Cameron's adoptions idea

[2old2beamum]

Our fantasic PM has decided adoption procedures must be quicker. Many of my friends and I have adopted several children with disabilities (we have adopted 8 sadly 3 have died) With the savage cuts proposed I am concerned children with disabilities will be left to stagnate in care costing far more than on benefits. (1 DS cost £5000/wk in residential care 1994)

DPBIHE (I'm sure you don't!!) Thanks for your post. I won't have covered everything but I think I've made some of the main issues. I haven't heard anything about comments made by a High Court Judge - can you advise where you read this? Was it Lord Justice Wall by any chance, as he has been quite vocal in the past about child care issues.

I note your para about the parent who is loving and caring but whose medical condition prevents them from caring for the child. To be honest I think this kind of situation is highly unlikely to end up as a contested case in care proceedings. It does of course depend on what the medical condition is, but the wording of the legislation in relation to removal of children against the wishes of the parents states "The child must be suffering from significant harm, or likely to suffer significant harm" (the likely bit is there to cover cases where several other children have been ill treated by the parents or someone with a severe enduring non-treatable psychiatric disorder e.g. personality disorder, or parents with severe Learning Difficulties)

I think in such a case it would be essential for the LA to put in whatever support was needed to enable the mother to care for the child, and build in respite care, or shared care with either a relative/friend or foster carer. I honestly feel that any LA would be loathe to take such a case to court against the parent's wishes (again it's difficult to comment on hyperthetical issues) but lawyers do have to be very careful in court, and this is in relation to the mother in the circumstances you mention and indeed in respect of any birth parenting contesting the case.

The thing is that the vast majority of birthparents are unable to cope with cross examination, and get upset or angry or make contradictory statements etc., and all lawyers know that if they go in too heavy with cross examination they will lose credability with other lawyers and more importantly the Judge. To be honest the birth parents quite often condemn themselves because they can't cope with the court arena (which is intimidating to many, and yes sws too) and so there is no great need for heavy cross examination. That is reserved for the sws and quite rightly as this is a child's future that is being decided. At the risk of repeating myself this is why every social worker and manager and LA lawyer know that they must be able to present evidence to support the allegations they are making about the birth parent.

On occasions the guardian (who is very influential in court)even though she is no more qualified than a LA sw, but works for CAFCASS (Children & Family Court Advisory Service) will disagree with the LAs case to the court and these final hearings can last around 5 days. Ones where everyone is "barking up the same tree" take on average 4 days, which gives some indication of how complex these cases are in reality.

You ask about residential assessments in centres set up for this specific purpose. Yes they are extremely expensive, and this is one important reason why they are not routinely used. However the other thing is that these parents have to be referred to these centres (most are outside of the LA - private ventures) and the centre will only take parents where they think there is a good chance that they will be able to make use of the assessment and possibly get a favourable recommendation. In all honesty many of the parents can't stand these centres and leave without the child/ren and then there is no contest - end of matter and sws have all the evidence they need for court.

In the LA that I worked in we recruited foster carers for "mother and baby" placements and these were of course far far less expensive than residential centres, and proved very successful, but the same thing often happened, the young mum would clear off and leave the baby with the carer. I can see the problem really for any struggling birth parent, that they don't like being monitored. Sorry about length of reply!

Here's the link nananina - it's on the Ch4 expert witness article/news clip
www.channel4.com/news/how-competent-are-expert-witnesses
have to dash out will come back with better reply & more questions later I expect!

