Support for young people on journey to adulthood

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/07/support-young-people-journey-adulthood

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I am moved to write to you on a personal note, having read Zoe Williams' article (Who profits from being in care? It's not the children, 1 November). The plight of many children in care, and their heartless treatment in the name of profit, makes me despair and appreciate how lucky I was back in the 50s.

In 1950 the NSPCC placed me (aged seven) and my sisters (eight and 10) in the National Children's Home (now Action for Children). We became part of a family group at the Alverstoke branch, near Gosport. There were approximately 150 children divided into small groups, each with a housemother. We were consistently loved, encouraged and supported. Our needs and aptitudes were recognised and nurtured. I was 18 when I left Alverstoke in 1961 to study at Brighton Teacher Training College. However, I returned "home" at weekends and in holidays. The NCH was indeed my home.

I was awarded the maximum grant for my training. Even so, the NCH made a further contribution to help me over the three years. Other children did leave at the age of 16. It was NCH policy to ensure "leavers" found employment or college courses and "digs" where necessary to support them – as they did for me. If they were not coping in their new life, the NCH brought them back in to the "home" until they were ready to be independent. This was common practice.

I am now retired. I have spent my working life as a teacher of French and German, becoming, for the final 15 years, a PGCE tutor for modern languages. My housemother is now 94, and is herself being cared for in a residential home. My middle sister visits her each week. Many of her NCH family visit and keep in touch.

It was so important to feel loved and to be safe and secure. The National Children's Home achieved that all those years ago, and I am very grateful. There must be many good stories nowadays of lasting loving care of children in trouble. It would be good to investigate these to counterbalance the many articles we read of abuse and callousness. Jenifer Alison Lowgill, Cumbria

• Although Zoe Williams' article colludes with the simplistic view of the care system as failing most young people – whereas research evidence shows some young people move on very successfully from care, others do well over a longer period of time, and a third group struggle greatly – she is right that there needs to be a radical rethinking of the funding and placement policies.

The first priority should be to provide financial support to prevent young people coming into care where they can safely remain with their parents. Second, far more use should be made of supporting kinship care by other relatives and friends, thus maintaining community links. This form of care is only used in England for about one in eight of looked-after young people compared with, for example, eight out of 10 young people in Spain. Third, we should fund, on a not-for-profit basis, local high-quality foster and residential care, each with a clearly identified purpose, including supporting young people from care to adulthood – not just at the time of leaving care.

We know from research what works in successfully supporting young people on their journey to adulthood: stability and continuity; a positive experience of education; responding to health and emotional needs; preparation; and gradual, extended and supported transitions well into adulthood. In other words, what most parents offer their young people. Why do local authorities find it so difficult to provide this? Professor Mike Stein Social Policy Research Unit, University of York

• Zoe Williams highlights the shocking situation where the most vulnerable children in society fail to thrive and achieve despite the eye-watering sums paid to private companies for their care. The solution seems obvious: non-state-sector schools should earn their charitable status by taking responsibility for the care and education of "cared-for" children. This would provide a real opportunity to change the current shamefully impoverished life chances for "cared-for" children. In these times of austerity, policymakers should also note the savings to be made (£200,000-£300,000 per year for residential care compared to £30,000 at Eton). Cynics would point to a lack of political will and there would certainly be challenges in ensuring the children were carefully nurtured and supported, but this one really is a no-brainer. Katherine Mason Southampton

• Adopted children can read headlines too ('I wanted to kill her', G2, 1 November). It's certainly true that adopting already distressed children is difficult, and that adoptive parents may not be given the information and support they need. But melodrama doesn't help anyone. Children who have been rejected for whatever reason are likely to feel intensely that it's their fault; describing them in a big yellow subheading as "a ticking timebomb" will do nothing to restore their self-esteem. Ruth Valentine London

