The Child Minder

Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Childline, the free-24-hour helpline set up by Esther Rantzen for children and young people.

This is one of those rare occasions where numbers speak louder than words:

-Since 1986, the 0800 1111 helpline has been a source of help for nearly 2 million children
-Since 1986, volunteers have counselled 175,000 victims of child sex abuse
-4,500 children call each day, but only around 2,500 of them get through
-An extra £20m would help an extra 1,000 children per day get through
-90% of Childline's funding comes from donations from the public

Need I say more?

To donate to Childline's 20th Birthday Appeal, go to www.childline.org.uk

Or email your MP to lobby government to provide long-term meaningful funding to expand this valuable service.

New government-commissioned research published this week on kinship care placements has highlighted examples within the current system of both the perverse and the downright unfair.

The study by researchers at the School for Policy Studies at Bristol University reveals that, despite family and friend carers being significantly more disadvantaged than unrelated foster carers, they are likely to receive less in the way of financial assistance. And despite both groups of carers looking after children with similar experiences and difficulties, significantly more kin carers receive little or no training or social work support.

But perhaps most peversely of all, the study reveals that kin carers who don't meet the standards for approval as foster carers because of past difficulties or health problems can be advised to pursue a Residence Order instead, under which social work support and monitoring ceases and payments become discretionary. The result is that those kinship care placements carrying the greatest risks receive the least support and scrutiny.

The debate on parental responsibility in relation to their children's exclusion from school rumbles on. In the House of Lords earlier this week, education minister Lord Adonis refused to force schools to offer alternative provision for excluded children from day one, despite warnings from campaign groups that requiring a parent to take time off from work to supervise a child for the first five days of any exclusion would pose considerable difficulties for some families.

Adonis stuck to his guns, though, insisting that everything would be fine: parents could simply call on relatives and friends to supervise their children if they couldn't get the time off work themselves.

Wrong. As the report on the provision of services for families with disabled children published by MPs today reveals, such help is not so easy to come by for this group of parents. They are exactly the ones who struggle most to find people to care for their children. Yet many of their children also have special educational needs and make up a large chunk of the excluded population. These parents will have no choice but to miss work everytime their child is excluded - and face the financial consequences that that brings.

In recognition of the increased emphasis being placed on parenting support work in all its recent policy publications, the government has published a guide for local authorities and children's trusts on developing parenting support.

The guidance will be relevant to those involved in the development of Children and Young People's Plans and those responsible for commissioning and delivering services for parents.

Publication of the guidance coincides with the launch of a searchable database of proven, effective parenting programmes across England in a bid by the DfES and Parenting UK to help councils stop reinventing the wheel and learn from what already works elsewhere.

More than 3,350 children are being held in custody. This shocking figure was published today by the Youth Justice Board, which has just confirmed that the number of secure beds for young people vacant tonight "could well be in the single figures".

But how did we end up here? Today there are around 730 more under-18s in custody than there were when the Youth Justice Board was established in 1999, despite part of the YJB's mission being "to prevent offending and reoffending by children and young people under the age of 18".

Over the years, the YJB has introduced a range of both alternatives to custody and early intervention and diversionary schemes to tackle the underlying problems that can lead children to commit crime in the first place. Yet still the child prison population grows.

The children's commissioner for England, Al Aynsley-Green, has warned again today of the "enormous damage" custody does to children, many of whom who are already vulnerable. An inquiry into the suicide of Joseph Scholes, who was sent to Stoke Health Young Offender Institution aged 16 despite a history of vulnerability and suicide attempts, might be a good way for Aynsley-Green to highlight how the secure system is failing vulnerable children. However, his limited powers means he is effectively unable to launch such an inquiry without the education secretary's prior agreement and funding. Perhaps that is why he was complaining to the Joint Committee on Human Rights earlier this week that being accountable to the education secretary was compromising his independence.

A truly independent champion for children, as envisaged in the Every Child Matters green paper, would surely be in a position to do more to prevent children being placed in custody inappropriately.

On the train on the way into work this morning I read a headline over another commuter's shoulder: "Freed, liar who killed her baby". It was, of course, courtesy of our old friend the Daily Mail.

The story was referring to the case of Danielle Wails, the 22-year-old who was given three years' probation yesterday for starting a fire in her home in which her baby son died while she was suffering from post-natal depression.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of readers' comments posted on the Daily Mail's website in response to this story demand that Wails be locked up for good and the key thrown away.

But the world is not black and white. To simply hold this young mother fully accountable would be to ignore her state of mental health at the time, her previous cries for help, her inability to cope and her repeated attempts to apparently hide this fact from health and social services.

