What is your idea?
We recommend that all birth parents are offered trauma-informed, relationship-based support after the removal of a child from their care, so that the removal of a child from their care never needs to happen more than once.
This idea will not only support parents who need help the most but also reduce the number of infants entering the care system as a whole. For this recommendation to be enacted, the current system needs to change to ensure there is a pathway to support for all parents who need it but may well not be able to access it for a whole range of reasons.
This recommendation could be enacted with a local multi-agency panel, which is brought together once care proceedings have concluded, to put in place a wide-ranging community response for the parents, agreeing a lead professional and who would deliver what. This could follow the example of MARAC in domestic abuse and would need to have an assertive outreach model at its heart.
The Care Review’s Case for Change sets out the context for this idea itself by asking why post-removal services aren’t more widely available already.
We believe that for this systemic change to have impact, the following conditions must be created:
- There should be a statutory duty to provide post-removal support to all parents who have experienced the removal of a child, regardless of the care plan or placement for the child.
- Data on parents who experience the removal of children needs to be collected and either national or local government needs to be held accountable for parents’ experiences and delivery of support services.
- There must be sustainable funding for support services for parents.
What impact do you hope this will achieve?
This idea will impact on all parents going through care proceedings and help break the intergenerational cycle of adversity. When a child is removed from their birth family, the systems around that child and family must work together in a trauma-informed way to provide support, so that it never happens more than once.
Independent evaluations of the Pause Programme show that providing trauma-informed, relationship-based support to women who have experienced the removal of children from their care has a huge impact:
- The number of infants entering care is reduced by an average of 14.4 per year per local authority area that has a Pause practice. This is equivalent to 215 children over three years in five local areas.
- The life satisfaction and wellbeing of women on the Pause programme improved, moving from a very low level (in the bottom 5% of the UK population) towards population norms.
- Pause has a positive effect on the quality of contact and relationships with existing children.
- Women on the Pause programme experience improvements in their housing and increased access to other support services.
- For every £1 spent on Pause, £4.50 is saved over four years, and £7.61 over 18 years.
What is your idea?
We recommend a more trauma-informed, relational approach to contact between children and their birth parents. Every child’s personal story and the circumstances of their family is unique. For this reason, contact arrangements and family time should be planned and supported to enable children to understand their identity and form meaningful relationships in their lives.
We believe in a different approach to contact that is viewed as relational, rather than administrative. The support needs of the child, the birth relatives and the carers (i.e. kinship carer, adoptive family, foster carer) must be recognised to ensure mutual understanding, trust and empathy between everyone involved.
Supporting high quality family time requires time, resources, capacity and a trauma–informed response. System changes needed include:
- Investment in therapeutic support that is beyond current post-adoption support. This must be offered to children and young people, birth parents, foster carers, adoptive parents and other carers and must be resourced sufficiently by central government and local areas.
- A change in language – moving away from talking about ‘contact arrangements’, towards ‘family time.’
- Regular review of contact, particularly at key ages and stages of development for children and young people.
- A system based on clear communication about any changes and assurance that everyone involved understands what is happening.
- Where it is safe, positive and in the best interest of the children, technology should be considered as a means of supporting indirect contact between birth parents, adopters, and children.
What impact do you hope this will achieve?
Evidence shows that contact is a beneficial experience and has a positive impact on a child and their family network. For birth families, contact takes place in the context of grief and loss but, over time, and with support to deal with their feelings of bereavement, contact can help them accept reality and be reassured about the adopted child’s situation. For some young people, when contact is managed well, it can reduce the sense of rejection and also gives the child the opportunity to see the birth parents recover from past challenges, which has therapeutic benefit on each other’s well-being.
It also informs future reunions with birth parents and can reduce anxiety felt by adoptive parents about the sort of relationship their child may eventually develop with birth parents once they reach adulthood, since there is already familiarity. This can strengthen relationships between adoptive families and children, as successful family time arrangements can create an atmosphere of honesty, openness and trust.
