There are a number of ways of doing this but probably, the simplest and most effective would be for one of the consortia to provide the national lead for managing the relationship with individual IFAs.

We recommend that larger local authorities or the consortia should consider making a determined attempt to become self-sufficient in carer recruitment or, alternatively, consider partnering with one or more IFAs to provide their complete fostering service. Either of these options is likely to be cheaper and provide greater assurance of quality than the prevailing and generally unplanned practice of part recruiting and part purchasing foster care.

We recommend all local authorities use Bright Spots, or similarly to survey approaches regularly and systematically to measure children's experience of fostering relative to other local authorities.

We therefore believe that it is time to reinforce the statutory guidance that children should know their rights to advocacy and how to access an advocate and urge the Department for Education to work with the Children's Commissioner and voluntary sector providers of advocacy, including Coram Voice, to ensure this is done.

Local authorities need to monitor the quality of referral information and ensure that, inadvertently; they do not demonise a child by over emphasising the negative aspects of a child's background.

Carers should, wherever possible, be able to play a proactive role in matching. Adapting adopter-led family finding techniques, such as activity days, to help find suitable long-term fostering placements should be piloted in a number of local authorities.

Children must routinely be better prepared for a placement (as already required in Regulation 11) by being told much more about the carers, their family and the carers' home, day-to-day care and routines before the first meeting (including seeing video messages and scenes of their bedroom and learning about some basic house rules).

If the register of adopters recommended in Chapter 4 were not to be introduced we must have, at the very least, a vacancy management system to remove the randomness and - sometimes the lottery - of finding the right carers for children.

We urge the Department for Education to remind local authorities of the change in the law and the need for professionals to ensure that birth family contact takes place only when in the interests of the child. Professionals should not shirk offering evidence to the courts about the potentially damaging consequences of contact.

When children move placement they should routinely be consulted about the adults and children who are important to them and, unless it is not in their interests, contact with those adults and children should be encouraged and facilitated.

Local authorities should review the environments in which family contact takes place and the way it is supervised to ensure that it can be as positive an experience for the child as possible.

As part of the assessment process when siblings enter care, individually or simultaneously, local authorities should not presume that keeping groups together is in the interests of all children in that group. Instead they should consider the individual needs of each child and whether they are likely to thrive when placed together and whether it is possible for one set of carers to meet the developmental demands of the full sibling group.

We believe that children on the edge of care and their families should routinely gain earlier access to foster care. The Department for Education, together with select local authorities and independent fostering agencies, should further explore the potential for support foster care as a means of: avoiding unnecessary entry into care into care; ensuring that those who do come into care are thoroughly assessed and placed in a more managed and timely way; and attracting a new population of carers and carers who no longer want to foster full-time.

The priority therefore must be to convert more fostering placements to arrangements which are more likely to last forever, either encouraging foster carers to adopt or to become special guardians, not least through longer term guarantees of financial support. In either case, the child will leave the care system.

We therefore recommend that the work of the Adoption Leadership Board, and the Residential Care Board should continue. And similar arrangements should be made to implement the recommendations from this report. But overseeing those boards, Ministers should direct the setting up of a permanence board under the chairmanship of the Director General for Children's Social Care, the most senior official in the Department responsible for the care system. And the purpose of that board should be very simple: to deliver to more looked after children permanence in their care, and a sense of belonging which lasts well beyond the age of majority.