A new report exploring risk factors for offending among children in care, which is launched this week by TACT and the University of East Anglia, concludes that “the care system has proved to be effective in providing good care to children from background and abuse and neglect, promoting security, resilience and pro-social values”. The most prominent risk factors they identify for crime and anti-social behaviour are children’s pre-care experiences of abuse and neglect and the particular challenges experienced during the transitional periods of adolescence and leaving care.

This important evidence that the care system can be a supportive and therapeutic environment that improves outcomes for vulnerable children flies in the face of the conventional and entrenched policy narrative that the care system causes poor outcomes for looked after children. TACT and UEA’s report follows Demos’s own flagship report on the care system In Loco Parentis (published in 2010) which also firmly challenged the lazy assumption that the care system itself must be responsible for poor outcomes. This reductive narrative derives from a shallow use of national data sets which demonstrate that children currently or previously in care tend to have below average educational and employment outcomes. It fails to take into account the evidence that children’s pre-care experiences of abuse and neglect in their birth families continue to affect their emotional and behavioural development and their chances of settling into a stable placement once they enter care. This evidence suggests that the ongoing impact of trauma or delayed development experienced prior to care in combination with children’s (often all too limited) experience of stable, supportive relationships while in care has a knock-on impact on their subsequent relationships and educational attainment.

However, acknowledging that we must recognise the importance of children’s pre-care experiences is not to say that we can’t improve children’s experiences and reduce the risk of poor outcomes once they enter care, including anti-social behaviour and criminality which is the focus of TACT and UEA’s new report. In In Loco Parentis we identified that the three most important factors for children having a positive experience of care and good outcomes on leaving care are:

• early intervention and minimum delay in entering care;
• stable, high quality (foster or residential) care placements;
• supported transitions on leaving care (which might mean adoption, a return to the child’s birth family or transition to independence and adulthood). 

TACT and UEA’s new report corroborates these findings and makes a series of policy recommendations aimed at ensuring that the care system can fulfil its correct purpose of intervening as early as possible to remove vulnerable children from potentially damaging home environments and then providing a safe and nurturing environment that can compensate for previous disadvantage. A number of these policy recommendations echo those we made in In Loco Parentis:

1.)   Care should be used proactively and positively rather than as ‘a last resort’

2.)   Early family support should be made available more widely to ensure that children are not taken into care unnecessarily (especially in adolescence), and to increase opportunities to intervene early to remove children from damaging family environments

3.)   Children entering care should receive a full developmental screening for mental health problems to ensure that these can be addressed with appropriate professional support early on

4.)   Care planning should aim to promote stability for children in care and in their transitions out of care. A key aim within this must be to reduce the number of

failed family reunifications through more effective assessment and coordination with family support services.

5.)   All looked after children should have the option of remaining in their care placements until age 21, and local authorities should continue to be responsible for providing appropriate accommodation for care leavers at least until this age, rather than this responsibility ceasing at 18 as it does presently.

TACT and UEA’s new report also makes additional recommendations that focus particularly on how the care system and the criminal justice system can reduce the risk that looked after children will get involved in offending behaviour, while also ensuring that young people in care are not unfairly and inappropriately criminalised. 

As this new report, Eileen Munro’s review of child protection, and Demos’s 2010 report In Loco Parentis have shown, the weight of evidence demonstrating what children, young people and their families need from the care system and family support services is now overwhelming. It remains for the Government to prove its commitment to improving outcomes for children in care by working with local authorities and partner agencies to put these proposals into practice.

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