Shocking.

[IrnBruTheNoo]

Hard to believe that a couple who are doing a good job raising their DC are being slated like this...

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kerry-mcdougall-dumb-married-mum-2799857

Nah, I don't think they're doing it for kicks. I would think the situation needs to be reassed now that the family are back in the LA and the children are growing up and will soon be attending school and nursery. The mother has obviously done well so far in raising them through the baby/toddler stages, some mothers without special needs do a much worse job.

• reassessed! sorry

Apparently, in Scotland there are no targets.

But here ia a Daily Mail article on England

"Meanwhile, millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been given to councils to encourage them to meet high Government targets on child adoptions.

Under New Labour policy, Tony Blair changed targets in 2000 to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 a year.

The annual tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales - four times higher than in France, which has a similar-sized population.

Blair promised millions of pounds to councils that achieved the targets and some have already received more than £2million each in rewards for successful adoptions.

Figures recently released by the Department for Local Government and Community Cohesion show that two councils - Essex and Kent - were offered more than £2million "bonuses" over three years to encourage additional adoptions.

Four others - Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Cheshire and Hampshire - were promised an extra £1million.

This sweeping shake-up was designed for all the right reasons: to get difficult-to-place older children in care homes allocated to new parents.

But the reforms didn't work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, social workers began to earmark babies and cute toddlers who were most easy to place in adoptive homes, leaving the more difficultto-place older children in care.

As a result, the number of over-sevens adopted has plummeted by half.

Critics - including family solicitors, MPs and midwives as well as the wronged families - report cases where young children are selected, even before birth, by social workers in order to win the bonuses.

More chillingly, parents have been told by social workers they must lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them.

One mother's son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

2There is a more worrying factor involved. Look at the official figures. Why are they so high? Is it really true that more mothers are becoming potential killers or abusers?

Or are the financial bonuses offered to councils fuelling the astonishing rise in forced adoptions?

John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning to change the adoption system, said yesterday: "I have evidence that 1,000 children are wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year even though they have not been harmed in any way.

"The targets are dangerous and lead to social workers being over-eager.

"The system's secrecy hides any wrongdoing. One has to ask if a mother is expected to have problems looking after her baby, why doesn't the State help her instead of taking her child away?"

The MP's concerns are echoed by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS), a body which advises new mothers.

Spokeswoman Beverley Beech insists: "Babies are being removed from their mothers by social workers using any excuse.

"We strongly suspect this is because newborns and toddlers are more easily found homes than older children. They are a marketable commodity."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

"Why on earth did she have to lose her little girl?

The grandmother emotionally explained: "All the family came forward to offer to help look after my granddaughter, and all of them were told they were not good enough.

"The social worker told us to forget her. He said: 'She is water under the bridge.'

"We think they wanted her for adoption from the beginning."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

How about this one, Claig? I think there is more than one way to look at John Hemming's record on stepping in to support parents in child protection cases: MP encourages mother with history of violence to evade social services

He also appears to be linked to this website -Fassit - which advises all parents to refuse to cooperate with social services. I think we all know from recent deaths and court cases that there are parents who are not fit to look after their children, and should have them removed.

Newspaper stories tend to be written very much from the parents' perspective, which of course may not always tell the whole story, but social workers are bound by professional confidentiality not to speak to the papers.

"One mother's son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older."

Oh come on. I cant take any of this scaremongering crap seriously. John hemming talks out of anothrr part of his body from the rest of us.

I suspect theyve extrapolated that from at risk of emotional neglect. Which usually means yoive neglected older children. Which on mn usualky gets baying for your blood. Unless of course the social workers actually intervene. Then they get to be the pantomime baddy.

Judge describes John Hemming as irresponsible and another describes him as a bad witness.

And there's more and more. I really can't understand how he got reelected last time.

No doubt theyre in on it. Whatever the hell "it" is. The tinfoil hat brigade.

I can assure you that there is definitely more to this.

I wish there were more brave MPs who stood up and questioned the closed secret family court system and the local authorities and stood up for parents who feel they have been treated unjustly.

We have seen what some of New Labour's targets led to in our hospitals and in our schools. Maybe they have also had a detrimental affect to our social services.

We saw how the Liverpool Care Pathway financial incentives were scrapped.

I cannot say much on a public forum but sadly in cases of mothers with learning difficulties children are very often removed and paved into care or adopted. The statistics are frightening. around 50% of parents with learning difficulties do not live with their children. Some care for their children for years worth no concerns from the hv etc but then have them removed after asking for help with something. It is absolutely horrible.

of course with this case all we know us what is in the media, it may be another case of a woman with learning difficulties losing her children unnecessarily or it may not. The media isn't that great at presenting a balanced view point.

The system is failing. It's not a matter of damned if we do, damned if we don't; we need to get it right, and we can only do that by looking closely at what goes on.

The Most Senior Family Court Judge calls for more transparency in family courts:

www.familylaw.co.uk/articles/Tranparency-family-courts-more-speech-enforced-silence-121113-968

Why is this so low key and only in the Mail/Telegraph?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2413373/Top-judges-war-secret-courts-Family-hearings-exposed-glare-publicity.html

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10289280/Judge-calls-for-more-transparency-in-family-courts.html

This is a recent article from the Daily Mail

"One social worker can be heard telling the parents: 'We are going to take [baby J]. I don't want to have to get physical.'

