Kids company - what a cock up!

[Northernlurker]

So I understand from the bbc that kc got the three million they were waiting for and which was given to support restructuring of the charity and promptly spent 800 grand of it on the months salary bill! What on earth were they thinking? Looks like it's totally done for now.

I didn't watch Newsnight but the story they spin keeps changing.

CB said the 3 million donation was withdrawn when the philanthropist heard of the sexual abuse allegations. (Which would fit with her victim scenario)

Yentob' version is that when they heard those allegations were about to come out they nobly contacted the philanthropist (and the government apparently- although they'd already used some of the grant money to pay for staff salaries so how were they going to give it all back) to return the money as they thought it would be morally wrong to accept it until the allegations were cleared.
Except they then went on to close the whole thing down because they were sulking over said allegations.

The whole story is such a mess. Those 'vulnerable children' (as they keep saying) have been royally screwed over.

Even with the philanthropist's donation, they could only have limped along for another month or so given the size of their outgoings.

Fair enough re size. I've only been involved with charities with turnovers under £15k. So KC seems huge to me!

1 million is nothing. I know, I know it sounds like a lot to you and me, but it really is nothing, business wise.
Only 80k income a month. Less goods, staff salaries, rent and electric, profit may be good but not huge.

Audits are done on a sample, so whilst every expense invoice has the same 'chance' of being selected, only the large ones end up actually being so.

Just because this company was audited doesn't mean THAT much, as regards all their problems and inconsistencies, to me.

14-15-16 year old girls from troubled backgrounds in a place with 20 year old blokes from equally troubled backgrounds and no sexual encounters at all? yeah right! even if they were consensual (as consensual as they can be from a 14 yo, but in their minds at the time) it's a recipe for disaster. I just don't get why she claims that nothing ever happened at all, why not answer on the lines that we will do everything we can to prevent bla bla

I'm been looking at the accounts. Frightening.
Their expenses were the same as their income.
They spent every penny that they had. Rather than build up reserves, as instructed, by audits, camilla had this policy of helping every child who came to her. This sounds lovely and caring, but you just can't do this.

Huge salary increases for her, up to 90k, another at 80k, two of the daughters of a trustee on 44k.

Key baseline staff only salaries of 1.7 million, - those therapists and frontline staff at the centres, because admin costs were so high, and fundraising - remember those 2 people who were bought in to fundraiser and got not a single penny in a whole year?
After admin , fundraising for and 2.2 million on 'special projects' (?????) there was no money for frontline staff and there was no money in the bank.

What I got from that NN CB interview was that these 'children' lost it sometimes - threw chairs etc. And that could be expected and it was 'dealt with' inhouse.
I keep wondering how they dealt with it - and was a record (even in house) kept...doesn't seem like it was from the snooker ball incident. Same with the drug taking - caught, sent away to stand outside to smoke your joint and then back in? (Why neighbours would know and complain)
Obviously robust mechanisms weren't in place...how many chances does someone get? I know they never turned anyone away but then how do they learn what is unacceptable behaviour?
(I would argue that EVERYONE needs some boundaries, consequences from their actions)
I agree they got too big (from government money) without proper procedures.
And also wonder how the hell they got insurance? Employer liability insurance if nothing else?
And also CBS attitude reminds me of the us and them, don't report/speak to police mentality I came across often when I lived in Brixton - which just enforces a divide.

Yes. Working with kids like that you don't get the police involved a lot of the time. What you do do is make sure incident reports are filled out for every incident, that the young person knows that their behaviour was unacceptable and that if necessary you exclude them from a course or for a short time. You also make all staff/keyworkers aware of the incident sonyou can for eg avoid having particular YPs in the same place at the same time. You also have rules around relationships eg no exclusive relationships, this helps with CP in terms of sexual stuff but also bullying etc.

It is really hard working with clients like this, but you cannot allow them to endanger themselves or other. With proper structures/staff/procedures you can avoid many of the allegations nagainst KC.

As worthy as CBs approach was you have to work in the real world.of risk assessments and incident reports and child protection procedures and recorded outcomes. The KC debacle illustrates why...

Useful take on this here - www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/06/kids-companys-demise-speaks-volumes-about-how-britain-is-run

I feel sorry for the employees who were on low salaries and now did themselves with no income and no redundancy payments and probably with high housing costs in London. The bad financial management has hit a lot of people - short termism always implodes.

Ten years ago I worked with a big national charity that hadnt filed accounts for years (don't you know they had important work to do rather than worry about preparing a set of accounts that pass audit) and they were racking up penalties of thousands of pounds from various authorities. They've since merged with another charity and I hope the finances have improved.

It's so interesting to read the perspectives of people who've worked with charities and understand the financial aspects. I feel much better informed (ie a tiny bit informed) after reading this thread.

I just wanted to make a point though about the 'woo bollocks acupuncture' stuff. I hold no brief whatsoever for woo bollocks, but at the moment I remain open-minded about whether CB was genuinely trying something quite radical here.

