If you're homeless or in jail, you probably grew up in care

Children at risk

I first realised how serious is the plight of children looked after by local authorities rather than by their families when I chaired an inquiry into youth homelessness. For the largest group of young people who live on the streets, or squat or stay in hostels or in other short- term accommodation, are those who have been in care. As Sir William Utting's report published last week notes, they comprise 30 per cent of the total.

Young people who have been placed with foster families or in children's homes also account for a sizeable proportion of the prison population - 23 per cent of adult prisoners and 38 per cent of young prisoners. From "care" to a life on the streets or in prison, those who make this passage truly are the excluded from society.

Sir William was asked to focus primarily on physical, sexual and emotional abuse by adults or by other children, but I read his report as a primer on the entire system. What is going wrong? In Victorian times, confronted with such a situation, the first step the reformers would have taken would have been to legislate. But now, over 100 years later, we have an abundance of legislation and official guidance, if not too much.

The Children Act of 1989 introduced a lot of new safeguards. The Act states that the first duty of a local authority to a child in its care is "to safeguard and promote his welfare". In turn the Act has been supplemented with regulations and guidance. Some 14 publications giving detailed advice have been published by the Department of Health alone in the past three years. Indeed Sir William believes that the amount of regulations, statutory guidance, departmental circulars and letters, reports by inspectors and other reports, is now so large that responsible managers have difficulty in comprehending it all.

The key malfunction is that the instructions, recommendations and good intentions of central government are often disregarded. One reason is an excessively diffuse structure. In England alone, 132 separate social services departments run 836 children's homes; and in addition there are 202 private and 64 voluntary homes. Moreover, the most potent influence on local authority behaviour is the financial pressure under which they work. Because it is seven times more expensive to place a child in a home rather than with a foster family, there is a continuing retrenchment in residential care. There is a pre- occupation with keeping occupancy levels as high as possible and some children are shoe- horned into vacancies in unsuitable establishments. Other children are moved from institution to institution, causing further upheaval in their development. And yet other children are put into homes far away from their local areas and then forgotten.

Nobody can estimate how much sexual abuse by adults (and by other children) and how much bullying takes places in children's homes, except that it appears to be endemic. At least the fact of the abuse has become well known. Best practice in terms of selecting staff and monitoring them has been made very clear to local authorities in recent years. And now the Secretary of State for Health, Frank Dobson, has set up a ministerial taskforce to deliver a "safer environment" for children. It will have to be a very large, powerful and active taskforce to be effective.

Think about the questions a child being put into the care of his or her local authority could ask. Will I be placed into a children's home if that is more suitable for me than foster care? Answer: maybe. If I am put into a home, will it be suitable for my circumstances? Possibly not. Will I be sexually abused by the staff or by other children or be bullied? There is a definite risk. Will the new taskforce make any difference? Hardly.

Will I get a good education? Answer: you will be lucky to get any education at all. One government report found that over one third of the children in residential care were not receiving education. Another report discovered that one in four of those aged 14 to 16 were not attending school regularly and many had been excluded and had no regular educational placement. In short, if children are in care, it is assumed that they are "difficult" and schools won't take them. No wonder that 75 per cent of care leavers have no academic qualifications of any kind and that more than 50 per cent are unemployed. Nor, in light of this, is it altogether surprising than many turn to street life or crime.

As 50,000 children are in foster care compared with 10,000 in children's homes, I turned with interest to Sir William's findings. But Sir William is the first to admit that not a lot is known about foster care. As compared with children's homes, little research has been carried out. Policy makers have not thought about fostering much. This is a pity as children in foster homes tend to be younger than those in children's homes, with 42 per cent of them under 10 years old. Quite a high proportion of them have some form of disability including emotional and behavioural problems. And they are clearly at risk of abuse since they are isolated and because they are young. The saving grace, perhaps, is that much fostering is short- term. The average stay is about 22 weeks.

What is to be done? For once there is an obvious piece of re-organisation that should be carried out, one which would bring about a substantial improvement in the standards of children's homes without raising costs - and which could even produce a saving! It is to make children's homes a national service rather than a local one. Local authorities should continue to be responsible for foster care, where local knowledge is of great importance. But they have shown themselves unfit to run children's homes. Rather than 132 local authorities managing 836 institutions more or less badly, one agency should be responsible. Then, and only then, could standards be raised substantially.