Sorry it'sme again- I was looking back through the threads and I think there is some confusion. Every child who is Looked After by the LA, be that on a statutory or voluntary basis has to have a written Care Plan which can be changed accordingly as circumstances change with the families. If however it is the decision that the case will be taken before the court against the wishes of the parents, then the sws have to spell out very clearly to the Judge the care plan for the child (the judge needs to know what sws plan to do with a child/ren before he grants an Order)

The care plan will depend upon the age of the child and his or her particular needs. If it is say a child under 5 or maybe 7 then the most likely plan would be for adoption and the LA sws would then be requesting that the judge make a Placement Order which "frees" the child for adoption . The birth parents can of course contest this and will have their own lawyer to present their case. However if the judge makes the Placement Order then the child will be matched with suitable approved adoptors and if all goes according to plan the adoptors then go to county court and see a judge in chambers so it is very informal and the Adoption Order is made. I mention ages because sadly the older the child is the less chance he/she has of being matched with adoptors.

Most adoptors want babies, but since there are very few, then they will "up" their offer to olderchildren, or maybe 2 siblings, but willmostly want under 5s. There is a preference for girls over boys. Hence the need is for adoptors for older (middle years aged children) sibling groups of 3 or 4 and children with disabilites. The LA can request a Placement Order for older children and be granted one and then if they are unable to find an adoptive family "in house" the child is advertised in "Be My Parent" type periodicals published by BAAF (British Agencies for Fostering & Adoption) and Adoption UK. Children from all over the country awaiting adoption will be advertised in this way. They can also be placed on the Adoption Register. If after a long wait, no familyis forthcoming, then the LA sws will change the plan to permanent fostering, but sadly this usually proves to be a fruitless search too. This child then spends most of his childhood in short term foster homes and needless to say this causes the child a great deal of confusion which he is unable to process and so his behaviour worsens and he is passed around short term foster carers.

If the LA know there is no chance of adoption (either because of age) or it is important that the child remains in contact with his birthparent or members of the extended family, then they will request that the judge makes a Care Order which transfer the parental responsibilities to the LA who become the "corporate parent" and the care plan will be for permanent fostering, but I'm afraid the same thing applies and people who want to permanently foster an older child, a sibling group, a child with disabilities are about as rare as snow in summer.

This is what I am trying to say about Cameron's plans for this 3 month adoption business. He clearly has no idea of the difficulties in finding permanent homes for children who wait. I think I said earlier maybe he is intending to make it compulsory for people to adopt or foster!!

The most successful way of finding permanence for a child is if there is a suitable relative in the extended family who can care for the child on a permanent basis. They can apply for a Special Guardianship Order (won't go into that now) but if granted it does the relatives more or less full PR for the child.

Sorry long post again!

The Channel 4 investigation into so-called 'expert witnesses' was horrifying. Most of them were unqualified and even those who were were out of practice or going well beyond the boundaries of their own expertise. No wonder Roy Meadows did so well out of a system that seems incapable of conducting the most elementary checks to see whether someone is genuinely an expert.

I'm sure social workers are well-intentioned, but reliance by the courts on 'experts' who are anything but means there will have been miscarriages of justice and they will carry on until judges start to do their flipping job and actually scrutinise the 'evidence' rather than assuming anyone who calls themselves an expert must be right.

DPBIHE thanks for that - frankly I am amazed and it is certainly a very worrying state of affairs.

Birdsgottofly I haven't understood some of the issues you have been raising but feel I must reply to your comments about Barnadoes being "mainly staffed by ex sws (mostly CP) and I think you are possibly right. The reason for this is because voluntary organisations like Barnardoes don't take on newly qualified sws, so these people have to start with a LA and experience life at the "sharp end" for themselves. When they are experienced and stressed out with statutory responsibilities they often look for a more relaxed way of working (and this is an observation not a criticism) and some of them move to voluntary agencies like Barnardoes or Action for Children, NSPCC etc. These voluntary agencies (unlike LA social services)are not under any legal duty to provide any service. The NSPCC for instances does not have to do any work in terms of the child's future etc - all they do is pass the referral on to LA social service departments.

These voluntary agencies can pick and choose what work they do. So, some of them recruit foster carers and adoptors and have to "sell" them to the LA because they don't actually have any children! They run groups for all sorts of service users, e.g. teenage mothers, drug dependent parents, parenting classes, perpetrators of abuse, domestic violence etc. Some of these groups are very successful and I am by no means criticising - I am simply pointing out the facts. You say they come into contact with all sorts of troubled people - yes they do, but only for one night a week if they are running courses, whereas LA social workers have to deal with this people day in and day out, which I can assure you is far more stressful.

