Pause welcomes the report from the Spotlight Inquiry by the APPG for Looked After Children and Care Leavers.
Yesterday, Tuesday 22 February 2022, the APPG for Looked After Children and Care Leavers published the report from its Spotlight Inquiry at the end of 2021. The Inquiry looked at what ‘community’ means to care-experienced people, and what could be done to strengthen relationships and connections, with the aim of improving the care system and feeding into the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.
Pause submitted evidence to the Inquiry, focusing on the experiences of women who have had children removed from their care. Pause’s vision is a care system that recognises, understands and counts women who have experienced the removal of a child from her care, and delivers support to these women so it never has to happen more than once. Pause’s evidence shows that supporting these women and families leads to positive outcomes and reduces the number of children going into care.
Jules Hillier, Chief Executive of Pause, says:
“Thank you to the APPG for Looked After Children and Care Leavers, its Chair Steve McCabe MP and its secretariat Become for gathering valuable evidence and insights around the care system and its community, in order to inform the Care Review. We are pleased to see a focus on the importance of relationships and identity in the published report. The foundations of care should be stable, trusting relationships, in order to foster a sense of safety, stability and belonging. This is what women working with Pause repeatedly tell us is particularly lacking in the care system. As always, we are grateful to the women we work with, who shared their lives, thoughts and experiences with us in the development of our contribution to the Spotlight Inquiry and our recommendations to the Care Review.”
Pause’s recommendations to the Care Review are:
- The system response when a child is removed from their parents’ care needs to change. Pause proposes a multi-agency panel, brought together after care proceedings have ended, in order to learn lessons from the child being removed and put in place a wide-ranging community response for the parents.
- As part of the multi-agency community response described above, it should always include support for parents through the implementation of statutory duty for post-removal trauma-informed support after care proceedings.
- Data on parents who experience the removal of a child more than once should be collected and published nationally every year.