Education and Skills Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Official Report 505KB pdf

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Independent Care Review

The next item of business is a briefing from the independent care review. The committee will take evidence from the Minister for Childcare and Early Years next week, and the minister’s remit covers care-experienced young people. Today’s session is, in part, to inform next week’s session. We are also keen to hear about the progress of the review so far and its future work.

I welcome Fiona Duncan, the chair of the independent care review, Rosie Moore, a discovery group member, and Kevin Browne, a discovery group member. Ms Duncan, I understand that you would like to make an opening statement to brief the committee on the review’s progress and planned work.

I will be brief because I have sent the committee some information, which I will talk to. I thank the committee for the invitation. We are pleased to have the opportunity to update it on the care review.

I will talk a little bit about the highlights of the stage that we are in at the moment, as we are concluding the discovery stage. I will also talk about what we are doing now and share some of the things that we plan to do next. My briefing outlines the methodology and clarifies the timeframe. We aim to conclude the review in the spring or summer of 2020, which might be a slightly longer timeframe than was initially anticipated. That is because there is a huge volume of interest from people. It has taken us longer to get around all the individuals and organisations that wanted to speak to us. Because of some of the questions that we have been asking specifically of children and young people about their vision for care, it has taken longer to get to a consensus emerging around a vision. Lots of the early conversations were really about fixing challenges in day-to-day life rather than what the world could look like.

We have been very clear that it was important for us to hear from as many diverse voices as possible and in ways that worked for individuals. We have not been prescriptive about how we have encouraged people to engage with the review; we have been really open about that. In addition to all those conversations, including the ones with the workforce, we spent some time doing detailed analysis of everything that we have understood. At the moment, we have started to frame that analysis into a vision, a series of intentions for the review, a series of outputs from discovery, which will be happening soon, and a series of inputs for the next stage of the journey, which will be on the more complicated areas.

All of those are being taken back to children and young people—our go-to groups—so that we can sense check what we have heard. We are saying, “This is what you have told us. This is how we have organised it. This is what we intend to do next and this is what we hope to achieve at the end. Does this sound right?” rather than just thinking that we have understood it correctly. That is happening throughout this week. Our first session was on Monday and sessions are happening all through this week, this weekend and next week. Once we have concluded that and, as we hope, the children and young people to whom we are speaking have told us that they like the way in which we have organised the next stage of the review, we will embark on that next stage.

We are very careful that our go-to groups are not made up exclusively of the 817 children and young people who spoke to us initially, because we recognised that there was a risk that we would have an echo chamber. Increasingly, we are building new groups of individuals who want to talk to us. That is where we are at. There is more information in the briefing paper and we are happy to take any questions on any of our work.

Thank you very much for that. It was very useful and it was good to see so that many people participated in the questions. Before I invite questions from members, I will start by asking Rosie Moore and Kevin Browne for their views on how the care review has sought thus far to take into account the views of care-experienced people and what they feel could be done later in the review to achieve this.

Thank you, convener. Following on from what Fiona Duncan said, at the end of the discovery phase, 817 children and young people had been spoken to, but that does not include the new people who are part of the go-to groups. Half the discovery group is made up of care-experienced members, including me and Kevin Browne, and I honestly could sit and talk to the committee for hours about the lengths to which I believe Fiona Duncan and the team have gone to hear the voices of children and young people who are either in the system or who have left. The way in which the team is trying to gather such a vast variety of voices is really admirable. With the discovery group members, we have people with a range of different experiences, such as people in kinship care or foster care, so that we have diversity in the group, and then obviously there is the diversity of all the different young people that the team are speaking to outwith the discovery group meetings.

My skill set includes my personal experience of care, but I am also an academic and a professional, and I think that those things are equally valued. When people talk purely from experience and opinion and things that have happened to them personally, that is not given any less credit when people are inputting into the discussions that the group holds, nor should it be.

