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6 POLICY TRENDS AND INITIATIVES
6.1 The Inquiry was told by former managers and staff at Kerelaw that over the years the young people placed there presented increasingly difficult behaviour. There is no doubt that during the 30-plus years of Kerelaw's existence there were major changes in the use of, and attitudes towards, residential child care. In the UK as a whole numbers of children in residential care peaked in the mid-1970s. In 1976 6,242 children were living in residential care in Scotland but by 2005 this number had dropped to 1,539 - see Extraordinary Lives, (2006) 6. Numbers in foster care, however, remained relatively stable.
The decline of residential child care
6.2 Crimmens and Milligan (2005) 7 suggested that by the beginning of the 1990s residential care was:
not only waning, it appeared to be in terminal decline.
and listed a number of important factors contributing to ambivalence towards the residential child care sector. These included the influence of the "anti-institutional" movement, the preference for placing children with substitute families rather than in residential units, and concern about rising costs. In addition, research in the 1980s revealed that social workers saw reception into care as a sign of social work "failure". Social work managers therefore directed their attention to developing alternatives to residential care. Practitioners received the clear message that residential care was bad, and by extension, not valued.
The impact of shrinking the residential child care sector
6.3 It was perhaps inevitable that the contraction of the residential care population would increase the complexity of the residential child care task. Children and young people placed in residential care might well have already been offered support in the community. In order to avoid too much use of this scarce and expensive resource, children were often expected to have worked their way through various tiers of intervention. Children with the most complex difficulties, the least resilience, and poor community and family supports became the group most likely to be placed in residential care.
6.4 Before being placed in a residential school like Kerelaw, children would probably already have been through a hierarchy of other care placements, such as foster care or smaller children's units. Many young people were placed in Kerelaw due to their experiencing difficulties in other units in Glasgow and elsewhere. A common sentiment was summed up thus:
all the kids who came to Kerelaw came as a last resort…
There was a view that Kerelaw was getting everyone who had failed elsewhere.
Kerelaw was the pressure valve for Glasgow and the sponge soaking up the problems…
6.5 The Inquiry heard references of this kind from former Kerelaw staff and from residential child care staff in Glasgow's children's units. The sense of Kerelaw being a "place of last resort" was thus reinforced for children, placing social workers and residential care staff. While this put increasing pressure on Kerelaw staff, we also heard that many staff took pride in being able to cope with the challenge it posed and recognised that it was their job to cope.
Emergency admissions
6.6 Given the stringent gatekeeping arrangements for residential placements, more breakdowns in the community were likely to result, with the consequence that many children ended up at Kerelaw in an emergency. The lack of planning for individual children associated with this would also have affected the ability of the school to plan appropriately. An ever-changing population at the school would have brought with it a continuing sense of instability. We return to the placing of young people at Kerelaw at paragraphs 12.22-12.28.
"Another kind of home"
6.7 Concerns that residential child care was a poor second choice to community support developed into worry about its safety. Evidence of children being abused in residential institutions emerged and this thrust the issue of children in care on to the policy agenda. The Pindown report 8 was published in 1991 and led to fierce public debate about how such a situation could have arisen. This in turn led to the Utting 9 (' Children in Public Care' in England) and Skinner ( Another Kind of Home in Scotland) reports, which were influential in moving residential child care back into focus. Both Skinner and Utting affirmed the possibility of considering residential child care as a positive option. However, more than a decade later it appears that there is still a struggle to make this a reality.
Safeguarding
6.8 When more concerns emerged about the potential for children to be abused when looked after away from home, the Government commissioned a review of safeguards. Reports were published in 1997 - in England Utting's People like us: the report of the review of safeguards for children living away from home10, and in Scotland, Kent's Children's Safeguards Review11. Despite noting that some progress had been made, these reports concluded that there was still much work to be done. In particular the poor skill level of residential staff remained a major concern.
Outcomes and aftercare
6.9 As noted earlier, The Children (Scotland) Act 1995 promoted greater inter-agency co-operation, and widening the duties to looked after children to the responsibility of the local authority as a whole, rather than simply social work services. This reflected growing concern over the poor educational and health outcomes for looked after children.
