The history of changes in the size of the care population

1. Numbers in care and neglect
After the Second World War the number of children in care fell steadily,
dropping to a little over 50,000 in the mid fifties and stayed at a relatively low
figure into the sixties. But, in the seventies, the numbers began to climb steadily
as the reality of child neglect and abuse began to take hold in the UK. By 1981
there were 92,000 children in care in England an increase of almost 50% or 30,000
children on the figure just twenty-five years previously. Of this 92,000, almost
two thirds, about 58,000, lived in residential homes.
So there were almost as many children in children’s homes in 1981 as there are in
all forms of care now (that needs to be remembered when it is argued that the
current care population is too large). Inevitably, the costs of almost 60,000
children in residential care were seen as unsustainable and in any case, a number
of high-profile abuse scandals brought the residential sector into disrepute. The
large institutions began to close as the voluntary sector rapidly abandoned its
orphanages.
In the working group I led for Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education, I
was keen to help further drive down the numbers in care seeing that reduction,
incontrovertibly, as a good thing. No one suggested otherwise, at least not
publicly. But, sometimes, in the margins of consultation events or at conferences,
front line social workers would sidle up to me to whisper their anxiety that the
direction of travel was not as clear as I thought. The whispers grew, I became
nervous about my initial certainty, and eventually my working group concluded,
almost certainly to Ministerial disappointment, that we should not have targets
for further reducing the numbers in care.
At about this time I started to see a little more of Barnardo’s own work in this
area. I recall a particularly fascinating day in one of our services talking to
parents – or more specifically mothers – who were seeking the return of their
children from care. Our job was to assess their readiness to re-assume their
parenting responsibilities. What I saw made me uneasy.
My practice whenever I visited a Barnardo’s service was to reflect for a day or
two on what I had seen and then to share my thoughts with senior colleagues
and Trustees. After this visit I wrote:
[I was worried that staff] seemed to be working in a context which required them not to
do what was unequivocally the best for the child, but instead one which tasked them,
whenever possible, with keeping children with their mothers. One family was described to
me as being guilty of the most abject neglect of their children who were filthy, suffered
exceptionally serious dental decay and were not attending school. Now fostered, the

2. children, 10 and 14, were doing reasonably well and were both at school. Meanwhile we
seemed to see success in this case as eventually returning the children to a mother who, I
was told, had very limited awareness of the inadequacy of her care for her children. I
wondered why on earth we would contemplate taking such a risk and the answer that
“blood was thicker than water” certainly did not convince me.
I went on to observe:
Part of the problem is, I fear, that these seem such illiberal things to think, much less
write. But I left this visit seriously perturbed that staff were working in a context, overly
influenced by considerations of what a Court might opine, in which the interests of the
child were not the overwhelming consideration they should be.
As I began – tentatively at first – to utter publicly the view that we might have to
think about taking more, not fewer children into care, my motives were attacked.
Some correspondents said I was drumming up trade for Barnardo’s Children’s
Homes (ignoring the fact that the last one had been shut two decades earlier).
John Hemming MP dismissed my view without debate blogging, simply, ‘Martin
Narey is wrong’ and there was a great deal ofoffensive comment on the internet.
Meanwhile, at successive presentations to staff from Children’s Services
Departments in two northern counties, each host Director referred to my views,
respectively as unorthodox and challenging.
But amongst the abuse, letters I received convinced me that this was a debate
worth having. Meg, a Social Worker with decades of experience wrote to say:
I am 57 and started my career as a child care social worker but I found myself unable to
tolerate the incredibly low standards that were tolerable within the childcare
services...Thank Goodness someone is speaking up for all those children whose lives are
witnessed and about whom nothing is done.
I did not know it at the time but there was no shortage of very sound research to
back up my anxieties about the children we leave in neglectful and abusive
homes.
The reality is that care can be much improved and the current Children’s
Minister is right to be impatient about achieving such improvements. But, even
as it is, care is much to be preferred to leaving a child in neglect. As Professor
Mike Stein from the University of York has said:
The simplistic view of care as failing 60,000 young people should be confined to the
dustbin.

