Education, Children and Young People Committee 10 September 2025
At the heart of our work in the working group and in considering the bill was listening to the voices of young care-experienced people. We really did listen to them, which led us to develop an imagined role for the chair of a children’s hearing that would be much greater and more weighty than it is now. Conspicuously avoiding any suggestion that they should be a member of any particular profession, we imagined a chair who would nonetheless be legally competent, especially in relation to human rights. We imagined a chair who can understand the impact of decisions of the children’s hearing not only on the child but on the parents and other relevant persons, and who has the confidence to say to those people, “We have heard from you and understand your concerns, but we now want to hear from the child on their own.”
I heard just this week of a case in which a mother found herself in a hearing room with the man who had abused her horribly and who had spent 20 months in jail for an assault on her. She was traumatised by the experience. In the room, she put on a brave face and everyone thought that she did fine, but she did not want to share her personal experience or personal information with him in the room. She did not want to rock the boat in case it upset him and led to some kind of reaction. She did not represent herself anywhere near as well as she might have done. In such a situation, a chair should have the confidence, first of all, to recognise the subtleties of domestic abuse and the impact of trauma. They should understand the role of an inquisitorial process and have the confidence to say, “I am leading this inquiry and the panel are supporting me in it. In recognition of the difficulty around the domestic abuse in the background here, we require the man”—the husband or partner—“to leave the room or to not be in the room at the same time as the mother.” That situation can be managed, but only by somebody who has real confidence and understanding.
We also imagined a chair who would write a full reasoned decision and not the abbreviated type of decision that is currently the norm at children’s hearings. We imagined someone who could bring together the views of panel members to produce a cohesive decision and deliver it. Furthermore, we imagined the chair having a role after the making of a compulsory supervision order, not as a supervisor or another boss for the social worker, but to receive expressions of concern if compulsory supervision orders were not being properly implemented, or if the mental health service that the panel expected to be available was not available and the order was not being implemented. The chair should have the discretion, faced with such concerns, to call for a review hearing outside the normal pattern of statutory reviews, every three months or once a year.
Two things emanated from that. One was that that role for the chair was really the product of hearing from the stakeholders across the whole children’s hearing community. We listened especially to the voices of care-experienced young people and heard about their personal journeys through the hearings system. We found ourselves devising a role for the chair that was quite an expansion of the current role. That, in turn, led us to recognise that, especially if the chair was going to be a consistent presence in that child’s journey through the hearings system, it would be difficult for that role to be fulfilled by somebody who was not doing it as a job.
That is a very brief outline of the process that we went through at the working group, which produced the recommendations in our report. What is lost in the bill is the cohesive structure of the chair’s role in particular and the issues around grounds hearings, which would have produced the transformational change that we imagined.