As we've all heard, her approach was essentially that these children have been under-parented, or not parented at all in any effective way. And she was trying to make up for that in KC's work.

So for a kid who simply hasn't experienced loving, non-sexual touch from a trusted adult, 'woo bollocks acupuncture' might be genuinely therapeutic in an entirely non-chi sort of way.

For a kid who's never been given even 50p's worth of pocket money - never gone to the corner shop to buy sweets - never had Christmas presents - never been taken shopping to buy new shoes: cash handouts could be about more than just the cash, they could be a genuinely loving gesture. Someone thinks you're worth spending money on. Someone trusts you enough to give you some money, just because.

And as an extrapolation - her principle of never turning a child away - well loving parents don't turn their children away, do they. However much trouble they're in or however shitty they're being, or however low on cash the parents might be that month.

Obviously in the hardnosed world of contracts and so on this approach is unsustainable.

But maybe leaving thousands of kids to fester in hideous home environments, at the mercy of local authority social service department who simply cannot cope, is morally unsustainable.

So I've still got some sympathy for KC and CB. I still think the principle of unconditional love that they were trying to offer is a noble one. Yes, financial competence would have helped them to stay open, but there does seem to be a fundamental tension between financial stability and the sort of unconditionality that KC was aiming for. I'm not sure how that could ever have been resolved.

Meanwhile, kids are still growing up in environments most of us would be horrified by. Today there's one less agency to help them.

I would like to know the percentage of children under the age of 18 they dealt with vs the number of adults a it sounds like there were a lot of you g men hanging around the centres

Tbh, I lost respect for cb when she blamed black mothers for black fathers abandoning their kids and causing the cycle to continue.

It's a sad situation and of course the children will be the victims.

However if things had been managed better it might not have turned so bad so quickly. Charities all have to budget and cover costs and expenses- I watched the NN interview of Iplayer and when Kirsty Wark asked CB about building reserves, than answer was 'I knew we had no reserves which is why I asked the government to give me more money'.
That's not how things work. They were lucky enough to get fantastic donations- they were expanding and opening centres in more cities. They should have focused on protecting what they had built and the children they were already helping.

baboob as a parent you don't give your child no boundaries, no pocket money, deprive them of 'luxuries' and then give them £50 and expect them to be able to manage it sensibly...that just isn't how you learn any grown up money management....
Furthermore no loving parent will ever turn their back - actually they do -sometimes it is in the child's interest - talk to parents of drug addicts...look at some teenage threads on here. Talking older teens here not 7 yos.
If you keep forgiving and turning a blind eye you aren't making them take responsibility for themselves and their behaviour- you are actually enabling them, not helping them.

A KC worker on Radio 4's programme about KC last night gave quite a detailed account of how the cash thing worked, and according to him it wasn't 'here's £50 now off you pop'; it was tied quite explicitly to things like school attendance and behaviour.

But at the same time, giving the child money and allowing them to make choices about how to spend it was an attempt to echo exactly the sort of thing that 'normal' parents do for their kids all the time.

You've only got to look at the genuinely appalling figures for care leavers to see the sort of traumatically terrible balls-up state agencies and their private contractors make when they act in loco parentis to damaged children. It's not like there are loads of agencies who do this well. Indeed, does anybody do it well? I think it was fair enough for KC to try a different approach.

(And there is plenty of scientific evidence that cruelty, neglect and a lack of emotional attachment early in a child's life will cause long-term damage. There may not be evidence that KC's approach can heal that damage, but then longitudinal studies of that kind would be a pretty long-term project. If KC weren't undertaking that research in a systematic way then I agree, that was just stupid of them.)

Nobody could possibly argue at this point that KC was financially sustainable or well run so I'm not even going to try. But as I said in the other post, I can understand how an organisation that works on the principle of unconditionality would have difficulty looking into the eyes of a desperate kid with nowhere else to go and saying 'sorry, we're full.' This is CB's explanation for why they didn't build up reserves. I think it's probably true that she could have done with bringing in a red-hot CEO to take some of the tougher decisions while she concentrated on fund-raising and ethos.

Local authority social services departments are an absolute shit show. At-risk children are let down by them all the time. They're an under-resourced, ineffective plaster on a gaping wound.

Where's the public tutting and purse-lipped 'ooh I knew they weren't as good as they pretended to be' about that? I must have missed it I guess.

But at the same time, giving the child money and allowing them to make choices about how to spend it was an attempt to echo exactly the sort of thing that 'normal' parents do for their kids all the time.

I would be very interested to know just how many families there are in which fifteen year olds are given two hundred quid a month in cash with no need to account for what it's spent on. I suspect that someone advocating that as a parenting technique for fifteen year olds in stable, leafy houses would be regarded with a fair amount of . Given that MN's demographic contains a large number of affluent Londoners from six-figure households, I wonder how many are currently giving their teenagers fifty quid a week in cash?

I didn't know they were trying to take a different approach to social services because I didn't know they were housing children that had been taken into care for that comparison to be made.

