Skilled care saves children

In her blog piece about adoption in which she argues that investing in adoption saves children and cash, Joanne Alper makes some interesting points, but also begs many questions. It is clear from her comment that she recognises that children who come into public care as a result of neglect or abuse are traumatised children. This means they have suffered injuries – specifically, as recent research tells us, brain injuries as a result of overwhelming stress. This is the cause of the behaviour she so vividly describes.

Children can recover from early trauma, but only if they receive skilled care. They do not just need families, they need therapeutic families who have the knowledge and skill to enable the children to recover. And these families must also work as part of a professional team around the child, a team that recognises and addresses the injuries the child has suffered.

These are children for whom the state must accept responsibility. What is wrong with our current system is not that it is expensive. Of course there is a cost to ensuring the recovery of our most injured children – and remember that this is just 0.5% of the child population we are discussing. What is wrong is that we do not yet invest enough in these children.

There is growing evidence in this country and around the world that skilled care over a long period can enable children to recover from early trauma. Akamas can prove, for example, that the courses we provide for carers, teachers and those who supervise and support them, change the way children are treated, and this changes the outcomes for the children. Adoption, which transfers all legal responsibility for the child away from the state, can never be guaranteed to provide this level of knowledge and skill.

And adoption support can legally only be provided as an optional extra if the adoptive family chooses to make use of it. All accountability is removed. Imagine taking your injured child to hospital, only to find that they are assigned to a volunteer who takes them away and is told they can ask for support if they need it!

Joanne Alper acknowledges a substantial breakdown rate in adoption arrangements, where the difficulty and stress is more than the adoptive carers, or the child, can manage.  There are no official records of the continuing progress of adopted people through adult life.  So we can only guess at the proportion of them who continue to face emotional and social difficulties originating in their early childhood.

Adoption certainly saves cash. But it cannot be relied upon to save injured children who need skilled care. Other countries in Europe invest in providing stable placements with a professional level of care for their most vulnerable children, and their children thrive. Let us learn from them.

Looked after children climbing the education mountain

Recent DCSF figures have shown improvements in exam results for looked after children.  But just as the mountain seems scaleable, so results for non-looked after children have surged ahead, leaving the percieved gap just as wide as ever.

In 2004 a government survey of 1000 schools showed that the main problem for schools in helping looked after children to benefit from education was the unmanageable behaviour of the children. And the vast majority of the teachers surveyed recognised the origins of the behaviour in the traumatic experiences these children have lived through, but felt they did not know how to address the problems in school.

In 2008 Akamas conducted an impact evaluation of online training we provide to anyone working with vulnerable and traumatised children. This provided clear evidence that the right training delivered to the right people does make a difference to the way people work, and that makes a difference to the outcomes for children.

Just one example we discovered was a young person behaving in ways that severely disrupted school life two or three times a day and they were on the verge of exclusion. When those working most closely with the child changed the way they worked these incidents became much less severe and dropped in frequency to one or two a fortnight. The young person also became more able to manage their own behaviour, and this made for more positive outcomes during the school day.

In my view, the key to this success is that the new knowledge is not just held by one person, but is shared by as many as possible who form the network around the child.  Designated teachers have a vital role in this and training will become a key element in enabling them to manage their new responsibilities successfully.