6.10 There was also concern about how little support was given to care leavers. The Inquiry heard from a range of witnesses about the difficulties young people faced when they moved on from Kerelaw. At one point a dedicated throughcare and aftercare service was established at Kerelaw. This service involved semi-independent living on the campus and links to local employers. It was never properly funded or staffed and relied on overtime working. It did not remain in place for very long. Young people were referred to aftercare services in their placing authority and we did see evidence of some being well supported in their first steps to independence. However, we were also told about a lack of suitable accommodation for young people to move on to.
Youth justice
6.11 Many of the young people placed in Kerelaw were there, at least in part, because of their offending behaviour. There have been numerous policy changes in relation to youth offending over the past decade. Much of the activity has been around working with young offenders while they remain in the community. Specialist youth justice workers began to offer individual and group work programmes, often based on a cognitive behavioural approach. The Forensic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service ( FCAMHS) from Glasgow provided services within the Secure Unit at Kerelaw for a number of years.
6.12 The introduction of those programmes within the Secure Unit was the first time this had been done in that environment in Scotland, and Kerelaw deserves praise for its innovation. Staff were carefully selected and trained to carry out this work. Programmes were introduced in the Open School, but we were told that there had initially been some management resistance to this, and it seems there was no consensus view among employees as to the merits of such programme work.
Drug and alcohol use
6.13 Many people told us of the increasing number of children coming to Kerelaw who faced serious problems with their drug and/or alcohol use. This was also noted by community-based staff and by other residential care staff. Young people with problems of drug and/or alcohol abuse put considerable strain on group living. Within Kerelaw's relatively large units of 12 young people, it would have been a challenge both to ensure everyone was safe and to meet residents' support needs. Although Kerelaw employed specialist addiction counsellors who worked with young people on an individual basis, we were told that this service was not always welcomed by unit staff, and it was suggested that some blocked young people's access to the addiction workers. This was an issue in the Millerston investigation in 2004 (see paragraphs 7.17-7.20).
The National Residential Child Care Initiative
6.14 There has been a growing awareness that seeing residential child care as a residual, marginal service of last resort has unfortunate implications for the quality of that service. Children placed in residential care often feel stigmatised. Staff feel undervalued and recruitment can be difficult. Despite this, the orthodoxy of residential care as a failure of social work lingers on, even though some children and young people prefer residential to foster care. This requires further exploration, as the superiority of family placements is often taken as a given by practitioners, but it is outside the scope of this Inquiry to do this.
6.15 SIRCC has been commissioned by the Scottish Government to lead the National Residential Child Care Initiative ( NRCCI). This will consider the challenges facing residential child care in Scotland and make recommendations for change with a view to making such care the first and best placement of choice for those children whose needs it serves. The aim of the NRCCI is to develop a blueprint for the development of residential child care in Scotland including:
An audit of and strategy for the supply of residential child care services to match the full range of needs of children and young people.
A determination of the right skills mix of professionals working in residential child care to ensure those working with these young people. are well-equipped to support these young people to develop their full potential.
An agreement on expectations between local authorities and providers to ensure effective commissioning of services for these young people.
It will recommend to Scottish Government, local government and providers of residential child care the actions required to achieve consistent improvement across the residential child care sector.
6.16 The NRCCI will report on the key findings and make recommendations for Scottish Government, local government and providers of residential child care. These are to be presented to Scottish Ministers in 2009. We wish this initiative well and hope that the findings of the Inquiry will be helpful to its purpose.
Implications for Kerelaw
6.17 The decade covered by this Inquiry was one of major policy and legislative changes relating to children and young people. Throughout the Inquiry we heard from a range of people, from inside and outside Kerelaw, who considered the pace of change there was extremely slow. A number of people referred to Kerelaw having been in a "time warp". Some took the view that having a large residential school run by a local authority was a dated concept, part of an earlier child care system. There is also evidence that some senior managers were either resistant to, or did not see the need for, change. Glasgow City Council made changes in their policy and procedures regarding residential child care over the period. However, it seems that Kerelaw was not always included in these changes and was often seen as a special case. We shall discuss issues of this kind later, but before doing so it may be helpful to explore the range and nature of allegations of abuse that led to this Inquiry.
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