You mention Barnardoes has statutory links and I don't know what you mean by this. If you mean they work in partnership with LAs, yes they do, LAs sometimes have a contract with a voluntary organisation to provide say short breaks for children with disabilites and they are very successful at this kind of thing.

In the mid 80s the LA started to run a pilot project to recruit Teenage Placement Carers (who would care for troubled and troubling teenagers who were mostly in childrens homes) and I started the project in the area in which I worked. The I think it was Barnardoes (though not 100%) decided they would do a similar thing. I was expected to recruit, train and assess approx 20 - 25 families per year to make it cost effective. Barnardoes target was 5 families per year!!

I rest my case!

Nana- i have friends and family (all SW's) who opted to work for Banardoes because they felt that the LA that they were working for had stopped serving both the service users (children and families) and the public and were becoming very disillusioned with SW. My sisiter worked part time running a project for Banadoes and part time for an LA,sometimes that experience is good as you are well aware of different ways of working.

I am in my fourties, having worked across all social care, and my friends/familiy are older, so we have seen many changes, a lot very positive and the system has been improved on,in some (but not all) LA's.

What i ment with "Banadoes seeing the product of bad SW" i was refering to the work done with both adopted/removed children and survivers of neglect/abuse, so a good range of opinions on what could have gone better, what worked etc.

This is of course combined with other think tanks from many different sources, service users/support workers and SW etc.
They gather data to put to the government and the public from all sectors of their work, not just from running a course from once a week.

I see your point about size, but i have seen very effective work done when projects have been kept smaller,both through my working life and personally.

What my point was,is that there opinion, as other charities should not be discounted,or mocked because they are not statutory.

Nina- also i am working with two families at present (and have in the past) were supervised contact is forcing a relationship that wouldn't be there otherwise, between family members. The time length that these cases have gone on for and some of the details, which you will no doubt be aware of, has caused there to be attachment and emotional issues for the youngest child.

The adoption decision has taken to long. In both caese the mothers are pregnant again and i only hope that the same doesn't happen with the next children.

Likewise my collegue, has had to wait a ridiculous amount of time to be matched with a child (not baby) i am being deliberately vague, that could have been done at least months sooner, given this childs set of circumstances.

At least we now have some idea of how systemically bad the expert evidence is in the family courts. The FJC has released a study of psychological reports in 3 family courts covering 126 bundles.

My own view is that we need to sort out the malpractise in the family courts in preference to simply make them create miscarriages of justice faster
www.uclan.ac.uk/news/model_to_quality_assure_psychological_expert_witnesses.php

see above for lancashire university press release from which you can access the report.

Thank you for that link John Hemming.

I applaud all people involved with scrutinising and raising awareness of these issues.

Very sadly the press release reads as worringly as expected.

May I ask, do you think there will ever be any recourse for children and families having been affected by this emerging evidence of malpractice?

Oh no not jhon hemming

Didn't he cheat of his wife

I to have deep misgivings about these so called "experts"
Whilest one parents who had missed 45 contacts in a row until she was due to have her assement was judged to be a outstanding parent

The day the assement finished she never came to contact again also it was noted by the contact supervisor who had deep misgivings about the parent

The parent had asked her do we let her eat with her hands or should she be using a folk at this age the child is question was 4

So the parent hadn't stepped foot in contact before or after the assment took place

The police and the school felt so strongly about the child not being placed back with the parent the wrote a strong letter to the guardian and the judge but alas the parenting assor gave the green light so back the child went

Sadly for the child they were back in care with in 6 months parent and new bf had left child with unknown local 15 year old and went holiday you can imagin the state the child was in when found.

