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Two Kent MPs are reportedly so worried about the number of children being placed in the county by London councils that they are calling for a law to prevent councils placing children more than 20 miles away. But this would be a mistake says Jonathan Stanley, Independent Children's Homes Association, policy and practice consultant

Most looked-after children need relatively 'ordinary' care and will find that a placement in or near their local community suits them well. But creating a universal rule about how locally children should be placed would undermine a key principle of the Children Act: ensuring the 'most appropriate' placement for a child.

We don't know what the implications would be if geography became the foremost factor in placement decisions. Geography cannot include the complexity of a child's needs. 

Family circumstances may be emotionally or financially strained. There may be considerable personal and family conflict. We need to be sophisticated in our thinking and planning.

The decision about whether to place a child locally must be a clinical one. It needs to assess the relationship between the child and the family, the effect of the local environment and the purposes and quality of the placement.

Listening to young people should help us decide how important distance is in individual placement decisions. After all, young people often say that distance has its benefits.

Being placed outside their local community can allow a child to 'channel, sift, and embroider family information.' Young people also frequently say that distance allows them to retain their own individual identity, while reassessing what it means for them to be a member of their family. They find they can belong to two places.

In the 1986 book Lost in Care, Spencer Millham found "relationships among, and aspirations of", professionals looking after children to be more important than "simple instrumental factors" like the distance between a child's family home and the placement they live in.

What we know is that some children need local placements and others more distant ones. What we need therefore is sufficiency and diversity. There may well be a correct or ideal proportion of local placements, but no one knows what that is. It is certainly not 100%.

You might also be interested in:

• CC Inform: Guide to April 2011 reforms to care planning and placements
• CC Inform: Looked-after children - assessment and making decisions about placement
  

Junior family lawyers are being forced to handle 'life and death' child care cases because of the rise in care applications, jeopardising children's access to justice, according to this interesting story in the Law Society Gazette today.

Naomi Angell, co-chair of the Law Society's family law committee, told the publication that law firms have responded to increased workloads by reorganising their practices so junior staff are helping with case preparation.

She warned: "Are junior staff equipped to make difficult decisions where there are alcohol, drug or mental health issues? Can they persuade a mother in an abusive relationship to choose between her partner or her children? Are they trained to make decisions that could mean the difference between life and death? I think not."

Barbara Hopkin, of the Association of Lawyers for Children, said the current situation was unsustainable. "The rising number of care applications means an unlimited source of work for those firms who can afford to do it.

"We all took a 10% cut in civil legal aid fees in October 2011, which led to some firms going out of business or just giving up publicly funded work. Those of us who are left are expected to do more work for less money, which is no incentive for future generations of lawyers to work in this area of law. The situation is unsustainable," she said.

Is this impacting on children's guardians working in tandem with lawyers on care cases? If you have a view on this, have your say on CareSpace.

Picture credit: katerha

The government has finally published its formal response to David Norgrove's family justice review - and it's not without controversy.

Although it accepts almost all the review's recommendations, Norgrove has already criticised the government's announcement on shared parenting following divorce or separation. (He said don't do it. Ministers look like they might.)

For social workers and children's guardians, the biggest news is probably the confirmation that the government will introduce a statutory six-month limit on care cases by 2013. (But this shouldn't come as a huge surprise given the government's position on this back in November.)

Those I've spoken to have mixed feelings about the deadline. Some feel confident it will speed up decisions and reduce delay (some children wait 55 weeks for their case to be completed), while others are adamant the deadline will only heap more pressure on a struggling system.

One guardian said: "We could see some poor practice if people are just desperately trying to meet deadlines." Nushra Mansuri, professional officer at the British Association of Social Workers, previously told me: "It won't help reduce delay. Most social workers don't have the resources to complete care cases in six months so this could just be setting them up to fail."

Barnardo's chief Anne Marie Carrie said the deadline would reduce delay, but acknowledged the difficulties of meeting it. "We must not underestimate the challenge in achieving this, with record numbers of care applications having been received in the last half of 2011," she said.

Maggie Atkinson, children's commissioner for England, said she recognised the challenge "in ensuring that all essential evidence is placed before the court within this timeframe".

• The government also announced plans to implement the review's recommendation for a co-ordinated family justice system, including a single family court across England and Wales, and a Family Justice Board.
 
• Family courts body Cafcass will move from the Department for Education into the Ministry of Justice by 2015, to "bring court social work functions closer to the court process". And courts will be expected to rely less upon expert evidence - another controversial reform.

by Sacha Mirzoeff, series director of the BBC's documentary series Protecting Our Children

Find out all you need to know about Protecting Our Children and take part in a live chat with experts during the screening.

There are some areas of society where it's said to be impossible to make morally responsible films. Typically the media has chosen to cover social work by going undercover and making investigative programmes. Sadly the end results are often sensationalist films that demonstrate a lack of understanding of the complexity of the work.

And so the bandwagon of poor media coverage of social work trundles on...  

I feel that there is a way of approaching any issue in a documentary as long as there is a clear understanding from all about what is being tackled and how best to do it. 

The director of children's services at Bristol council, Annie Hudson, was open to our approach to show the day-to-day complexities of child protection work. It took months of effort and negotiation to draw up a working protocol that ensured the welfare of children, families and social workers was protected.

