Fostering and adoption learning resources

1. Fostering and adoption learning resources

2. Outline for Day One • Aims of the project and of these workshops • Policy, research and practice context: issues the project is designed to address • Introduce the toolkit and walk through a sample of the materials

3. Overall aims • Provide evidence-informed training materials which address key areas of skills and knowledgefor the team around the child in fostering and adoption • Informed by TCSW curriculum for CPD • Support the use of the materials at nine two-day Train the Trainer workshops followed by an implementation webinar

4. Learning objectives Day One: • Understand the policy, research and practice context for the learning resources • Initial familiarisation with the online learning resources context By end of Day Two: • Be skilled and equipped to transfer learning to colleagues including: • Children’s social workers, • Foster carer/adopters social workers (supervising social worker), • Independent Reviewing Officers, • Social work managers. • Be able to identify key principles of Training Transfer and use this knowledge to maximise the impact of the materials.

6. Learning outcomes for end users: • Improved competence and confidence in working in a team around the child • Better able to support the child, birth families, foster carers, prospective adopters and adopters through evidence-informed practice • Increased understanding of permanence options • Increased understanding of key issues in children and young peoples’ journeys in and out of foster care/adoption • Understand the adoption system in the context of current adoption reform • Familiarisation with key messages from research in the topics covered • Access to resources to inform continued professional development

7. Your role: cascading the learning • Engage your organisation’s use of the learning resources • Raise awareness of the resources with key colleagues • Use or support the use of the resources to design and deliver learning activities • Evaluate or support the evaluation of learning activities

8. Questions and answers • First impressions • Questions

9. Context: relevance for those delivering training Statutory change and policy: • Children and Families Act: 2014 significant changes for practice • Achieving permanence: principles of practice in this field Research: • Delivering best practice requires engaging with the evidence Practice: • Making the connection between learning materials and practice context improves training transfer People who perceive that training is useful, learn and transfer more(Burke and Hutchins 2007). Supporting people to understand how training is relevant to them is an important part of the training process.

10. The context: statutory change and national policy • Family Justice Reforms and new case law • The Children and Families Act (CFA) 2014. Key areas of change: • consider ‘fostering for adoption’ where adoption is an option; • role of ethnicity in matching; • Secretary of State empowered to require LAs to commission adopter recruitment services; • change access rights of prospective adopters to the adoption register; and referral of adopters and children to the register • new duties regarding provision of adoption support; • changes to the arrangements for contact between LAC and birth families to reduce disruption • post adoption contact Adoption is one of the Government’s top priorities…DfE, 2013

11. Permanence a sense of security, continuity, commitment and identity […] a secure, stable and loving family to support them through childhood and beyond DfE guidance on the Children Act 1989 (2010)

12. Permanence An underpinning framework for all social work with children and families, from family support through to adoption (Boddy 2013: 6) The law requires first that the child should return home, if possible, and if not, to wider family. If these are not possible, other options should be considered

13. Pathways to permanence Each route sharing common principles in planning to meet children’s lifetime needs: • permanent return to birth parents • shared care arrangements, including regular short-break care • permanence within the looked after system, whether in residential placement, unrelated foster care or family and friends care • legalpermanence, through adoption, special guardianship orders and residence orders. In any route, quality and continuity must go together

14. Children looked after 2013: placement type

15. Legal status of children looked after 2009 -2013 Source: DfE SFR 36/2013

16. Legal permanence: adoption • 2013: increase of 15% in number of children adopted • 2013: no. of babies under age of one adopted doubled • Much work undertaken to tackle delay • However, family court judges "must“ consider all available permanence options in a global, holistic and multi-faceted evaluation…of each option (Munby 2013) • Re B-S reminds us that adoption needs to be ‘fully integrated in the general child welfare provision’ rather than being positioned with ‘pride of place at the head of the available options for permanent placement’(Bullock et al 2006:722)

17. Special Guardianship and Residence Orders • SGOs introduced in 2005. Number has increased by 122% since 2009 • 58% SGOs are to former foster carers. Many are to relatives, usually grandparents • Carers’ concerns about the financial impact of a shift to special guardianship, alongside loss of social work support for carers and children • Residence orders increased 25% from 2012. Residence orders are replaced by Child Arrangement Orders under CFA

18. Unrelated foster care • Not always intended to offer permanence. For most children and young people in foster care, the carer is task- or role-oriented (Thoburn and Courtney 2011, cited in Boddy 2013: 16) • Long term foster care: until 2013 there has been no government guidance on how this pathway can be achieved • Consultation (December 2013) likely to lead to change in legal status of long term foster care. This will improve abiity to understand outcomes

19. Family and friends care • Clear need for improved planning and packages of support to support permanence • Outcomes: children can do at least as well as those in foster care in terms of emotional and behavioural development and placement stability • Carers live in significantly more disadvantaged circumstances than unrelated foster carers – cannot be seen as ‘cheap and easy’ solution

20. Reunification with birth family • Around 35% of children leaving care in England return home • 67% of maltreated children who return home are subsequently readmitted to care (Wade et al 2012) • Variation in LA practice a bigger factor in determining whether a child returned home than the needs of the child (Wade et al 2011) • Factors supporting reunification including: slow and planned reunions; social work support to family; parents engage with services; the problems that led to admission are reduced