I have never known Fiona Duncan to pass up an opportunity to go and speak to care-experienced young people outside the review. I am part of a care-experienced young people advisory group for the Life Changes Trust. I made a passing comment to Fiona Duncan that we had a well-established advisory group of 18 to 30-year-olds and Fiona Duncan instantly said, “When can I come and see you?” and there was no underlying motive. We did not have an agenda for that meeting. She purely wanted to come and speak to us, update us a little bit about what the review was doing, get our thoughts on a few things and then open herself up completely for us to question her. It was nice for me, to be outside the discovery group and to resort back to being a care-experienced young person, asking her questions in a different role. I have never known Fiona Duncan to be too busy; she will make the time.

Fiona Duncan mentioned the recent creation of the go-to groups. There has been a multi-layered approach to engaging with young people, so that there can be one-to-one meetings, phone calls and focus groups from across the country. The approach is not centred around any particular areas or the bigger cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Moving forward, there needs to be a continuing discussion about how we reach some of the harder-to-reach care-experienced young people. As Fiona Duncan has said, one of the principles of the go-to groups is to get new people involved so that the forum is not an echo chamber. It is partly the responsibility of the review and partly of people across the sector to get together and think about how we can reach those people who are currently under the radar. If that is an issue to do with data, the collection of data not being up to scratch or people not feeling able to disclose their care experience because of stigma or shame or whatever, as we move forward, and speaking from a care-experienced young person’s point of view, that is a focus that I would like to see as a cross-sector responsibility.

I suggest doing that by using a lot of resources that are underutilised. For example, champs boards have recently been created across the local authorities. Up to 19 or 20 different local authorities have ready-made groups of young people who own the care experience and are there voluntarily to create change. They would love people from different parties or different sectors to come and say what they think, because the voice of young people is so powerful. In recent years, through the work of organisations such as Who Cares? Scotland, the centre for excellence for looked-after children in Scotland, and the review, young people are slowly being empowered to talk and to open up. Some of the messages that have come from them are invaluable.

Moving forward, in summary, it is about keeping going the way we are and for people to get together so that, after the review has concluded, we do not just say “That is it”. People from health, education, mental health and different political parties need to commit to continuing to engage with and listen to young people. A lot of the answers are there but we have not taken the time thus far to seek them out.

That was really good.

From my perspective the scale of the review is fantastic as far as the numbers are concerned, but I am most proud of the approach that the review taken. It has created the conditions for care-experienced children, young people and adults to feel safe. It has been as relationship based as possible by working in partnership with agencies and companies to make sure that children, young people and adults feel comfortable and confident in sharing their experience.

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Beyond that, the public statement that was made that the review will be driven by people who are care experienced is a real strength. As a result of that, Scotland has engaged in a national conversation about how to engage with the care population locally. It has gone beyond numbers and it is starting to reach into communities; the discussion is being taken forward there.

The third element is care identity and the power of sharing and listening to stories. Approximately five or six years ago, there was a reluctance to listen to people who were care experienced because there was a fear that their declaration of their journey would cause or revisit trauma. The review has created the conditions for Scotland to have confidence that sharing stories is a positive thing if it is done in the right way with the right support.

More than that, the review has been tabled as an appreciative review, but it has not ignored the lived reality. I have spoken publicly and openly a number of times about my own experience 15 years ago and 10 years ago. Both of my brothers died at the age of 18—one through suicide and one through a drugs overdose—and both were care experienced. Last week, one of our members at Who Cares? Scotland, who was aged 23, also died. Her name was Katie. The review has listened and is facing the reality as well as looking at the strengths and adopting the appreciative approach.

The fact that the review can learn from the past and listen to voices that will never be heard and, more important, build and look forward to the future, has real integrity.

Moving forward, the review needs to be care experience driven. The question was about how we have taken into account the views of care-experienced people. I would like to see care-experienced people at the centre of the process as its architects, builders and creators. For many years, care-experienced people have been oppressed through fear, stigma and discrimination, and the review is a marked change and a public message to care-experienced people that they will be listened to, that we will take their views seriously, and that there is real scope for delivering change.

