Meeting of the Parliament 22 November 2016
I start by declaring an interest as a councillor on Aberdeen City Council and, therefore, as a corporate parent. I echo the comments of members who have welcomed the debate and its positivity and unanimity. As the Scottish Government has rightly recognised, our system of care needs radical reform, so the launch of a root-and-branch review that seeks to ensure that love is at the centre of that system, and that every child in care is loved and feels loved, is very welcome.
For far too long, we have let down the most vulnerable people in our society. As my colleague Maurice Corry highlighted, more than one in 10 young people leaving care in Scotland experience homelessness within two years. Some 14 per cent of looked-after school leavers receive no qualifications, while only 8 per cent receive one or more qualification, and only 4 per cent of care leavers go on to higher education. Although we have seen improvement in terms of positive outcomes and destinations for care leavers since 2009, we have also seen the number of positive outcomes stagnate since 2012, with very little improvement.
They are not somebody else’s children: they are the children of all of us, which is why Parliament, the Scottish Government, its agencies and our society need to step up and ensure that our care leavers get the very best opportunities to succeed, to be what they want to be and to make the most of their potential. For those who are in care, we have work to do to ensure that children have a family, love and—most of all—a childhood. If we are to improve outcomes, we must work to reduce the time that it takes to find permanent stable placements.
The evidence that we have seen at the Education and Skills Committee shows that, in terms of educational attainment, children who are in more permanent places and who have fewer moves achieve more. It is therefore important that greater weight be attached to permanent adoption, where that is in the best interests of the child, in order to provide a permanent solution and a better outcome.
Transforming the system to deliver the best possible outcomes for our children and young people will take work. The number of adoptions of children from care in Scotland has remained broadly flat in recent years; in fact, the most recent figures show that the proportion of children leaving care for adoption dropped from 7.2 per cent to 6.9 per cent between 2014 and 2015. Furthermore, in 2012, the number of children who lived with prospective adopters was 1.6 per cent of all children in care and, two years later, in 2014, that number was 1.7 per cent. No real progress or change was achieved.
As my colleague Liz Smith highlighted in her speech, it is astonishing that it takes on average more than two years to secure an adoption. There have been some extreme cases in which it has taken up to 10 years. Therefore, a key objective of the Scottish Government should be to speed up the whole process and to ensure that it is as simple as possible while compatibility to register as an adopter or foster family is properly assessed.
My colleague Maurice Corry alluded to the comments of Robin Duncan, who is the manager of Scotland’s adoption register. He warned:
“we still don’t have enough adoptive families in Scotland for all the children needing placements”.
We need to congratulate adoption agencies on the hard work that is being carried out to recruit new adopters. The Scottish Conservatives believe that in order to support that work and attract new adopters, an adoption tsar should be created. That would be a voluntary post, and the person would be appointed by the Scottish ministers. Their task would be to co-ordinate and encourage the effort to raise the profile of adoption in Scotland so that we can make real progress in attracting the new adopters whom we need, because too many children are still waiting for a loving family.
We still have work to do to change perceptions and attitudes—especially in respect of foster families, who are too often viewed as being for difficult children. In challenging those perceptions, we can work towards improving the supply of foster parents, which will in turn help to make placements last longer and therefore result in more positive outcomes.
I turn to contributions that members have made to the debate. My colleague Jeremy Balfour recognised and welcomed the efforts of the Scottish Government and previous Executives. We welcome the extension of activity days, which is great news, and the comments of the minister, who made an important point about myth busting in respect of adoption and the need to encourage people to come forward to do something that is, as he said, hugely fulfilling. He also highlighted the challenges in the system, which can be complicated and slow, as it was in the constituency cases that he mentioned.
My colleague Liz Smith talked about the work of the previous session’s Education and Culture Committee—Tavish Scott also referred to it—and how it had examined the challenges around educational attainment and what could be done to improve outcomes for leavers from our care system. We need to congratulate warmly the agencies that continue to do all that they can to recruit new people and to launch new campaigns on their work, and we need to urge the minister again to consider all school leavers and the support that could be put in place as they go out into the wider world.
In opening for Labour, Monica Lennon touched on a very important point: one in four adoptive families is at risk of breaking down due to lack of support. She referred to families hitting a brick wall. Tavish Scott touched on that very point when he spoke about the challenges of adoption breakdown and how it is incumbent on us to try to understand the reasons for and causes of that so that we can ensure that support is available and that families that seek support in a natural and normal way do not feel stigmatised or ashamed about doing so.
I know that Jenny Gilruth made a comment about people being tired of hearing her rhetoric as a teacher. I never do; I always think that it is a welcome contribution to our debates. She touched on the important questions about how we achieve the best attainment for our young people and children, the best ways of supporting them in the education environment, and ensuring stable and secure homes and permanent adoption placements. We can work towards those.
Fulton MacGregor made a terrific and incredibly valuable speech about his direct experience, and about the importance of taking into account children’s and young people’s views and how children and young people have to be at the heart of the decision-making process.
Iain Gray talked about the vital role of being a corporate parent. That role needs to be taken very seriously; indeed, we cannot forget our role when it comes to children who have left our care. We, as corporate parents, always have that role and very real responsibility. He also touched on something else that was not mentioned by other members: the number of children who suffer from prenatal substance and alcohol abuse. Before those children are even born, many of their life chances are decided for them, which has a significant impact on their quality of life. That was a very important point to make.
I welcome Rona Mackay’s story of a same-sex couple adopting for the first time. That is absolutely wonderful; we need to see more of that, because we should be promoting and supporting any home that is loving and safe.
Alison Johnstone and Gillian Martin both touched on the great success in Aberdeenshire with the PACE programme, where we have seen real improvements, including a reduction in the decision making-time to less than 20 weeks. Other local authorities could learn lessons from what has happened there.
Elaine Smith touched on how we ensure that children’s views are taken into account as we go into the root-and-branch review. I, too, look forward to hearing from the minister about how the Scottish Government intends to achieve that.
My colleague Miles Briggs talked about how we as MSPs can work in our regions and constituencies to encourage our constituents to become involved, to become foster parents and to become adopters. It was interesting to learn about what has been happening in Edinburgh and the City of Edinburgh Council’s advertising campaign, as well as how we could use social media more to inspire more people to come forward.
In making adoption easier and reducing barriers to adoption, we can attract more people to register so that we can bring children and adopters together in order to secure loving environments in which children and young people can reach their full potential, prosper, have a childhood and—most of all—feel loved.