But hay as long as the expert thats been involed with the family all of 13 weeks in a controlled contact centre thinks their and excellent parent,

what dose any one else who has been involed with the said family for 5 years
Know god forbid the judge trust their advice on the matter

Hi, as a relatively new approved foster carer I am beginning to have grave concerns about " the child's best interests " and indeed there whole future in all of this. We are all taught in training that "we fight for the child" which is absolutely correct, however it seems that the bottom line is budgets and targets and very little about the child I am starting to have serious questions about this whole process and Cameron's plans just reinforce this.

Childatheart. you are not wrong

The child best interests come seconed to the parents wants and 3rd to the ss budgets

When I asked for councilling for a child I cared for I was told their was no money, the parent was getting 2 sessions of counciling a week.

It also concerns me that false allergations made by the parent against foster carers or sw are not raised in court, they should be repraemaned for this and it should be taken as a hostile act

As adoptive parents the problems with birth parent is legally complex I accept this. My concern is SW's, our beautiful DS born to a drug abuser who had already had 2 children removed. Fell pregnant with new partner and SW said she could have another chance OK it was thought she remained drug free during pregnancy. Gave birth to a small baby. Move forward 8months GFather turned up mother off planet with heroin, baby virtually dead with pneumococcal meningitis. In hospital for 5 months mother did not visit. When better deafblind/CP/ epilepsy moved to residential care , why no foster care. When 3yrs decision made to look for adoption SW started process then left notes put to one side and forgotten Move on 2.5yrs new SW who realizes his plight. He came to us so sad &withdrawn .We have salvaged what we can. He now has a cochlear implant(should have been done as soon as he was well enough after he had recovered nobody bothered so speech centre dead) He had no1-1 at school no section 7 in place. Sorry for rant but it is us who sits by his side as he screams with pain. OK mother was primarily to blame but SW's failed him.Yes i am bitter.

What I don't understand is why do all the relevant authorities hide behind a "smokescreen" and pretend that the child wishes are paramount and taken into account when in so many ways they clearly are not.

~~ Sorry for going on, it just makes me so mad that the most vulnerable in our society are being treated as no more than case files and political pawns.

It also concerns me that false allergations made by the parent against foster carers or sw are not raised in court, they should be repraemaned for this and it should be taken as a hostile act

They are under my LA and are brought up by the IRO in LAC/CP reviews.

I read lots on here and would like to point out that different LA's function/perform differently. I have worked under three different ones, my friends/family similar.

I will always agree that services are not in place for damaged children, though, unless they are "clinical" enough fort CAHMS to worry about and then the service is limited.

Birdsgottofly - in spite of your experience and that of your family I am still finding your posts somewhat muddled and confusing. I would just like to comment that I have not mocked or discounted Barnardoes , which is what you accuse me of doing. I was simply pointing out the differences between a voluntary organisation and a the statutory duties of a LA SSD. Incidentally, vol orgs get grants from govt and considerable amounts of money from the fund raising with which they are involved.

MrB and childatheart - I can understand your frustration at feeling that the child's best interests do not have paramount concern, and to some extent you are right. Your comments about budgets coming first are absolutely right but this is because Social Services have always been under resourced, and this was before the coalition's slashing of all public sector budgets, which has of course exacerbated the situation. Blame cannot be laid at the door of any public service, who are having to make huge savings in their budgets and the wisdom of solomon is needed to make decisions about where to make the cuts, because some disadvantaged people in our society are going to be seriously hurt by these cuts.

Many inner city social service Depts are trying to run a service with 30/40% vacancy rates, a great deal of sick leave due to stress related illness and the need to use agency workers. Even in the shire counties the vacancy rates are rising. The thing is though these vacant posts cannot be advertised because there is just not enough money in the budget. So there is a catch 22 position here. At the same time as slashing budgets Cameron and his ilk are pressing for improved services - totally ridiculous.

Obviously these things are going to impact on the children and the foster carers who are working hard to care for some very troubled children.

