Topic: Letter sent to the editor regarding the Minister’s statement on abuse in residential care in The Herald 8th February (2008)

Topic: Letter sent to the editor regarding the Minister’s statement on abuse in residential
care in The Herald 8th February

The No Time to Lose (NTTL) coalition welcomes the Scottish Government’s response to
the recommendations of the Shaw Report on Historical Abuse. The establishment of
appropriate support services for survivors of abuse is long overdue, and we would urge
the Minister to develop these services as soon as possible. It is only right that the
injustices of the past should be addressed.

The Shaw Report, however, has also emphasised that the lessons of the past need to
be addressed in the current provision of residential child care. The Scottish
Government’s acceptance of these points is also to be welcomed. Over the last 25
years, a number of reports and inquiries have identified key issues in preventing abusive
systems and protecting children from abusive adults working in care services. While
many changes have been made because of these previous inquiries, much more needs
to be done if we are to ensure there is real and continuous improvement.
We therefore welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to ensuring that
residential child care is the best that it can be, and the placement of choice for the
children whose needs it serves. In particular we support improvements in this sector
which would include both investment and strategic oversight for this sector.
We agree with the Minister that a supply of residential child care services which matches
the full range of needs of children and young people must be achieved. This includes
foster care, respite services, residential establishments, residential schools, secure
accommodation, throughcare and aftercare services, as well as independent advocacy
services across all these settings as a consistent safeguarding presence for some of
Scotland’s most vulnerable children and young people. This goal has implications for the
whole children’s services sector in Scotland.

No Time to Lose is a Manifesto for children and young people who are looked after and
accommodated which was developed and launched by key Scottish organizations with a
wealth of experience and expertise in this field. It is a call for change which has an
unprecedented breadth of consensus across the sector working with and for these
children and young people.

The development of a national strategy was a key recommendation of No Time to Lose.
We believe that a national strategic review of the full range of these services remains
absolutely vital to achieving tailored, consistently high quality services for these children
and young people.

Local authorities are the key bodies for funding and delivering care services and they
face major challenges in meeting all the needs with which they are presented. The
pressures in some local authorities make it very difficult to provide tailored residential
services for the specific needs of their young people. Many also rely on a range of
independent services which have grown up over the years without national strategic
overview to ensure the development of the right types of services in the right locations.
The national strategy must enable local authorities and independent sectors to work
together most effectively so that the services children and young people need are
secured for the future.

We welcome the Minister’s recognition that the starting point for residential care must be
improving the status, morale and skills of the residential child care workforce. Working in
child care is an incredibly demanding job, as well as an incredibly rewarding one. We
need to recognize and acknowledge their dedication and commitment.
Our efforts to improve status and morale for both staff and young people are all too often
undermined by negative reporting and headlines in the media. This impacts greatly on
the children and young people in residential care and the staff members who work with
and for them. The Minister’s statement is a positive start in leading the way to a more
balanced approach which highlights the positive work that residential care provides for
disabled children, children who have been abused, children in need of respite from their
families, as well as those who have committed offences. Residential care should not be
scapegoated for the failures of a whole system.

It is time to value the staff members who remain at the front line of residential care, the
foster carers who give children a place in their homes and the workers who support the
young people across the range of settings. We look forward to the actions the
government is proposing and to the development of a national strategic overview. We
would stress that this strategic overview needs to cover the whole range of services for
children and young people who are looked after away from home. We urge the
government to recognise that with the necessary investment now, we have the potential
to achieve the best possible services for our most troubled and vulnerable children and
young people. There really is No Time to Lose.

Signed,

Anne Black, Chair, the Fostering Network

Jennifer Davidson, Director, Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care

Heather Gray, Director, Who Cares? Scotland

Barbara Hudson, Scotland Director, BAAF

Ilona Richards, National Co-ordinator, Scottish Throughcare and Aftercare Forum

Addie Stevenson, Chief Executive, Aberlour