I have every confidence that the review will achieve that. Under Fiona Duncan’s leadership and given that, to date, care-experienced people have driven the process and will continue to do so, I am hopeful and confident that we will deliver transformational change that will restore childhoods, connect communities and create a care experience that is based on love.

Thank you both for that. Rosie Moore talked about the importance of care-experienced voices and we have just heard that very powerfully for ourselves, so thank you very much.

I have one question for Fiona Duncan. How do you get the request out for people to participate in the review? I understand that your next step will be to involve those who are not easy to get to, but how do you make sure that enough people participate, which you clearly have succeeded in doing?

We are trying as hard as possible to work in partnerships. You will see from the briefing that we have approached and been approached by lots of voluntary organisations, umbrella bodies, local authorities, and charities that have a specialism in disability or children. We are building trust within the care-experienced community. On Monday night, I was at a meeting with people whom I had not met before, but their friends or family members had engaged with the review and decided that they could trust it. We are meeting new people like that.

The nominations and representation process that we used to create the discovery group was effective. Kevin Browne and Rosie Moore represent other organisations and we mapped out our key stakeholders and asked them to nominate or identify a representative. That was very good at extending our reach.

We also use all the usual channels. We are on social media and we go everywhere we are asked to. I have been all over Scotland and we turn up to every conference. As Rosie Moore said, I invite myself to things. I have not had many people say that they would not have me, but it has happened. We just make a point of being as accessible as possible. We are not working Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. It is evenings and weekends; it is whenever it needs to be. Because we want to hear from children and young people, it is really important that we are not compounding stigma by saying, “We will be with you on Tuesday at 3 o’clock and you have to come out of class.” I guess that we are working around people’s lives to make sure that we are present.

The last thing to say is that we are listening and we are asking questions. To answer Kevin Browne’s point, we respect the voices of the care-experienced community and they will be involved in the design, delivery, monitoring and evaluation of any care system. They have to be. We are moving into hope and belief, and that in itself is creating momentum.

Good morning, panel. Thank you for attending and for all the work that you are doing.

Fiona Duncan, you said that some of this was taking a little bit longer than was expected. It is easy to say that you are consulting people, going out to listen to their views and getting them to shape stuff, but I guess that people are leading their own lives and that you need to get over the day-to-day issues. I would think that, in that respect, care-experienced folk will face additional challenges. I realise that it is not the same thing, but what I have in mind is the way that, when we have focus groups with teachers on future plans and strategies, we find that what is actually important to them is the stuff that is going on at the moment. Is there a time element to this? If so, how do you move past that and build trust so that people feel involved in building what is coming instead of simply sharing what is happening at the moment?

There is a time element. We have structured the discovery stage of the review as a conversation, which means that people do not have to answer a question there and then.

Let me give you an example. Everyone who takes part in Who Cares? Scotland’s work to deliver the 1,000 voices commitment gets a badge; I met one young lady who had five badges, and she was just getting to the point where she was ready to share the things that she thought we had to hear. She knew that she had been counted once, so she is not five of the 817 young people to whom we spoke—she is just one person who appeared five times. I think that it is important to point that out.

A very powerful thing is to ensure, as far as possible, that the people involved in these conversations really understand the issues. You have seen for yourself the power of what Rosie Moore and Kevin Browne have had to say. The fact that Rosie Moore invited me willingly into her group and said, “You should be part of this conversation” in itself makes it easier for some of these conversations to happen. In any case, I certainly think that these have to be conversations; our response cannot be, “Right—we have heard your view, so that’s it.”

It is also worth noting that we have tried harder with hard-to-reach communities or individuals whom we have identified. We have not said, “Because you’re hard to reach, we’re just going to write you off”; we feel a responsibility to try harder in such circumstances. Our approach has been wide and open, but we have also been quite specific and targeted in hearing the voices that we need to hear. It is not just children and young people who might not feel that they want to engage with the review, but those who do not have a voice or whose first language is not English. We are very aware of all of that.

