ARE WE BEING AUDACIOUS ENOUGH?

 He aha te mea nui o te ao. 

He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata

What is the most important thing in the world? 

It is people, it is people, it is people.

What I would consider to be the most audacious review report that I have ever read on children in residential and foster care, was published in February 2020. For those of you in my part of the world, that was just after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Australia and just before the first in New Zealand. Remember those days?

Given world events it didn’t get much international attention. However, the Scottish Independent Care Review https://www.carereview.scot/ is framed as the first major step in delivering on the Scottish First Minister’s 2016 commitment to figure out “how Scotland could love it’s most vulnerable children and give them the childhood they deserved”. 

So how is this review report any different from the countless others across the world?

1.        This review actually reimagines what residential and foster care should look like, rather than focusing on how ‘underperforming’ services need to be improved or future harm averted.

2.        It was a thorough ‘root and branch’ review that took three years to complete. This enabled the review team to listen and reflect meaningfully, gather a wider range of evidence, and also commission their own independent research.  

3.        The review teams heard from 5,500 children, young people and adults who had been in care, families, carers, and professionals.

4.        The need for the review was not crisis-driven as such and the Scottish care system, in my view, already operates far better than most others.

 Here are some of my takeaways from the material (7 reports and an addition 1,750 page evidence framework document). Scotland needs to: 

·      acknowledge the lasting pain that removal has caused many children, and their families and communities, and fundamentally re-think why, when and how children are removed from their families;

·      develop further and much more holistic support for families, including both an increase in universal provision as well as intensive long-term family support, so that far fewer children need to come into the care in the first place;

·      have the compelling international evidence on poor average outcomes for children in care to date front-of-mind, and ensure that outcomes are actually improved;

·      stop tolerating poor quality care, and redesign for the future;

·      Reconceptualise ‘care’, both in terms of policy and practice, to be caring through relationships with carers and workers, siblings, family, friends and other supportive networks;

·      also reconceptualise the very notion of ‘professional relationships’; rather than detach, carers and workers must be encouraged not to step back but to step in;

·      While qualifications and training continue to be important , place much more emphasis on recruiting people with the right ethos and qualities in the first place;

·      ensure that organisational systems and processes fit around children and their families, and not the other way round;

·      plan for the majority of current crisis services to in time become obsolete; and

·      really listen to children and meaningfully and appropriately involve them in decisions about what they need and want, whether as organisational leaders, social workers, foster carers or the courts etc. 

Do take a look – I’d suggest starting with the first few pages of Volume 1 (The Promise). 

Expect to be challenged, and maybe even be prepared to change your mind about something. Are you, your organisation, and your state, province or country being audacious enough?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz

Kia kaha (Stay Strong).

Iain