• Michael Gove's instruction that excessive emphasis on ethnic matching requirements must not stop black youngsters being placed with loving white parents (Report, 6 November) at long last gives effect to a policy Paul Boateng, then health minister, tried to introduce 14 years ago, only to be thwarted by the social services establishment. As a result, in 2010 only 80 of the 3,050 children adopted were black, leaving 90% of black children in the care system without a chance of finding a new permanent placement. The assumption that white people cannot be good and loving parents for a black child is both racist and false – look no further than President Barack Obama, who was very happily and successfully brought up by a white couple. Maritz Vandenberg London

• The articles by Meg Henderson, on traumatic adoption experiences ('I wanted to kill her', G2, 1 November), and Zoe Williams, on the children's home industry, illustrate the gross inadequacies ofthe care system across much of the UK. I have heard many similar stories to the ones told by Meg Henderson and have been involved in the subsequent therapeutic care of adolescents and younger children who have suffered secondary deprivation as a result of failed fostering and adoption experiences.

The private ownership of children's homes is often a key factor in their inadequacies, but there are also many well-run privately owned homes and plenty of examples of poor-quality local authority and voluntary children's homes as well. A more fundamental reason why we so manifestly fail to provide appropriate care and treatment to children and adolescents in the care system is that we collectively turn a blind eye to the almost unbearable nature of childhood trauma. The minimisation of emotional disturbance and the gross understatement of behavioural problems that Meg Henderson so painfully describes is at least partly a collective professional defence in some social work departments against experiencing the reality of traumatised children.

But this in turn is part of a wider societal denial of the traumatising nature of the abuse of children and adolescents. Society hands the problem to social workers, who as a result of inadequacies in current professional training and support cannot themselves bear to hold the problem and pass children on to some of those least able to provide them with the psychological help they need. The reality of failed adoption is that love is simply not enough in some cases. Severely traumatised children need intensive psychological help from highly motivated and skilled adults away from family-based care.

Only a very small number of residential therapeutic children's homes and therapeutic communities provide this kind of help, and they are no more expensive than some of the organisations Zoe Williams refers to. The fact that such successful models of care and treatment exist and have existed for 40 years or more, but are still often regarded with suspicion and hostility by public policymakers, should be a cause of great concern to all of us. I recently set up a training programme for therapeutic foster carers in a London borough. Shortly after the programme finished, the service was closed. Andrew Collie Therapeutic childcare consultant

• Mark Kerr's comments on the care leavers' charter (Second thoughts, Society, 31 October) drew our attention to the poor situation of many care leavers, struggling to fend for themselves at an age when most of their peers are still supported emotionally, practically or financially by their family. By around the age of 15 young people in care are too old for a foster family, but this is only because our concept of a foster family is limited to foster parents. Why not have foster uncles, grandparents or cousins – people who take an active interest in the young person, perhaps meeting once a week, but who don't offer the youngster a home?

Most of us would be daunted at the thought of having a strange teenager living in our home; more people would be willing to make a long-term commitment to a relationship that would be physically more distant. Meeting once a week or once a fortnight, sharing Christmas and birthdays, being present in crises or triumphs. The commitment would be to a long-term relationship but not a relationship that would dominate your daily life.

Ideally every older teenager in care could have three special people. These people could be related to each other or they might be people who hadn't met until they were drawn into a relationship with the same child. Three people representing both genders and different ages so that the teenager would have a variety of relationships – a slightly older cousin who has recent experience of being a teenager, an uncle to put up shelves when the teenager moves into their first flat and a granny to cook roast dinner on Sunday.

And of course the "looked after" person can contribute too; the new extended family could include a disabled person who would be glad of help with shopping or a mum who is lonely at home all day with a new baby and would welcome a chat. Maybe the teenager could put up shelves for their uncle or cook dinner for their granny.

We are awash with agencies that promise to help us to find a life partner. It requires specialist understanding to construct an extended family, and we cannot overlook the safeguarding issues, but let's have an agency to foster families with a flexible concept of what it takes to be a family, recognising that being a family does not have to mean living together. The long-term community benefits have got to be worth the effort. Rebecca Saville London