21. Reasons why children are looked after Source: DfE SFR 36/2013

22. What skills does the team around the child require? • In groups discuss and agree the key areas the team around the child need to know about to do a good job in working with looked after children, families, carers and prospective adopters • Appoint a person to feedback your ideas to the main group • Timing: • 15 minutes discussion • 15 minutes group feedback

23. Time for tea

24. Video clip • Care leaver Jenny Molloy talks on TV about her positive experience of the care system. 2 mins 20 sec:Clip available to watch on Vimeo

25. Learning resource topics

26. Learning resource topics

27. The context: selected recent research • Care Inquiry (2013) • Impacts of delay on child development (Brown and Ward 2012) • Safeguarding initiative studies (2012) Key, earlier DfE funded studies: • Fostering Now (Sinclair 2005) • Quality Matters (Stein 2009) • The Adoption Research Initiative http://adoptionresearchinitiative.org.uk/ Forthcoming: • SGOs (Wade, due 2014) • Adoption breakdown (Selwyn, due 2014) • Rees Centre foster care research (various, ongoing)

28. The context: core theory, skills and knowledge • These are well outlined in TCSW Curriculum framework for continuing professional development (CPD) on Planning and supporting permanence: reunification, family and friends care, long-term foster care, special guardianship and adoption (Schofield and Simmonds 2013) • TCSW Professional Capabilities Framework: specialist capability statements for Fostering and Adoption (2014)

29. The context: practice • Team working around the child in foster care and adoption • Supporting relationships for children and young people • Supporting effective working relationships in the team around the child

30. Video clip • Foster carers discuss working within a team and what they need from social workers 2 mins 40 secs • This clip available to watch on Vimeo

31. The team around the child

32. The team challenge While 71% of foster carers described the relationship with their supervising social worker as excellent or good, 88% cited problems when working with children’s social workers Foster carers’ most common complaints were that children’s social workers do not return their calls or emails, appear not to take their views into account and do not share vital information or treat them as ‘part of the team’. Nearly 90% of foster carers say they experience difficulties when working with social workers Almost two thirds of social workers say the same

33. What carers and adopters seek from practitioners • Communication, communication, communication • Experience; respect for carers/adopters An empathetic person who has a good grasp of attachment theory, who can appreciate where children’s behaviours can come from… able to offer me, as a foster carer an understanding of my role in the lives of looked after children whilst treating me as a professional Treating foster carers as part of the team, trusting us with confidential information

34. What practitioners seek in foster carers • Patience, warm, nurturing, flexible empathic, child-focused commitment Someone who is resilient, patient, flexible and caring. Able to work with professionals, children and birth family members Able to show reflective functioning and mentalising

35. Walking in each other’s shoes Before I had my [adopted] children, I worked as a Children and Families Social Worker. I thought I was quite empathic towards carers and understood 'Challenging Behaviour'. I now apologise unreservedly to all those adopters and foster carers I inadvertently patronised, (with good intentions), when trying to support them! I have had experience as a foster carer and as a supervising social worker for foster carers. As a foster carer, I found the child’s social worker was often patronising and judgmental. They had no concept or respect for what it could be like to have a child living in your household. So to an extent, they can have the theories but not know what this feels like or means in practice to live with a child.

36. The need for theory and knowledge I work in fostering social work but I used to be a Local Authority children’s social worker. When I went into fostering I thought I knew it all but when I moved job, I found that there was more time to reflect and think and consider the impact of attachment theory etc. on children. Once a child is in a safe place, the child’s social worker needs a whole different skills set and knowledge  If you don’t understand the theories behind the behaviours- then you are lost. You have to understand that sanctions don’t work with the child with attachment issues. Social workers often come from a behavioural model and the interventions they suggest, won’t work.

37. Supporting the team around the child to share perspectives In groups, discuss and record your ideas on facilitating productive discussions where professional tensions are evident: • Key facilitation/interpersonal skills • Potential barriers • Actions –facilitation styles, sensitivity, issues boards • Timings: • 30 minutes to discuss and 15 for group feedback • Appoint someone to feedback your ideas to the main group

39. Video clip • Young people discuss their experiences in care 3 mins 3 secs • This clip available to watch on Vimeo

40. Context: children and young people • Becoming ‘looked after’ is just one aspect of identity and experience. • A diverse population: with individual characteristics and needs, varied pathways and experiences within the system, from the point of entry, through childhood, and into adult life. • Permanence depends on securing the right placement for the right child at the right time.

41. Identity: Family experience Gender Ethnicity and culture Interests, dreams, passions Sexuality Age

42. Identity: Age of looked after children 31 March 2013 Age on starting to be looked after 31 March 2013

43. Identity: ethnicity The variable experiences of black and minority ethnic children in the looked after system indicate a critical need to develop social work understandings of identities and their intersection with ethnicity – including mixed ethnicity without being trapped into indecision, lack of timeliness and an adult, rather than child, focus. (Boddy 2013: 2)

44. Context: recap • CFA brings significant changes for practice • Permanence remains the key aspiration for practice in this field • Building permanence requires practitioners to work to support asense of belonging, continuity between past, present and future • Effective work requires relationship building across the team around the child • All those involved need to keep the child at the centre

45. The web-based resources