SOME PLACEMENTS NEED TO BE DISRUPTED!
We’ve all likely worked with, or know of, a child in care or care leaver who had as many as 5, 25 or even 50 different placements. While some of these would have been temporary at the outset, most would have been placement ‘breakdowns’ (I’ll maybe do a post on temporary placements another time). Clearly such breakdowns may compound and worsen existing problems, create new ones and further compromise positive longer-term outcomes.
At an organisation-wide level, monitoring placement disruptions and/or changes is a critically important metric. At a glance this may offer possible insights into:
the needs of children in the care of the organisation,
the appropriateness of the range of placements and assessment and matching process,
the quality of case planning, risk mitigation and the casework undertaken,
the extent to which the support needs of foster carers and residential workers are being met,
the quality of individual ad organisational relationships and trust, and
broader issues of system ‘efficiency and effectiveness’.
Placement breakdowns are usually urgent, always very time-consuming and in my experience at least usually occur outside of office hours. They also involve many people and processes, and may come with a range of consequences e.g. the child being placed further away from family, a change of school and leaving friends, or the loss of a foster carer to the agency. Placement breakdowns are usually also of course very distressing for those involved.
However while organisationally a low level of placement breakdowns may indicate that the system is working well, and a high level that it is not, that does not necessarily apply to all cases individually. Even if we leave aside placements that are actually emotionally or even physically harmful, if a child is unhappy, not engaged with the foster carer or residential workers (or they with him or her), or just surviving rather than thriving, irrespective of why this is, action must be considered. And if with additional support the placement is still not meeting this child’s needs, consideration should be given to urgently finding a more suitable placement that is judged more likely to work, and to end this one on a planned basis.
As all western countries (re-)embrace early intervention in other parts of the service delivery spectrum, we need to intervene early in a failing placement to order to either better understand and support it, or to replace it. A change of placement can offer new opportunities and is not of itself inherently bad. However, ‘propping up’ a placement that isn’t working, isn’t likely to last, or isn’t promoting the child’s well-being, is to say the least professionally and ethically problematic..
Organisational strategies for preventing placement breakdown need to focus on expecting more, listening to children, getting children and young people into high quality supported placements that will meet their needs in the first place, and more structured child-centred approaches to reviewing the effectiveness of individual placements.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz
Kia kaha (Stay Strong).
Iain