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When is an advice call more than an advice call…...?

December 21, 2012 by Susan Moore, Adviser

Advice is defined as an opinion which someone offers you about what you should do or how you should act in a particular situation (Cambridge University Press- Cambridge dictionaries online)

Our advice line receives an average of 700 calls per month. Some of these fit in to the definition of advice very well. A question is asked, information is provided, and the caller goes away with a clear sense of what they should do and the implications of this action.

However, people’s lives are rarely so straightforward. The majority of our callers come to us with a complex package of experiences, questions and needs and most calls could not be described as pure advice.

Providing a listening ear

Advisers have a wealth of knowledge and experience in order to offer callers clear and in depth information and advice about a range of legal and practice issues. In addition, however, it is vital that we have and use a range of counselling skills such as empathy, a non judgemental approach and active listening.

Callers come to us in a range of emotional states. Because of the nature of the advice we offer, many callers are deeply distressed, desperate, frustrated, and angry. Some calls can appear to be predominantly “counselling” calls.

A recent independent evaluation of our advice service, asked callers about their experiences of the advice line and what they had found most helpful. The evaluation report repeatedly highlights the value that callers place on this element of our service.

The truth is that much of the advice I and my colleagues give to parents is hard to hear. Often I advise parents to accept very difficult realities about their own situations, to understand concerns about them and their children and accept where changes might need to be made. I also, very frequently, advise people to co-operate with and engage in processes that feel desperately negative and unfair. Some of what I am advising a parent to do, for example, may have been said already by local authority social workers but they have been unable to hear or accept it. 

In order to give advice meaningfully, we must first truly listen to and understand our callers. Once they feel heard, callers are more able to hear, trust and act upon our advice. Of course it also helps that we’re independent of any decision about the child, which also assists in building callers’ trust. This is a real strength of our advice service.

Advocating for families

For some callers, advice is not enough. However well a caller feels heard, however accessible the information that is presented to them, however much they might understand and accept the advice being given, some callers simply do not have the capacity or resources to make full use of the advice without further support.

The advice we are providing to a grandmother caring for her 2 severely disabled grandchildren without appropriate support from the local authority may be the key to moving things forward and preventing the placement from breaking down. But if she is too exhausted and overwhelmed to act on the advice, however, this value is lost and we are just another service unable to make a difference to her difficulties.

We have been successful in securing funding from the Orp Foundation and the Rayne Foundation to provide a limited amount of self and indirect advocacy to callers to our advice line who require this service. In practice, these are not big pieces of work. But sending the above grandmother a template letter, which she can adapt and send to Children’s Services or making a telephone call to a social worker on her behalf may be enough to make the advice truly meaningful and move the situation forward. The value that this adds to the advice service is tremendous, and this too is noted in the evaluation.

People’s lives are complicated, complex and fluid. As a result, our advice line has to match this need and be responsive to the people who use our service. As noted evidence from the recent evaluation is overwhelmingly positive, which is reassuring and indicates, in the great majority of cases we are getting the balance right. As we move in to 2013, I look forward to continue learn, listen, advocate and, most importantly, help our service users by giving them the type of advice they need.

A day in the life of an adviser

October 23, 2012 by Susan Moore, adviser

Demand for our advice service is growing month by month; it is a challenging time to be advising in this complex area. It is vital for us advisers to keep up to date with legal and policy developments but also to be constantly aware of how these changes are impacting on services on the ground.

It’s difficult to prepare for a shift on our advice line because the calls we get are so varied both in terms of content and tone. The best thing for me to do is ensure that I’ve cleared my mind of previous calls or anything else from the morning. When the phone rings, it’s a blank page to be filled.

The first call comes in early. A grandmother calls in tears. Her two grandchildren, who live at the other end of the country, have been removed into foster care because of an unexplained injury to the baby. The whole family are devastated. She feels confused and helpless. What is going to happen…?

Unfortunately that’s a question I can’t answer. I can explain the process though, talk about options, help the caller to realise that there are things she can do to effect the situation. We talk about the importance of the family in care cases; kinship care options, family group conferences. The call is longer than many but the result is worth the extra time. By the end of the call, the caller feels reassured “I haven’t got an answer, but I have got a plan”. There is a good chance that our 40min call will result in two children being back within their family in the near future.

