Use of care orders is on the increase - voluntary agreements are in decline. Ruth Winchester explains why this is good news

Local authorities and the government have reason to celebrate the latest Department of Health statistics on children in care. Not because the number of looked after children is going down - it isn't. More than 55,000 children were in the care of local authorities at some point in 1998-9, a 4 per cent increase on the previous year, and part of an upward trend that started in 1994.

Any celebration will be down to an unexpected increase in the number of care orders against a fall in the number of voluntary agreements.

At the end of March 1999, 34,100 children were being looked after under care orders, more than 62 per cent of the total and 2,000 more than the previous year. Within these figures the number of children being looked after under interim care orders has almost doubled since 1995.

This may seem a strange thing to celebrate. Voluntary agreements were introduced as a way of encouraging local authorities to work more flexibly with families and they represent a less drastic way of protecting children, without recourse to the courts, than care orders.

Yet care experts have welcomed the news of the fall in their use because they see it as a symptom of the change in local authority children's services which Quality Protects was set up to create.

British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering director Felicity Collier says the trend towards care orders shows that the Quality Protects guidelines are starting to take effect: "This could suggest that we have reached some sort of plateau. The Children Act 1989 pushed local authorities to work very hard - sometimes too hard - to keep children with their birth families.

"While it has worked well for some children, others have drifted into short-term foster placements, then back to their families, and back again," says Collier. "The increase in care orders could be a result of a recognition that sometimes it's in the best interests of children for local authorities to take responsibility early on for their long-term care."

Collier argues that Quality Protects has focused local authorities' minds on achieving a sustainable solution much earlier, and on reducing the number of placement moves children go through.

She rejects the suggestion that the proliferation of care orders is a sign of councils being too ready to whip children away from birth parents, arguing that they are getting the balance about right.

"A lot of children under care orders are still going back to their families. It's clear that local authorities are taking proper care and they haven't stopped trying to get children back with their birth parents, or supporting the ones who do go back."

National Foster Care Association executive director Jerry McAndrew agrees that the increase in care orders can be seen as a sign that local authorities are becoming more proactive in response to Quality Protects. "Maybe this is a symptom of a swing the other way, a sign that they are becoming more realistic about children who might never be able to return to very dangerous family situations."

But she warns: "I think care orders are a response to the fact that the children entering the system are generally more damaged and traumatised than they have been in the past - and we hear this all the time anecdotally from foster carers.

"The severity of children's problems is getting worse, and local authorities are reacting to that by going down the care order route. I suspect the number of interim care orders is increasing because local authorities have significant concerns about a lot of children, and the courts are very busy."

Although her prognosis is worrying, McAndrew adds: "From a foster parent's point of view a care order can be much better than a voluntary agreement, where children can be removed at any time. It's sometimes easier if the local authority is actively involved in managing the placement."

She also highlights the differences between local authorities across the country, pointing out that the use of care orders and voluntary agreements varies enormously, as does the type of placement used.

For example, in Hillingdon three out of ten children were under care orders while seven out of ten were looked after under voluntary agreements. In Lincolnshire, those figures were reversed.

Things are likely to change drastically under the new detailed Quality Protects targets introduced last week, which put local authorities under real pressure to cut the time children in care wait before adoption, as well as the number of moves they make between placements.

Fortunately, local authorities may be one step ahead. The majority of children stay in care for relatively short periods already, with more than half looked after for less than six months.

But perhaps more significantly, in the past year the number of children being placed for adoption has shot up by 30 per cent. Perhaps this is a sign that local authorities are starting to bite the bullet when it comes to adoption decisions.