Finally, as Kevin Browne said, we create a really safe environment. We ensure that somebody is always on site if a person is talking about something that is traumatic or which triggers something and that all the support structures are in place to keep people safe during and after the conversation.

I want to ask about harder-to-reach young people. In the previous session of Parliament, I was, for a short time, convener of the Equal Opportunities Committee. When the committee held an inquiry into young people and homelessness, we discovered that quite a high proportion of homeless young people had come through the care system and were homeless because the system had failed them. There was no support or clear pathway in place for them when they left care. I remember one young person telling us that they were taken away from their care setting in a car, deposited outside a house, given a set of keys and told that this was their new home, and they had no skills to cope or deal with that situation. I am keen to hear how those young people are being engaged with, because clearly we need to make some massive changes to how we deal with care-experienced young people and ensure that they have the correct support and the proper pathway of help when they leave the system.

We also found that young people were quite often in and out of the criminal justice system, simply because they had nowhere else to go. Again, that is a failure of the system; it is no reflection on the young people themselves. Basically, they do not have the coping mechanisms to deal with life, and I am keen to hear whether you are speaking to people in those situations.

Absolutely. We recognise what you have just said, and we have targeted charities that work with the homeless community to ensure that we are having those conversations.

One of the things that we have identified is a lack of data, and part of our responsibility in the next phase will be gather that data and try to understand the scale of the situation. We have also done work at Polmont, and we have identified those areas—and, in fact, many others—that are of specific interest to us. It is an issue that we will focus on even more in the next stage of the review so that we can understand it.

I completely agree. For me, it is a massive issue where improvement is needed. I mentioned that Fiona Duncan had spoken to the Life Changes Trust advisory group, which I am a member of outside the review. One of the Life Changes Trust’s big initiatives at the moment is focusing on the idea of home and the problems that you have just referred to, and Fiona Duncan has agreed to continue to work collaboratively with us as a group.

Two of my advisory group colleagues were here several weeks ago, providing evidence on homelessness issues. We have discussed these matters at quite some length with Fiona Duncan when she has come to speak to us; we also discuss them when she is not there and feed those discussions back either through me, given my involvement with the group and the review, or through emails, phone calls and updates. I can definitely say that Fiona and the team are considering homelessness and various other issues such as people being expected to run their own tenancies at the age of 16. Common sense says that that is not going to be easy; in fact, the approach has not been successful and needs to be looked at. I know that the review is definitely taking that into consideration, because I have been part of those conversations with Fiona Duncan.

I find this to be quite a dark subject and I hope that I can talk concisely about it so that you understand what I am saying. When Government increased the age at which people can remain in care to 21 and then to 26, it was a monumental move and definitely the right thing to do. That happened in 2014. A coalition of key partners in the sector, including CELCIS, Who Cares? Scotland and Clan Childlaw, has now been formed; a whole range of people is coming together; and there will be a meeting in the Parliament in the next week or so to talk about the fact that, here and now, children from care are still ending up homeless and that the average age of leaving care is still 17. We are not seeing an increase, but the situation still exists.

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This is a multilayered issue that has come up in the review, and it has also come up in my role at Who Cares? Scotland as manager of our national corporate parenting training programme. One of the things that I find fascinating is that all of the reasons for this situation are different. For example, registered foster carers have found themselves unable to look after a child after the halving of the foster care rate, and so the child has had to move on. For another agency, it was about their providing residential childcare at a certain rate. Some of the reasons have been to do with money and resource, but there is a whole range of other reasons.

When I spoke to professionals and agencies about this, I said, “This issue is bigger than finance. There is something very dark and cultural about it.” The discussion that we had in that room was not about young people who were potentially going to be homeless, but about young people who were already homeless. Their foster carers let them go; the legal agency comes in and tries to support them at the latter end. Who Cares? Scotland is an advocacy service. The residential house had held them for seven or 10 years, and the people who say that they love their children are letting them go.