A number of short and straightforward calls are dealt with including referrals to our partners when the issues fall outside of our remit and signposts to advice sheets and decision trees on our website.

My next caller has just attended a review child protection conference and is angry and distressed that her child remains under a child protection plan. She is a victim of domestic violence but feels blamed rather than supported regarding her ex partner’s behaviour.

It is important to hear and acknowledge the caller’s anger without allowing it to dominate the call. It’s in the caller’s best interests to see the situation from Children’s Services’ perspective. We discuss what aspects of the child protection plan the caller can agree with, what issues she feels she needs to challenge and the most productive way of doing this.

I refer the caller to our discussion board for parents as a safe and supportive space for her to vent her frustrations and benefit from peer support while co-operating with the process surrounding her child.

Finally, I am speaking to an expectant mum whose husband has been arrested on suspicion of child sex offences. She is devastated and bewildered. She knows her husband and knows he could not have done this and yet the social worker carrying out the core assessment is already talking about them separating.

It’s a hard call. It is vital that I am completely honest and realistic with the caller. She feels she knows her husband but she cannot truly know what lies behind the allegations. Regardless of the outcome of any police investigation, Children’s Services may remain firm in their view that her child will not be safe while she and her husband are together.  In this case, she may be faced with the stark situation of choosing her child or her husband. Only she can make the right decision for her family; my priority is to ensure that any decision she makes is as informed as possible.

As the line closes, my focus turns to recording the afternoon’s calls on our confidential database. It is vital that these are as clear and detailed as possible to ensure any future queries are dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible if a caller needs to come back to us as their situation develops.

With records complete and any relevant follow up work done, now it’s time to tackle the emails…..

To find out more about our impact read the Evaluation of Family Rights Group Advice and Advocacy Service.

Why we decided to set up the Care Inquiry

September 30, 2012 by Cathy Ashley, chief executive of the Family Rights Group.

Family Rights Group advises over 7000 parents and family members a year who are involved with or require support from children’s social care services.  Some of these parents are crying out for help, for example to deal with their teenager’s violent behaviour, with their partner’s abuse or because their child has significant disabilities and they need practical help and respite. But too often they meet only rejection, until the crisis escalates into the child protection or youth justice arena, when they are then subject to statutory interventions.

There are huge differences across the country as to what preventative and early intervention support is in place, how readily the local authority initiates proceedings and the proportion of children who end up in care.

Since the death of baby Peter Connellly, many local authorities have become more risk averse and are more readily applying for care proceedings, with some children now being removed from their parents, who in the same circumstances a few years ago, wouldn’t have been. Unsurprisingly the courts and local authority social work teams are extremely stretched, the system is very expensive (care order applications cost the public purse well over £25,000 a case on top of the child’s care costs) and significant delays in finding a permanent placement for the child is a common occurrence.

Children who are in the care system are there either under a court order or a voluntary agreement with parents. In the latter, we see cases which have been allowed to drift, with no coherent plan in place and no external court scrutiny, the child is subject to multiple moves and split up from their siblings. Many of these children will return back to parents and many want to.  But often little work has been done with the adults or the child to address the very problems that led to the child going into care in the first place.  Whilst there are success stories, there are also cases of some children being deeply damaged or reabused.

There are 200,000-300,000 children in the UK being raised by family and friends carers, only around 4% of whom are in the care system i.e. where the carers are assessed as foster carers and the children are entitled to looked after children support services. The rest are raised under a residence or special guardianship order or indeed just with the parents’ agreement. Research shows these children have experienced the same adversities as those in the care system and do as well if not better, but the carers are often forced to give up work, suffer significant financial hardship and have to deal on their own with very difficult situations, such as managing contact or supporting a child deal with abandonment.

Initial research findings indicate that whether a child who is being raised by a family and friends carer ends up inside or outside the care system is primarily a reflection of their circumstances rather than their need or the level of abuse or trauma they have experienced. Moreover, in some cases, these children were placed by the local authority, and should be treated as looked after children, according to established case law, but the carer is kept in ignorance of this or the local authority actually denies such responsibility.   We also know that there is significant variation between and even within authorities as to what effort is made to explore whether a child who cannot live with their parents, but could live with a relative. Family group conferences, which are an effective approach in supporting family members to come forward to be assessed as a potential carer for the child, are still not routinely offered pre proceedings in most parts of the country.

