Children in Care: Gone Too Far Report

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Some of our aspirations in relation to children with autism—I think my noble friend’s question might have been a little broader than just children—is set out in our new SEND strategy, both looking at how we can support children with autism where it is appropriate for them to remain in mainstream schooling, but also making sure that there is enough specialist provision. We are making a very significant investment in that area at the moment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my governorship of Coram, the children’s charity. The Minister said earlier that not very many children were being sent to Wales and Scotland. In 2022, more than 800 were sent. I think that is rather a lot; I do not know whether she would agree. Will she also focus on the fact that the cost of sending a child so far away is roughly double the cost of placing them in a home much nearer? At a time when local government is starved of funds, it seems particularly stupid that this should be the practice, so please will she and her department focus on trying to stop that as soon as possible?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have tried to set out what the department is doing to address those points. A number of the most distant placements are for very specialist provision, and I appreciate that there can be some additional costs but, overall, those residential care placements are broadly similar in cost when looking both at local authority and at private and voluntary provision.

Adoption Support Fund

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

That this House takes note of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Adoption and Permanence’s Report Investing in families: the Adoption Support Fund beyond 2020, published in July 2019.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the usual channels and Cross-Bench colleagues for allowing me and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, to have a third bite of the cherry with our debates, having fallen foul of the non-Prorogation and the general election. I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and as an officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence, whose report we are discussing this afternoon.

The adoption support fund, usually abbreviated to the ASF, was introduced in England in May 2015, championed by the then Minister for Children, Edward Timpson—happily re-elected to the House of Commons in December. His personal experience informed his belief in what the fund could achieve. He was brought up in a family with two adopted siblings and his extraordinary parents fostered an additional 90 children. Edward grew up with a deep understanding of trauma because he saw it unfolding all around him. The fund was specifically designed to find alternative and creative—I emphasise that—ways to enable families to deal with the effects of trauma on the behaviour and well-being of adopted children. It was set up with a five-year term, due to end this year.

As our report says, the fund has been, and is, a great success. I congratulate the Government and the Department for Education on making such a positive difference to families and children who were at, or near, breaking point. The Government have invested over £150 million, providing therapeutic support for more than 38,000 families. Since the cost of each child in the care of the state is around £34,000 per annum, one can do the maths: £1.3 billion for children in care, as opposed to eight and a half times less when children benefit from the therapies provided by the adoption support fund. How cost effective is that?

I was fortunate to be present at Coram for the launch of National Adoption Week last October, when the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson—whom I see has retained his job—announced the extension of the fund to 2021, while also revealing his own personal commitment, having grown up in a family with a foster sibling,

So, the Government have a success on their hands. They have extended the fund for a further year and the department has been resolutely consistent in saying no more than that its future will be considered in the upcoming spending review. I shall try to articulate the case for its long-term continuation and measured expansion, and suggest how it can be even more successful in helping to mitigate the effects of trauma, and in so doing transform and improve the lives of adoptees and their families, saving the state a huge amount of money. To borrow from the words of Mark Antony: I come here to praise the Department for Education, not to bury it.

There are six key recommendations in the report. I assume that the department has studied these carefully so I shall not bore the Minister or the House by repeating them in detail. Instead, I will flag up some specific points for the Minister and the department. The first is prevention versus cure, or how to prevent trauma happening in the first place. Harriet Ward was one of the authors of the 2012 book, Safeguarding Babies and Very Young Children from Abuse and Neglect, which detailed the results from following the lives of a sample group of children at risk from birth to three years old. Of that sample, 66% were identified as being at risk before they had even been born. Of the two-thirds of the sample still with their families at age three, 43% were judged to be at significant risk of harm from their own parents. By age three, 50% of the children in this study displayed serious behavioural problems or developmental delay.

This is partly where trauma starts. I urge the Department for Education and the Department of Health to assess and potentially extend initiatives such as the Oxford Parents Under Pressure pathway, the London and Glasgow Infant and Family Team and the Norfolk Parent-Infant Mental Health Attachment Project, and to build the learnings from these into discussions during the spending review about how to present and/or mitigate the onset of trauma.

Secondly, it is time to reassess the target audience. Initially the fund focused on adoptive families, which subsequently extended to special guardianship families. A third group is kinship carers. One size does not fit all, but I urge the Government to develop their understanding of the needs of each group and to target those specific needs as much as possible. This could be achieved partly by providing more effective publicity and information about the availability of the fund, but one might consider renaming the fund so that it can reflect better its target audiences.

