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The new care leavers’ legislation will achieve little unless there is a significant increase in resources allocated to children in care, which will require a major shift in society’s attitudes, writes Alison Taylor.

Patricia Amos made history when she was imprisoned for not ensuring that her teenage daughters attended school. Her sentence conveyed the message that parents would henceforth be held criminally liable for their failures and inadequacies. Comment then appeared in the press on the issue of whether directors of social services and local authority chief executives might also find themselves behind bars for bad parenting. The education of children in care has always been of the lowest priority and very significant numbers of such children are deprived of proper schooling - in many cases, throughout their care career.

The new care leavers’ legislation was provoked, in part, by the gross inadequacies and inequalities in the system that have been identified by a number of official investigations. Those who live and work in the system, however, have known for years that children are being unnecessarily failed. A child’s life chances are seriously compromised at the point of entry to care, and the longer in the system, the greater the deprivation. Nonetheless, and although local authorities have long had the power to maintain children through higher education, it has been standard procedure to discharge from care as soon as they reach the age of 16. The most mature and capable 16-year-old from the most supportive environment would find coping with independence a daunting challenge. Those coming out of care usually have few, if any, personal or familial resources on which to fall back. It is no surprise, then, that their lives so often embark on the downward spiral to utter disaster.

Many of the tragedies that befall children in care and, by extension, blight future generations are predictable and avoidable. The state has repeatedly shown itself to be an inadequate, and, in some instances, abusive, parent that is constitutionally unwilling to give due regard to the child’s interests. The duties and responsibilities devolving from legislative change will inevitably be at the mercy of intense competition for finite resources and ever-diminishing funds. A former director of social services in north Wales told the Waterhouse tribunal that child care services were systematically starved of cash because councillors representing other client groups, particularly older people, persistently and successfully lobbied for the lion’s share of money.

Children in care attract little compassion and hence are usually pushed to the back of the queue when resources are allocated. While being largely ignorant of their real needs, society clings to its historical bias, viewing these children as the offspring of the shiftless poor; as tomorrow’s criminals; as an unacceptable drain on the economy; and as fundamentally unworthy. Inevitably, government policy reacts to and reflects societal attitudes. In recent years, high-profile scandals involving institutional abuses jolted both government and public, but made only a temporary impact on attitudes. The tide turned almost immediately, and, if anything, children in care are now being presented as even more villainous.

Labyrinthine entanglements always exist between public attitudes and social policy, and the fact that legislation is necessary to particularise and to enforce the basics of decent parenting is symptomatic of the prevailing negativity. From another perspective, the legislation is the equivalent of a finger in the dyke. Care leavers will never be remotely on a par with their peers in society unless radical improvements are made throughout the system - while they remain so essentially disadvantaged, they will remain, for the most part, a liability. There is, for example, no point in empowering local authorities to support children through higher education when their basic education has been so neglected that they are barely literate or numerate. Human beings respond to the treatment they receive and self-image is, by and large, created through external feedback. Children who experience prolonged, negative feedback from those around them generally either go under or fight back, which explains why a substantial proportion of care leavers self-harm, suffer mental illness, develop addictions and go to prison. Their chances of forming long-term, stable relationships and of successful child-rearing are similarly jeopardised because they can only repeat what they have learned.

Social work is a difficult and often thankless task, but, barring the few bad apples to be found in any profession, practitioners strive to do the best for their clients. That best, however, is always hostage to multifarious and conflicting demands and constraints. In social care, as in public health services, increasingly draconian but unacknowledged rationing has been standard practice for at least two decades. Therefore, without significantly enhanced direct funding, the good intentions behind the care leavers’ legislation will remain unfulfilled.

Alison Taylor is a novelist, a former senior child care worker and the winner of the 1996 Community Care Readers’ Award.