At the end of March 2012, 4% of children who were in the care system were placed for adoption in England. In the last 18 months we’ve had revised adoption guidance from Government, new adoption scorecards, the appointment of an adoption Tsar, an adopters’ charter, an expert working group on redesigning adoption, an action plan for adoption, a House of Lords select committee inquiry into adoption and fostering to adoption measures will be included in the forthcoming Children and Families Bill. Yet adoption will never be the answer for the great majority of children who are in care, no matter how many adoption initiatives are announced.

Some children do remain or return home to loving parents, who have managed to address their own problems and put their child’s needs first with the help of committed social workers and other professionals.  Some children can’t remain at home and thrive under the care of an amazing foster carer, a loving and remarkable older sibling or a dedicated and battling adoptive parent.

However what the above picture shows, is that the system is inconsistent, can work against rather than facilitate the right outcome for each child, that policy announcements and practice on the ground are often driven by factors unconnected with evidence, and that when we get it wrong it is costly for the public purse, in terms of individual children’s lives and for society.

Read more about the Care Inquiry here.

An introduction to The Care Inquiry

September 27, 2012 by Jo Tunnard, RyanTunnardBrown

Did you know that this year about 90,000 children and young people in England will spend time being looked after by a local authority?

For many children, this is a brief period while their family sort out a crisis and then the children return home. For others, it can go on for longer and this can mean that children get cared for in different ways, for some as they grow into adolescence and for others as they become adults.

These different types of care include living with relatives, or with foster carers, or being adopted, or living in a residential home with other young people. Sometimes it still ends up with children going back home or to other family members. All these ways of looking after children are part of the English “care system”.

The aim of our care system is to support families to help keep children safe and happy, and to make sure that children have a permanent place to grow up in. But, as the learning from practice and the evidence from research develop, is the care system still serving our children as well as it should be? The Care Inquiry wants to take stock on this important question.

The Care Inquiry is a collaboration of children’s charities with a special interest in all the care options for these children and young people. The charities are Adoption UK, British Association of Adoption & Fostering (BAAF), Family Rights Group, the Fostering Network, Research in Practice, TACT, The Together Trust and The Who Cares? Trust.

Together, they are using their expertise and knowledge – and that of others in the sector – to explore how society can best provide secure and stable homes for our most vulnerable children.

The Care Inquiry wants to:

• take a fresh look at which children come in and out of the care system;
• explore what we know about how children in care can have the same chances as other children to grow up with a positive sense of their identity and where they belong;
• find out what more can be done to provide children and young people with a sense that they have a home for life, and;
• make recommendations to government about how the care system can best meet the needs of children and young people in the future.

This is a good time to run The Care Inquiry. The government is reviewing different aspects of care, including how children’s homes operate, which children get adopted, and what happens to contact with sisters, brothers and other relatives after adoption. There are likely to be changes in the law about these things next year and we all have a duty to make sure that decisions made about vulnerable children are made in the best possible way and based on the best possible evidence of what works, for whom, and in what circumstances.

Local authorities make decisions about children in care in different ways. We want to find out more about why this happens and what it means for children and those close to them. We want to check what research studies and other reports have told us in recent years. We want to see what we can learn from the way other countries respond to the needs of children and young people who might not be able to stay at home or go back home from care. We want to get people talking about what they know, what they think, and what they themselves and others close to them can tell us about their own experience of the care system.

There will be three formal meetings of the Care Inquiry in November, December and January. These will be for invited people, and the aim is to:

• look at recent trends in the law and practice for children in care;
• learn from young people and adults about how the care system can support long-term stability for children, and;
• debate how best to provide well for all children in the care system, given their different ages, backgrounds and needs.

Those invited to the formal meetings include researchers, local government policy makers, legal experts, service practitioners and managers, and young people and adults who have experience of the care system.

There will be plenty of opportunities for everyone to get involved in The Care Inquiry. You can follow the Inquiry on Twitter, or visit our Pinterest page where you can find out all the information you need about the Inquiry’s work and the organisations involved.