Meeting of the Parliament 22 November 2016
I start by recognising Aberdeenshire Council’s achievement of its aims for early permanence for children who need a caring and stable home and family. The Aberdeenshire PACE group’s aim is:
“each child living in a stable, safe, secure and happy home, where they know they will stay until they are independent and where they know they can make lifelong connections.”
The group goes further than that by setting itself a measurable target to ensure that
“90% of children will be accommodated before their 12th birthday and will have a permanence plan within 9 months.”
That target was met in January 2016 and the group is working hard to sustain the position and improve on it in future years. Last week, its achievements were recognised when Aberdeenshire Council won The Herald’s society award for the young people’s project of the year. Further, at the 2016 quality improvement awards, the project won the outstanding contribution to improving outcomes for children, young people and families award.
Those awards reflect what the group has done around the idea of support. As many speakers have mentioned, it is not enough simply to place a child with a family; support must be provided to ensure that the adoption flourishes and does what it should for the parents and the child. The PACE group has programmes that involve peer support from other adoptive parents—who would know more about what newly adoptive parents are going through than people who have been through that themselves? It provides training and coaching opportunities for prospective adoptive parents, who can ask as many questions as they might have and access support. There are also support groups for adoptive children and looked-after children.
The young people’s organising and campaign group—YPOC—in Aberdeenshire does many of the things that Tavish Scott just mentioned. It is important not only that teachers are trained and know how to work with children who have been in care but that children who have been in care take ownership of their situation. The YPOC group has produced materials for teachers that communicate how its members feel when they are in meetings and which outline issues that they face. It has produced a fantastic DVD on issues that its members face in school—the young people made the DVD themselves, and I highly recommend it. I am making pizzas with the YPOC group in a couple of weeks and we will see how that goes.
Variations abound on the quote that
“A society should be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable”,
and there are arguments about who first said it. However, the sentiment is extremely relevant to the debate. No one is more vulnerable than a child who is without a loving, caring protector. The longer that children experience uncertainty in their lives, the more damage is done. The sooner that children can be settled in a permanent home with their new family, the better their life chances.
A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Laura and Shaddelle from Who Cares? Scotland. Both those exceptional women had been what we call cared-for children, but they had vastly different experiences.
Shaddelle and her little brother had been badly neglected by their birth mother but had been given a new permanent home early and were able to grow up in a loving and stable environment. It was by no means plain sailing. Shaddelle and her foster mum, Hazel, who she calls Mum, still had to cope with her childhood trauma, and unsettling sporadic unwanted contact from Shaddelle’s birth mother made things very hard at points. However, she and her brother had a loving family who were there for them no matter what, and the confident, bright and compassionate Shaddelle is living proof that early permanence can make a world of difference to a young person.
We can contrast Shaddelle’s experience with that of Laura, who moved from foster carer to foster carer and from a children’s home to a secure unit where she was locked in at night, supposedly for her own protection. Lack of early permanence was the start of a downward spiral for that young woman. She told me, “I just wanted someone to claim me.” I will never forget those words. She needed someone to take her on board, warts and all, difficulties and all.
I imagine that all of us here got into politics to make a difference and, of course, people throughout the country give money to Children in Need and whatever. I am reminded of a conversation that I had with a social worker whom I know, who said that the biggest difference any person can make is to give a loving and secure home to a child who, for whatever reason, has a risk to their wellbeing in their birth home and is confused, scared and vulnerable. Such a child will only become more vulnerable the more transient, temporary and numerous their moves are from place to place.
I urge anyone who has been watching the debate to look at the work that Who Cares? Scotland does and at the recent STV documentary called “Who Cares”. The strongest voices belong to those who have been through the care system and two of those voices belong to Laura and Shaddelle. The two of them are ambassadors for looked-after children, and their message is simple: vulnerable children need to be loved and to feel secure as quickly as possible, so that they can start their journey towards being ordinary kids, with ordinary, safe and happy lives.
Early permanence through adoption is the key to that and I fully support the Government’s prioritisation of that goal. I support the Government’s strategy, which takes new approaches that are in line with the recommendations by those who know the situations best: the adoptive parents and the looked-after children who have been through the system.
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