I have just spent the last few hours trawling through the transcipt of the debates in the House of Lords last week on the Education and Inspections Bill and have been left thinking: what is the point? During 12 hours of debate over three separate sessions, only one amendment put forward by someone other than children's minister Lord Adonis was actually debated and agreed to. Four other amendments were lost at the vote after debate, and 12 others were withdrawn after debate - often reluctantly and more because time was running out than because their fears had been allayed.

The remaining amendments, with the exception of those laid by Adonis (a former No.10 adviser, we mustn't forget), were not even moved.

Maybe it's just because the bill is at the final stages of its journey through Parliament that few changes were made, but the whole process had the air of an elaborate rubber-stamping exercise. Carefully crafted amendments laid often on behalf of charities and pressure groups failed to even see the light of day.

The Lords will discuss the bill again tomorrow. Campaigners from across the children's sector are hoping that amendments challenging sections of the bill aimed at penalising parents who fail to supervise children excluded from school have more success than last week's amendments.

Failure to amend this part of the bill will mean that, in future, parents will be guilty of a criminal offence if their child is seen in a public place during school hours during the first five days of any exclusion.

The National Youth Agency and children's charity 4Children have submitted a plea to the Treasury to increase the daily spend on services for teenagers to £1 per day.

They claim that increasing the average spend on statutory youth services from £98 to £350 per teenager per year would result in half the population of 13- to 19-year-olds using youth services, effectively doubling the current level of provision while also directing services to the most vulnerable.

Their plea coincides with yet more research and headlines revealing how adults are scared of teenagers who hang around on street corners. Surely Gordon Brown and his team will be able to see the potential benefits to society as a whole of such a relatively tiny up-front investment.

Those directors of children's services and lead members who made it to the first session of the morning after the night before (the carnival-themed conference 'disco') were well rewarded. Tom Jeffery, director general for children, young people and families and Ralph Tabberer, director general of schools, gave a convincing double act as the united front of the Department for Education and Skills.

Importantly, they acknowledged the mixed messages that have been coming out of the department in relation to the two agendas of schools standards and Every Child Matters and promised an end to the ambiguity.

"No more educational standards without Every Child Matters, no more Every Child Matters without standards," Jeffrey said.

However, neither were able to give a satisfactory answer to the question of how academies will be forced in the future to take their share of children in care. This issue looks set to rumble on for a while longer yet.

My hopes that Estelle Morris might be more informative at the national children's and adults' social services conference than the current education secretary yesterday were immediately dashed with the words "this session is very much a consultation exercise". She also seemed to have forgotten where she was, reverting back to the role of teacher at one point and instructing her audience to "stop chatting and pay attention".

However, the session was still worthwhile. Asked to respond to a series of multiple choice questions about the skill sets and training needs of the future children's workforce, the delegates revealed the scale of change required....
Headline results included....

One of the reasons for choosing to launch our blog this week was so it would coincide with the national children's and adults services conference in Brighton. This is basically an opportunity for directors and lead members from across the country to get together to share stories and woes, and to hear politicians' latest ideas.

I was therefore hoping to use this entry to summarise yesterday's keynote address by education secretary Alan Johnson. Unfortunately, though, I have been forced to reach the conclusion that he actually said very little that was either 'key' or 'of note'. As he himself admitted, he had allowed the department's writing team to get at his speech - and it showed!
Caught off guard by a question from the floor, he did however let slip that he shared delegates' concerns about the restrictive nature of the current funding system for schools and hinted at the possibility of greater flexibility in how the money could be spent in the future. So watch this space.

Time to go and hear from a former education secretary now, as Estelle Morris joins the conference donning her Children's Workforce Development Council hat. Log-on again later to see if she had more to say than her successor.

Welcome to Community Care’s children’s services weblog, a daily commentary targeted at anyone who cares about children and what is being done – or not – to improve their lot in today’s society.

My name is Lauren Revans and I am a qualified journalist who joined Community Care’s news desk in 2000. After writing and editing social care news there for over five years, I became editor of 0-19, Community Care’s then sister magazine for people working with children, teenagers and families at risk of social exclusion.

Now I am back at Community Care, using my journalism skills to get behind the stories, events and decisions that affect the lives of the UK’s most vulnerable children so I can bring you this weblog.

While there are still thousands of children living at the margins of our society – whether they be in care, in poverty, in custody, seeking asylum, or living with a disability, learning difficulty or mental illness (or a parent with one of these problems) – there will always be a need to scrutinise the actions of those in a position to help.

And while the Daily Mail is still allowed to publish stories like “Struggling schools swamped with asylum seekers”, “Plans to lock up young thugs”, “How handouts tempt single mothers” and “Dictators tore happy family apart”, there will always be a need for balanced, rational debate!

I hope you find my entries of interest. Please feel free to add your comments at any time.

Lauren Revans
Children’s services editor, Community Care