CatH - I honestly don't think that social workers hide behind a "smokescreen" and pretend that the child's best interests are paramount. At the risk of repeating myself, there is only so much social workers can do when there are too few of them, handling very high case loads because of all the vacancies and "frozen" posts. Some foster carers don't realise that the child's sw will probably have 25 - 30 children on her caseload. I think the vast majority do their level best in very difficult circumstances. Of course, like any other professional or worker, they range from highly competent to woefully inadequate and anything in between on that continuum.

MrB - yes John Hemming is the Lib Dem MP who pops up from time to time on MN. His usual beef is about children being snatched from decent parents to get them adopted. He believes that there is a conspiracy between all professionals involved in care proceedings, including lawyers (even those acting for birthparents)and the judge himself, to just snatch this child away from loving parents to get him adopted.

I have spent more time than I can tell you giving exact details of what has to happen in care proceedings to no avail. Many of us (sws, lawyers and barristers) on MN have tried to disabuse him that his conspiracy theory is fundamentally flawed to no avail

There is a great deal of information in the public domain and JH so I am not breaking MN rules by giving some of the facts about him.

1. He holds this conspiracy theory as explained above. I am pretty sure I know the roots of his theory but will not go into it here, but it is in relation to a personal matter.

1. He was greatly angered by the personal matter I refer to and so he sued Birmingham City Council for some ridiculous figure (I think around £300,00) and further more he insisted that the social workers paid this money out of their own pockets. Clearly he lost his case but that did not stop him posting on numerous occasions on any adoption thread on MN. As I said to him in a post to him, he is posting on a thread about adoptions taking too long which completely goes against his conspiracy theory. This has not stopped him because he has seen an article about psychologists not being adequately qualified, and has jumped on that bandwagon, coming back to one of his favourite topics "the incompetence of social workers"

1. He runs some sort of organisation "assisting" parents who are involved in care proceedings. Sometimes he advises them to get rid of their solicitors and one of his untrained volunteers seeks to get permission to represent these parents in court. If that is not exactly what is happening with the issue of unqualified psychologists then I don't know what is. That is too logical for JH to understand.

1. He admits to helping parents where care proceedings are imminent in fleeing the country to escape their child being removed because he is being significantly harmed. He also pays for these trips. The fact that an MP can behave in such a way is completely beyond me. Several of us onMN have written to Nick Clegg to point out what one of his MPs is doing which we thought would bring the LIb Dem party into disrepute and did not get the courtesy of a reply.

1. He was ordered out of the court by a Judge in the Birmingham County Court. He was (as I have outlined in an earlier post) seriously criticised by a Lord Justice Wall (a high court judge)

1. He posts the most ridiculous things. e.g. children were removed from parents because they called the social worker fat!! The scarey thing is that he believes this and expects others to believe it too. There are numerous examples like this but I can't bring them to mind.

1. He rarely answers any question asked of him. He makes random odd comments, always very brief, which often have no bearing to anything being asked of him.

1. Personally, he was married with 4 children and then took a mistress and the wife he claims is now his ex wife though they are not divorced. He put himself forward in one of the tabloid rags as "Love Rat of the Year" Then there was the whole debacle of the cat and the first wife who had been scorned (hell that no fury like a woman scorned) can't remember who said it.

I could go on but I think I've probably said enough.

SO JH I invite you to tell me which one of my 8 points is not a matter of fact????

Gah!

(that's not at you nananina, but the only response that seems fitting this morning )

BTW some people on this thread may be interested in this:

www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/inspection-of-adoption-support-agencies

"This is a consultation document on proposals for a revised framework for the inspection of adoption support agencies. Ofsted seeks the widest possible range of views from those who have an interest in, or expertise relating to, adoption to ensure that the inspection framework takes proper account of the needs and circumstances of all interested parties. Above all, the framework must assure the quality of services for all those receiving adoption support and promote their continuing improvement. There is also a version of this consultation document for children and young people.

The closing date for the consultation is 3 April 2012."