We finished with a working protocol, written up by the council's legal department and ratified by the senior family court judge in Bristol. It worked for everyone. On the one hand, it was tougher than the Children Act in terms of identifying children in the public domain during and after proceedings. But on the other hand, it gave the BBC freedom to be able to continue filming during proceedings - as long as everyone was in agreement that it was fine to do so.

Each social worker was given the choice about whether to participate in the series.  Understandably only a small number came forward at first. For those that did, we went through their cases together and discussed the families that might be suitable to approach. Of course even smaller numbers of families agreed to take part. It took months of patient asking before we had enough material to start making the films.

Even with a protocol, how could we at the BBC tell if we were doing the right thing?  We ended up doing the opposite of what many filmmakers strive to do. We rescinded control rather than holding on tight. As many of our contributors are extremely vulnerable, we used a system of rolling consent whereby they, or any of the professionals working with them, could pull out right up until transmission. 

After showing the practically finished films to everyone involved we listened and reacted to their comments. Lawyers, court-appointed guardians, council solicitors, council heads and area managers, our legal advice, editorial policy, our own childcare consultant, the seniors in the BBC and most importantly of all, the families and social workers we filmed, all had their say. It took a long time but we could then rest safe in the knowledge that the end result was balanced, accurate and fair.

• Protecting Our Children is on Monday February 6, BBC2, 9pm. 

Morning all. Here's another quick round-up of today's news, views and interesting things, starting with good news for Essex council's children's services department which has been released from two years' of government supervision after making improvements.

The latest court statistics, published today by the Ministry of Justice, have revealed care proceedings took 55 weeks, on average, to complete between July and September 2011.

Mothers of disabled children have opened up about their experiences of family life, describing to the Daily Mail how they felt when they learnt their children would have different futures to the ones they had expected. Fiona Wilson, 41, recalls her father-in-law telling her to leave her newborn son, who has Down's Syndrome, in the hospital, warning "he'll ruin your life".

Although Wilson adores her son, who was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism too, life has been far from easy. She describes the exhaustion of having to "fight for your child at every step", something parents of disabled children will undoubtedly relate to.

In more positive news for disabled children and their families, a number of charities, including Mencap and Scope, have backed Ambitious about Autism's Finished at School campaign - lobbying for a clear legal right to educational support for young disabled people aged up to 25.

Third Sector reports that a Wolverhamptom charity supporting young offenders is to close after an investigation found its activities were likely to mislead potential donors.

Another day, another Facebook scandal - this time involving a 24-year-old man who attacked a 13-year-old girl he groomed online after she logged onto the social networking site during a difficult time at school. (Changes in a child's online behaviour could indicate they are being exploited. For more details of this warning sign, and others, see our online tool.)

Picture credit: ZoeLouisePhotography

The deadline for responses to the consultation on the Public Bodies Bill - which proposes the abolition of a large number of quangos, including (controversially) the Youth Justice Board - is fast approaching. (Next Tuesday, 11 October.) 

But if you were organised enough to submit your response before 20 September, you probably won't be too impressed to learn that you may need to submit it again...

Community Care understands that, due to a "technical issue", responses emailed to PBB.Consultation@justice.gsi.gov.uk before this date may have been lost in cyberspace and never received.

The Ministry of Justice has advised that any responses sent to this email address be re-submitted via the on-line questionaire to ensure they are received by the right team. And you can call them to check whether your response was received on 020-3334 6298.

Picture credit: Cara Photography

By independent social work agency director Phil King

Exactly what does it say about the current value placed on social work when a process server is paid more per hour for their time in court than an expert social worker?

The Legal Services Commission (LSC) has just released details of the payments allowable to court experts providing evidence which will apply from next month. However, it excludes independent social workers whose fees have already been capped by the LSC at £30 [outside London] and £33 [London].

A comparison of these rates reflects an appalling situation. Expert social workers- who are usually the most experienced social workers in the country- are expected to provide opinion on some of the most complex cases before the family courts. Their opinions are expected to encompass a wider degree of factors than other experts whose opinion is more narrowly focused, such as psychiatrists for example, and often their opinion will have a greater impact upon a case.

Comparisons with other professionals
Yet they will be paid the least. Here are a few comparisons - expert social workers will be paid around 75% less per hour than a psychologist (£117); 70% less than a GP (£99); 63% less than a nurse (£81). Even a process server is paid £32 outside of London whilst a social worker gets £30.

This position is as perverse as it is illogical given the increasing numbers of complex family cases coming before family courts. The danger is that with reduced fees, the expertise and quality of opinion will decline as will the quality assurance processes that support it.  This could result in tragedies where children will be further harmed or it could see children placed for adoption when they should be returned to their family.

Ministers' failure
To date, ministers have failed to explain why social work has been thus penalised. They have also continued to misunderstand the difference between an independent social worker, commissioned to provide an assessment the local authority has failed to provide, and a recognised expert social worker who provides a specialist risk assessment.

The inconsistencies in fee levels devalues the status of the whole social work profession and sends out the wrong message to both the general public and the children and families undergoing assessments.

Phil King is the director of ISWA, an independent social work agency

Court fees 'insult' to independent social workers

Fees cap deters independent social workers as expert witnesses

Guide to what to expect from the court process - A guide for professionals