For me, there are some real challenges that we need to understand better, but this is a really dark issue to do with behaviour, society and culture. It is all about taking children from abuse and neglect, bringing them into the system and then returning them into a very disruptive and unsupportive environment. It goes beyond finance, and I think that in the next stage of the review we need to understand the culture and examine the fact that, despite our knowing that this is wrong, we collectively let it happen. It is not about blame—it is just a reflection of where we are at this moment.

Thank you for your very insightful comments this morning. With regard to the 32 local authorities that you said were in the discovery programme, did you get a good level of engagement from all of them or was the response patchy?

They were all willing to engage, but there was perhaps a different level of engagement from each. Some engaged in a multi-level way through the champions boards and social work teams; some held workshops for us; and others encouraged us to meet children and young people. We were with some councils for days on end, and we had shorter interventions with others.

I am pleased that all 32 councils are on board; I believe that we are at the beginning of a conversation with all of them and that there is a willingness to engage, and we are trying to make sure that our engagement is wide. In that respect, we are also engaging with the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, COSLA, the Care Inspectorate, Audit Scotland, the Scottish Social Services Council and all the other organisations that work closely with local authorities to ensure that we can continue to have conversations with them.

First of all, thank you very much for everything that you have said. You have raised some very profound issues that we need to think about. Those of us who are a bit hard bitten about stuff will say, “There have been a million reviews on a million issues in this Parliament,” but you have given us huge confidence that this review is being taken forward in a really serious way. No matter what parties members come from, they will all be hugely encouraged by what you have said.

Historically speaking, I taught for 20 years, and it was only latterly that people were even talking about youngsters who were in care. When I taught on Bute, youngsters in care were brought down on to the island; nobody discussed why they were there, even when they were trying to get back off the island. There has been some progress in that time, but I feel that this is a very important moment.

You are absolutely right that care-experienced people, whether they are young or older, have to be at the centre of all this. One particular campaign group that has been very strong in Parliament is kinship carers; they have spoken up for the young people whom they love and care for, and they have exposed a lot of issues. You talked about people stepping away from these matters, and I think that the extent to which our system has been prepared to step away is a shame on us all.

How do you manage not so much conflict between but the different perspectives that might be held by a care-experienced young person and somebody—a foster carer or whoever—who believed that they were doing their best but perhaps failed? Moreover, what balance should be struck between ensuring that young people have some very powerful advocates and ensuring that the care-experienced person is absolutely at the centre of things?

I will try to respond, but I am interested in hearing the views of Rosie Moore and Kevin Browne, too.

We have a map of the care journey. It is on an A3 sheet, and it includes kinship and foster care, residential care, those who are looked after at home, the edges of care and babies and children of a certain age and gender and in certain settings. We have tried really hard to ensure that our conversations have been representative and that we have included children and young people, the paid and unpaid workforce, people who are involved in the children’s panel, kinship carers, foster carers and so on.

I will make a couple of observations on this. First, there is huge consensus and a real appetite with regard to what has to happen and the need for change. It feels that now is the right moment for this review and that there are certain things on which everybody agrees. I imagine that that is a symptom of the discovery stage that we are at; we are crafting a vision and are trying to understand the roots and branches.

Inevitably, as we move into the next stage, there will be divergence and conversations about resource allocation, precedents and voices. One of the things that people say to us a lot is that they do not feel as if they are being heard. Kinship carers do not feel heard, and foster carers do not feel heard at critical points of decision making. There is nobody I have met who does not want the best for children and young people; the issue is where the tensions lie. I imagine that those tensions will emerge when we talk about specific issues such as the voices that are heard at a children’s hearing, and, at that point, we are going to have to understand and go back to what is best and right for the child.

At the very beginning of the review, we had some interesting commentary from children and young people. They said that the system had been designed and delivered by adults and that children and young people now had an opportunity to make it better. One young man said to me, “If you had asked me these questions at the age of 14, I would have given you very different answers.” We have been speaking to people of different ages in all sorts of different settings. For example, I went to the Who Cares? Scotland summer camp and spent lots of time with children—and got pelted twice on the assault course. The conversations that children want to have are about what is not working now and what they would do if their best friend were to come into care tomorrow. With those kinds of day-to-day decisions and issues, we are not necessarily going to bump into disagreements; disagreement will arise on the bigger questions of where responsibility, power and the resources sit, what the risks look like and how risk averse different organisations are going to be.