I am pretty shocked if that was their role.

There seems to be a huge problem with this charity taking on government money, providing services we except to be under rigorous controls, such as education and mental health care, and then not being under the bodies that usually inspect such facilities, like OFsted.

I think there needs to be an investigation into voluntary sector organisations providing services to vulnerable people, with an aim of making sure they are inspected and regulated in the way the public sector is, rather than all this focus on just KC.

www.kidsco.org.uk has a formal notice of closure. It makes very interesting reading.

It looks like they failed to pay a creditor who got sufficiently cross as to seek a winding up order. They admit to straightforward insolvency, amongst a huge buffing of CB's saintliness.

What's interesting is that they are saying they wanted to restructure when what emerged last month was that they would only get funds if they agreed to restructuring.
Suddenly they're saying that's what they had wanted to do all along.

And talk of 'moral failing' is so disingenuous. And unfair.

Lots of charities close- some of them doing great work, some not so much.

The more everything comes out the more it looks like CB thought she could just pick up the phone and funds would magically appear. Rather arrogant isn't it?

15yos in affluent households might not be given that much cash (although I wouldn't be surprised if some are) but they sure are provided with decent clean clothes and shoes, equipment for school, all meals, money for travel, basic mobile phone packages, the occasional treat/meal out and probably all the books they can eat. Which comes to a lot more than £50pw.

I wasn't claiming that KC provided residential care, but as I understand it they were attempting to act in loco parentis for a lot of these kids, albeit informally/emotionally. My point was that state agencies and their private contracters are almost uniformly completely terrible at this. We all know this, but it doesn't make the headlines ever, let alone five days running.

It is an appalling moral failure, at a societal level. Whatever stunts KC pulled, they pale in comparison to our collective failure to give sufficient funding and consideration to these children's needs. Talk to people who work for social service departments (with a few valiant exceptions) in local authorities if you want to hear about jaw-dropping organisational failings and kids at risk.

But as a society we don't want to think about it because we think we pay too much tax, and we want our council tax to get spent on bins and potholes.

But they are not closing because of 'moral failure' they are closing because they didn't manage their funds properly.

Re the 500 pounds for 15 year olds. It does seem a odd thing to give cash and expect a child to use it widely- would a vulnerable 15 year old really be able to budget and provide for him/herself as well as other family members depending on the circumstances?
As a one off giving cash might work. However in the long run it is much more helpful to distribute resources in a practical way- travel cards, vouchers etc

but they sure are provided with decent clean clothes and shoes, equipment for school, all meals, money for travel, basic mobile phone packages, the occasional treat/meal out and probably all the books they can eat. Which comes to a lot more than £50pw.

So it would be a lot less open to coercion to give them these things, rather than cash. It would be interesting to know how many of the young, vulnerable (etc) clients got to spend the money on any of the above, rather than it being taken by older and more aggressive associates and/or their inadequate parents. That's the sort of outcome tracking that needed to be done: does giving thirteen year olds fifty quid a week result in them buying clean clothes, nice means, an Oyster Card and a book, or does it get stolen and used by bullies to buy drugs? Which would you bet on?

they were attempting to act in loco parentis for a lot of these kids, albeit informally

You are either in loco parentis or you aren't; there's no "informally" about it. They had no statutory basis, and (as we have found out) no on-going responsibility. Someone upthread referred to them as Disney Dads. That seems appropriate.

Or as part of.a course eg a work readiness course, take them into town with a budget to buy interview clothes etc. You can just hand over money - there needs to be some supervision/education alongside - just as with an affluent MC family..

They did give Oyster cards at the same time as the cash according to the guy on the radio, and were experimenting with giving food vouchers instead of cash.

I suppose what I'm trying to do is trace back the line of causality here.

They closed because they had no money/reserves.
They had no money because they were financially irresponsible and had poor governance, but also because of demand and their policy of not turning away self-referrals. (Self-referral is a legit thing, it's not a term made up by KC.)
They had so many self-referrals because of the failure of state agencies.

Which in the end means we all take some responsibility for this. If society provided for these children better then none of this need have happened at all.

Of course if it turns out that they were committing fraud left right and centre and actually had 15 clients in total, this argument will turn out to be bollocks.

Gemauve I take your point about the tragic consequences of lack of statutory underpinning in this case. My point was that this was the emotional approach they were trialling, and was based on a premise that AFAIK is scientifically valid (ie that a lack of continuity, love, trust and care in a young person's life will have poor long-term consequences). I was getting a bit fed up with the endless 'woo' references tbh. I, along with most of us I guess, would have been interested to know whether that approach could have worked in the long term, because LA/care home approaches sure as fuck haven't according to all measurable outcomes for the last 30 years or so.

Well I think the only way we are going to find out what they were actually achieving is by reviewing the areas covered over the next few years

One thing I noticed about those who used the service and are commenting now - it's parents who use the service with their children. So not the feckless. So why do we only hear about the emotive clients and not the others that may be more easily helped by other services such as food banks. It all seems so chaotic