AIBU to keep reporting my sister over concerns for her children?

Keep reporting. You can love your sister but you have to protect your nieces and nephews as they’re more vulnerable

You know you should be reporting her but it’s so hard when it’s your dsis. I had a similar situation not involving dc but my dsis financially abusing dm so I empathise with you. I had tried to give advice etc but eventually report dsis to opg but in my head I reframed it as I am raising my concerns to the people who are qualified to deal with this and who aren’t emotionally involved in the situation

I’d take this as far as I could. And start with an MEQ to the council and CC the local councillors, asking for a full investigation into what has been done to safeguard the children as multiple reports have been made. And seemingly no action taken. It needs to be looked into thoroughly and brought to the forefront of SS attention before there is a tragedy. Local authority workers are often only responsive once an MEQ has been raised or councillors or external authorities are grilling them. Sadly. It’s due to being too understaffed and underfunded to stretch.

Sorry if this has been said already- you, your cousin and your brother need.to report to the safeguarding lead at the school, as well as ss every time

Please update when you can OP.

@Pipiscoming2023

What a horrible situation, OP.

Well done. I hope something happens soon.

Yes please keep reporting her to SS & the school. You have to be advocate for those children if you think they aren't being cared for properly or are in danger.. You can also ask the Police to do a welfare check if you think she's fighting or drinking in front of the children. They will turn up unannounced & refer to other agencies if necessary. We have a duty of care to all children & if you didn't report her can you imagine how you'd feel if anything happened to those babies.

I can’t understand why the Op is the one gathering the evidence and writing a timeline…. When she lives long distance and everything she knows is second hand from relatives.

Surely your relatives who live close and see this with their own eyes are the ones that should have already done this, but give they haven’t… be the ones to do it now.

I agree with everything you said, but none of it means the poster I quoted is right!

Seriously? So because she is a single mom to 4 kids she should be excused from being drunk, having the police around all the time and getting into fights? It’s the sister’s responsibility to rescue her or should the mother put her big girl pants on, step up and be an actual mother and get help for herself I’m a single mum with 5 kids and I don’t behave like that! Family support when someone has a blatant addiction is futile. Someone needs to think about the children who are suffering as a result of her behaviour!

Unfortunately, there is extremely little outside help. Social care has been decimated under 14 years of Conservative rule. There are nowhere near enough foster placements and nowhere near enough adoptive homes. Mainly because foster carers and adopters have wised up to the fact that there is no meaningful support from local authorities or the government to help them re-parent society’s most vulnerable children. It would be vanishingly unlikely for a foster home to be found to keep all four siblings together. Ditto an adoptive home. Only last month, a judge in the family courts division made a placement order for adoption for a family of four siblings to remain together while simultaneously accepting that is was highly probable that no home would be found. If the children were removed from their mother, children’s social care could look first to place them within the extended birth family. They will say that this will be a better outcome for the children. The truth is that this will save the LA hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. Kinship (family) carers are treated even worse than foster carers and adopters. Foster carers get paid a professional fee. Adopters generally do not. Kinship carers only get an allowance if they are in one of, I think, nine or 10, boroughs of a pilot scheme. Otherwise, kinship carers are overlooked and exploited as a free resource.

We don't disagree in principle but please be careful about how you word things. We typically do an enormous amount.

My concern is the children who I am constantly referring to social work due to neglect but are left living like that because social work either won't take the case on to investigate or glance at it and discharge them. That wasn't a dig at social workers, that was a statement about the social work as a whole. The system is entirely broken and it's children who pay the price. Regardless of the hours worked or size of their caeload, it's ultimately children who are paying the price of an inept system that's under resourced and not fit for purpose.

The school will have already been contacted by the police and SS

Something is amiss here

They've offered help. How can you read that description and not think this family need outside help. People like you are part of the reason children get left in awful situations that either ruin their mental/physical health, or kill them.

If I want to get a message across and be sure I've done it I tend to put it in writing. Don't you?

What difference does it make if they refer by phone or online form!?

Tell the social workers I work with who hold caseloads of 20-24 children, work all the hours, go to court to remove children and drive them across the country to new homes not getting in their own beds until 11pm, writing reports at weekends etc etc that they typically do nothing 🙄🤬

Yes but in some people - members of the public- can only ring up.which means they don't get to see how their concerns are recorded. Or if they've been recorded.

Schools have a system (in England) called CPOMs where they report incidents and can share directly with MAST (or however the OP’s sister’s front-line emergency team styles itself). The OP can also refer anonymously via the NSPCC. The NSPCC will triage and pass directly to the relevant LA. This is what my neighbour does when my multiply neurodivergent adoptive children kick off. I then get a call from a MAST worker, probably about five days later, to ‘anonymously’ relay the concerns. The MAST worker then closes the case. To be fair, I am still waiting for a call back from MAST from August 2025, when I phoned them for help when my AD1 was trying to batter down my bedroom door with her younger sister behind it. OP, I would strongly recommend that you phone the police force your sister lives in, particularly the domestic abuse team. You will get further with the police than you will with children’s social care. The police have special powers of protection for children so if they do a welfare visit and deem the children to be at significant risk of harm, then the children can be removed instantly.

Likely won't make a difference. They'll report to social work, who typically do nothing. It's heartbreaking

🙄

So much nonsense on this thread really.

All local authorities have means for public to make referrals via the MASH

Some authorities don't have a paper referral for the public. School could fill one out if that's the case.

Why are people repeating the same things that have been posted on the thread umpteen times already?