On Kevin Browne’s earlier point, the fact is that there are many different pieces of legislation in the system, and that is often where the creaks happen. Something might have been changed in what people consider to be a good and positive way, but it might actually have had unintended consequences or it might simply not have been taken up. Those are the areas where the disagreements are going to emerge.

I hope that I am answering your question, but there are a lot of young people out there who are either in kinship care arrangements or are being looked after at home but who do not understand that they are care experienced. There is a real tension in the sector—and in families—about the ability or desire to embrace a label.

For me, the real challenge is that a lot of the opportunities and support that have been built up require a person to know that they are care experienced. The Government’s fantastic work in replacing student loans with a non-repayable bursary for care-experienced students will transform lives, but if a person does not understand that they are care experienced, they will never—if I can put it this simply—tick a particular box and therefore never receive those benefits. For example, if you are from a care-experienced background and are made homeless, you will get priority; if you are looking for employment, a whole range of corporate parents will automatically guarantee interviews and ring fence jobs; and you will get free accommodation all year round in some of Scotland’s universities.

Those are fantastic developments, but they require care-experienced people to celebrate their care identity. In that respect, I think that this movement is still very young. With the disability and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements, huge investment has been made in getting people to a place where they can celebrate who they are and where they are from. The care-experienced movement is embryonic, but we are building on that.

One real challenge is support for kinship carers, but a bigger challenge is to support children in having a very positive sense of self, in saying that being care experienced is not a bad thing and in realising that, by owning that care identity—not publicly but internally—they can access the benefits that we are creating out there. However, that requires them to know, accept and celebrate their identity.

As the review moves forward, we need to engage Scotland in a discussion about this area of care to ensure that people understand and do not try to hide from it. I went to university for four years, and the only time I told somebody that I was care experienced was on my last day, because I knew that I would never see them again. That is a very real example of my feeling ashamed of who I am, and I have only felt happiness in my marriage, with my kids and in my job after embracing who I am. For me, it is a personal and professional issue, but there is a broader and wider discussion to be had, and I think that Fiona Duncan and the review can certainly aid that discussion in Scotland.

We have talked about discrepancies in data and our not knowing the number of care-experienced young people out there or, indeed, the number of kinship carers, because all of that is done as part of private family life. One issue that is important to me and which I have brought to the discussion in the discovery group is stigma. I am talking about not just the stigma of declaring that you are care experienced—which is, as Kevin Browne has just highlighted, a massive issue—but the stigma for families and carers of coming forward and asking for help. We have talked about that in relation to edges of care and the families who are providing kinship care to children and young people and whom we, as professionals, do not know about because they are simply not coming forward to tell us.

One of the big reasons for that is that there is the stigma associated with being a social work service user, and something that the review needs to continue to look at—and which cross-sector professionals need to continue to work on—is how to reduce the stigma of asking for help and how to get rid of the illusions that members of the public have about the social work, health and education sectors, a lot of which comes from the media and the misrepresentation of information.

Some responsibility for that lies with the review, and the issue will continue to be looked at through the journey stage. However, because the review is independent, there is general consensus that Fiona Duncan, the team and discovery group members’ accountability lies with children and young people and with giving them a better environment, upbringing and childhood.

Stigma is one of the big issues that I would like to be worked on, not only to ensure that children and young people feel comfortable in owning their care experience but to reduce the stigma associated with accessing services and, I hope, to help families who are on the edge of care. For me, the goal that we should be working towards is prevention, not intervention.

Thank you very much. I think that I speak on behalf of the committee when I say that your testimony was very useful and powerful. I have no doubt that we will hear from you again during this process and, I hope, later in the parliamentary session.

That brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting. We will now move into private session.

12:00 Meeting continued in private until 12:07.