3. Extensive research, much of it commissioned by the Department for Education
confirm the Stein view. Very recently, in 2010, DEMOS were commissioned by
Barnardo’s to take a comprehensive look at the evidence. DEMOS confirmed
that:
• Stigmatisation of the care system, combined with concern about the upfront costs
to the state, means that some children who might benefit from the care system do
not do so.
• When the care system is used effectively in this way it can be a powerful tool for
improving the lives of vulnerable children and young people.
• The mistaken belief that care consigns all looked-after children to a lifetime of
underachievement and poor outcomes, creates a culture of uncertainty, increasing
delay and leading to instability later on.
• There is now a substantial body of academic evidence that provides a longer-term
and more nuanced perspective on looked- after children’s lives, taking into
account the nature of their pre- care experiences and comparing them with more
appropriate control groups. This evidence shows that care can be a positive
intervention for many groups of children.
• Some groups of children whose entry to care is delayed by indecision or drift are
at risk of experiencing a longer exposure to pre-care adversity; higher emotional
and behavioural problems; placement disruption and instability
More recently, and more vividly, Becky Hope’s All In A Day’s Work,
published in April of this year offers a frequently moving record of the
experiences of a social worker who has spent twenty years working in child
protection. Her preface could not be more stark when she says:
Children whose basic needs for responsive loving care are not met, and who are left to
flounder, have been found to suffer clear detrimental effects to their brain
development long before they reach anywhere near their first birthday. It has also
been found that children who have experienced severe neglect as tiny babies, but are
placed in long term adoptive homes before the age of six months are able to make far
greater progress overall than a child placed after that age. [But} at present this
research is not infiltrating social work practice in a way that best supports the
children who depend on us. To allow these research findings to change our practice
will require a change in the mind-set of all involved in the process of child protection.
She captures the sad reality that too often we wait too long before removing a
child from parental neglect, sometimes because of an unjustified optimism about
the capacity of parents to improve. As Jonathan Ewen the Director who leads for
adoption for Barnardo’s told me:
Speeding up the decision making after a child first comes to the attention of the
authorities is key; research shows that most parents who are going to significantly
improve their ability to look after their child do so in the first six months of the child’s

4. life. If that doesn’t happen, then we need to be bolder – and quicker - in making the
decision to remove that child permanently.
It needs to be stressed here that I am not talking about cases where there is room
for doubt over whether or not a child has been neglected or the capacity of the
mother to become an adequate parent. This is not to deny that mistakes are not
sometimes made and that, however occasionally, decent and loving parents
suffer the horror of having their children taken from them without justification.
But front line practitioners know that those cases, however regrettable, are
overshadowed by a much larger number of cases where we leave children too
long and until neglect turns into abuse. I believe that most lay people, most
parents, would be deeply shocked both at the conditions in which we routinely
leave children and at our continued consideration of returning a neglected child
to the circumstances which led to his or her abuse.
In All In A Day’s Work, Hope describes her experience with a typical case where a
child had been physically abused, was in care, but seeing her mother regularly
(known as contact) with the possibility of a future reunion. The child is Sarah
and the mother, Julia:
Over the weeks since Sarah had been taken into care, Julia was often very late for contact
meetings and a couple of times she forgot to come altogether. Sometimes it was suspected
that she was high on something, at other times there was asuspicious smell of alcohol
about her person. It was a frequent event for it to be reported that she had spent her time
reading a women’s magazine at contact and often had very little time for Sarah at all,
just making the very barest attempts to interact. Sarah said little after these contact
sessions but reacted silently with the inevitable wet beds, disturbed sleep and very
difficult behaviour at school.
Before her birthday Sarah was getting very excited about the prospect of a party and
presents and, during contact the week before, her mother had made repeated promises in
terms of presents, building up Sarah’s hopes. Sadly, when the pre- birthday meeting with
the mother took place, nothing appeared, her mother arrived both an hour late and empty-
handed. The long promised bike, the puzzle and the skipping rope – all evaporated in
vague excuses. Not even a card. Sarah’s behaviour at the remainder of this contact
session was of hesitation and confused silence, but later her hurt came out in
tremendously angry outbursts and terrifying nightmares, plus some fights at school. This
was the culmination of months of disappointment with her mother’s disinterested
behaviour.
Why do we allow children to be damaged in this way? Sometimes it is because
sustained changes in parenting capacity can be and are achieved. But the current
system is gripped by an unrealistic optimism about the capacity of deeply
inadequate parents to change. Making the birth family successful should be our
first option, and I am not arguing that mothers should not be given a second or
even a third chance, just not a fourth, fifth and sixth.

5. This unjustified optimism in the capacity of deeply inadequate and sometimes
uncaring parents to change condemns children to a childhood of neglect and
sometimes abuse and damages their chances of leading a successful life in
adulthood. We should and do help parents to change and when that is successful
that is a great achievement. But we have to tackle the naïve optimism that
paralyses the system. And we have to stop letting children down by returning
them to parents only for them to be neglected once again. This is not simply my
view. Research supports it. In Casemanagement and outcomes for neglected children
returned to their parents: a five year follow-up study (2010), Professor Elaine Farmer
followed the fortunes of 138 children who had been taken into care and then
returned to their parents. She discovered that:
• [There was] a tendency over time for abuse and neglect to be minimised so that
referrals about harm to children [did] not lead to sufficient action to protect them.
• Plans made during care proceedings did not work out in three fifths of cases, often
when children were returned to parents because of an over- optimistic view of the
possibility of parental change by guardians and expert assessors, in the face of
long histories suggesting the contrary.
And, most troublingly, she found that two years after those children had been
returned to their parents three in every five (59%) had been abused or neglected
once again. We cannot let children down in this way. Findings from a
University of York study (Jim Wade, Nina Biehal, Nicola Farrelly and Ian
Sinclair) also published last year echo Professor Farmer’s findings. This study
compared the progress and outcomes of a sample of maltreated children some of
whom were returned home from care with those who remained in care. It was
found that outcomes for the children who remained looked after were better than
for those who went home with respect both to stability and well-being.