Lord Laming’s report will be published tomorrow. It’s important to acknolweldge that society’s protection for a vulnerable child was once again found wanting when Baby P was wickedly killed. It’s also important we build upwards from this recognition and design systems for safeguarding children that are more effective in future.
I’m leading a group to see Secretary of State Ed Balls next week to offer some suggestions. I am doing this in my capacity as the MP who chairs the Associate Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care leavers. The huge membership of this Group, which includes adults with past care experience and children and young people currently in care, thinks we have something to offer to the design of better safeguarding services.
We’re going to focus especially on three issues.
First, the crucial need for a stable and successful social care workforce. All that is being said now about training, support, skills mix and status matches precisely the views that have been expressed in the Associate Parliamentary Group. We would love to work with the social care teams, their managers and trainers to help improve these standards. Children in care and care-eperienced adults already take part in programmes that make a difference – programmes like “Total Respect” and LILAC.
Secondly, we want to stress how important it is to listen to the voices of children themselves and involve them in decisions about services that affect them. I’m personally very committed to this agenda. It’s why I’ve always been a supporter of a compulsory curriculum of citizenship education. It’s why I give time to encourage schools councils and youth councils in Stafford. In the Associate Parliamentary Group, it is our ethos that the children and young people who are encouraged to attend are given centre-stage positions in the meetings and invited to make presentations as well as to speak up from the audience. And the last meeting of the Group was completely given over to children and young people who planned the agenda, chaired and ran the meeting and gave the presentations – which were on the subject of the poor media image of children and young people, especially those in care and care leavers.
The third focus of our comments to Ed Balls will be the positive contribution that those with care experience can give back to help today’s children in care. I’ve mentioned some existing examples: Total Respect which involves people with care experience taking part in the training of new social workers; LILAC involving people with care expereince in the inspection of local authorities’ services. We think our society can go further in enlisting the help of peple with care experience to improve the experiences of today’s children in care. We want a system for promoting befriending and mentoring as well as greater roles in training and decision-making for local authorities and others, including foster carers.
We will see tomorrow what Lord Laming has found during his further investigation and what steps he recommends. I will be interested to see if these three themes feature in his recommendations. I would also welcome your views on these very important matters. How we treat today’s children determines the kind of society we inherit tomorrow.
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