The mother can be heard wailing and screaming 'no' as social workers take her baby.

The baby's father told the Daily Mail: 'I taped over the light on the webcam so the social workers couldn't see it was switched on.'

The couple - who cannot be named - have lost four children who were removed by social workers. Three have now been adopted.

The father said yesterday they have never been accused of harming their children.

Cases in which children have been taken from families with learning difficulties have been acutely controversial over the last decade."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2413319/Father-secretly-records-moment-hour-old-baby-taken-away-social-services.html

I've got a lot of respect for John Hemming and I am fast losing respect for the Church. What are the Church doing about these cases? Why aren't the bishops bringing these cases up in the House of Lords?

Apologies, this ended up very long:

The attempt to increase adoptions was, I understand, an attempt to reduce the numbers of children languishing in limbo in the care system. But, as with any attempt to set targets, there is/was the danger that some people would go for the easier options to fulfill their targets. Whether or not there were cases of babies being removed from their birth family unjustifiably, it was right to raise that possibility. It seems that the policy was either badly worded, or nobody had thought through the negative consequences of that policy.

There is also the problem of a shared mindset that can arise in particular cases. Experts of all specialties involved in a case often rely on other experts' reports. There can be a kind of folie a deux where once the notion that a parent or parents are unsuitable to care for their child has initially been put forward, that notion cascades down to everyone else who subsequently gets involved. That's the damage of a "label".

Whether John Hemming is a loon or not, what he has done is repeatedly speak out about the secrecy of the Family Courts and the Court of Protection. Senior judges in the Family Courts have been pressing for quite some time now for there to be more openness, to the extent that accredited members of the press can be permitted to sit in on Family Law cases (but not see confidential documents). Apparently, very few applications from the press have been made. But some judgements, can be viewed here: www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=fo6 - though note that many make for distressing reading.

Going on to the "learning difficulties" aspect - to my mind, that's the most disturbing of all. It is perfectly possible that someone who scores not very highly on an IQ test, or is not academically able, to be a very caring and nurturing parent, both in terms of physical and emotional care. There might be problems in such parent(s) providing an intellectually stimulating home environment for NT children - but it's not a given, and shouldn't be regarded as such. There are plenty of families where the home isn't intellectually stimulating, not because of any LD but because some parents just don't care.

These parents have already demonstrated their ability to engage with the authorities in Ireland, and demonstrated their parenting skills. The support they had there should continue now they are back in Scotland.

Ultimately, and I'm paraphrasing from those Family Law cases I've linked to, removal of a child from its natural family should be the last resort. Certainly there are cases where removal is necessary for the safety of the child, but LD shouldn't automatically trigger that. To my mind, being loved and nurtured is the basis, and for as long as those parents are providing that, and they're engaging with the schools to provide the intellectual stimulation, then the children should stay with them.

'Why is this so low key and only in the Mail/Telegraph?'

Becaue they are the non-socialist papers. The socialists won't even talk about it.

The same story in the guardian.

But the case in the OP isn't even going through the courts - all the newspaper story seems to say is that social workers are keeping an eye on her with a view to offering help; the couple are the ones saying they might take their children away. I don't think publicity at this stage is particularly helpful to the couple or their children, tbh.

'Whether John Hemming is a loon or not'

John Hemming is not a loon. He speaks up about injustice and he speaks up about the child abuse that went on in Jersey and elsewhere.

Anyone who criticised Savile was once called a loon, anyone who questioned why he had a senior position at Broadmoor was called a loon.
Anyone who asked questions about his role in hospitals was called a loon.

They told us that the Daily Mail was irresponsible to question the financial incentives to hospitals for placing people on the Liverpool Care Pathway.

John Hemming questions the secretive closed family court system and wants to throw more light and accountability on the people who make some of these decisions.

It is a shame there aren't more MPs like him.

Thanks exexpat, when I searched those were all that came up.

I agree to an extent about unhelpful publicity however I think there is a link to what goes on in the family courts and how what goes on in them is monitored. If a family doesn't have confidence in the authorities, and needs to challenge their decisions, what else is there?

This is about Scotland

"Three in five parents with learning difficulties will have their children taken into care, charity estimates"

www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/three-five-scots-parents-learning-1874016

There's also this earlier piece about the debate over openness in the Court of Protection.

claig. I normally like your posts. But I too have read some very dubious stuff about him, on here and on the internet.

Will find a thread if I can.

I am sure some people with learning difficulties are capable of looking after their children, with appropriate support, either from their families or from social services, but some are not. They may be loving and have good intentions, but just do not have the capacity to deal with a child needing complex medical care, for example, or even sometimes just to provide basic nutrition and hygiene.

If social workers decide a child is better off in care, they are criticised. If they decide not to take a child into care, they are criticised. These are hugely complicated cases, where there are layers and layers of factors to be taken into consideration - none of which will be evident from one tabloid story from the parents' point of view.