Thirdly, it would be good to understand the consequences of the fund’s success. It was designed to find alternative and creative ways of enabling adoptive families to deal with trauma, and its success has, in effect, created a substitute mental health service without normal governance and scrutiny. An unintended consequence is that some NHS child and adolescent mental health services—CAMHS—use the existence of the fund as a means of excluding adoptees from accessing those services. Can the department, with the Department of Health, please consider the best means of co-ordinating and clarifying services, so that children do not unintentionally suffer?

Fourthly, how do we ensure adequate and appropriate clinical input? How can we resource and embed this better to enable optimal evaluation of need and effective delivery of services? Can the department study best-practice organisations such as the Birmingham Children’s Trust, ably led by Andrew Christie, the chair of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board? The trust provides a comprehensive and holistic process which analyses need, develops an individual plan for each client and then acts as the advocate for the family in its interactions with the fund.

Please could the department consider hiring and embedding in-house clinical experts within its own ASF team? Please could the department specify a requirement for Mott MacDonald, which does an excellent job of administering the fund on its behalf, to hire and embed clinical expertise within its application processing teams? Please consider recommending that every local authority should have a qualified, designated trauma lead who colleagues can refer to for advice.

Please review why voluntary adoption agencies are unable to apply to the fund directly, or at least consider the practical solution of allowing social workers to delegate applications to those agencies but with the final sign-off remaining with the designated social worker. The current lack of sufficient clinical experts to help social workers evaluate applications is placing an unfair and unreasonable burden on them. They are not clinical experts, so give them access to the real experts to ensure the children and young people get the appropriate assessment and therapeutic help.

Fourthly, how could we future-proof the fund? The fund was always intended to tap into, and to help stimulate, a market in therapeutic support outside the clinical mental health suite of services. As the fund has grown and broadened, assessing and focusing on what works best and what is worth experimenting with has become more challenging. The fund is currently assisted by the aforementioned Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board and by the DfE, local authority and regional adoption authority user group.

Please could the department consider creating a specialist ASF advisory board which would be able to assess, advise and recommend on improvements and adjustments to the fund in real time? This could include creating a formal evaluation process for measuring effectiveness.

The organisations that provide and develop the therapies that the fund enables children and their families and guardians to access crave the degree of certainty that will encourage them to invest, innovate and expand. This can come only from confidence that the fund has long-term support.

The Minister will be pleased that I am the end of my wish list of questions. I thank Edward Timpson and his DfE team at the time of the fund’s launch for having had the courage and insight to create the fund. I thank Rachael Maskell, the chair of the APPG, for her passion, humanity and gentle but effective leadership; and give a big thank you to the team which supports the group and makes our work possible.

Above all, I thank the individuals and organisations which gave evidence to our inquiry. We received 1,600 responses, hearing from 247 children and young people, 1,212 parents and guardians, 115 therapists and 74 social workers. We are particularly grateful that the Department for Education participated in the inquiry and it was extremely helpful to hear directly from Christina Bankes, the deputy director of children in care and permanence.

Finally, I thank those who will speak in this afternoon’s debate. We are speaking on behalf of children and young people who have had, through absolutely no fault of their own, early life experiences which can blight their lives and the lives of those who love and care for them. Please listen to their voices and to their heartfelt thanks for what the fund is achieving. They are unanimous in asking for its continuation. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. We may be few in number but we speak for an awful lot of children and families who are not able to reside on these red Benches, albeit that I gather that we may have a few new arrivals imminently. The Minister commented that I had taken a positive approach in my speech. I return the compliment and thank him for being unusually positive and even effusive in his comments about the fund. I think that the department really does deserve a pat on the back—I am looking at the advisers in the Box—for having been responsible for a true, apolitical success which is making an enormous difference to people who need and deserve help.

I thank the right reverend Prelate in particular for taking part. He is a living example of the danger of finding oneself sitting opposite me at lunch. We started a conversation about something quite different. Once he had found out a bit about me and I had discovered about his personal experience, he very kindly altered his diary to be with us this afternoon. We are all enormously grateful to him for giving us his direct, personal experience.

This subject deeply affects a lot of people—often people you do not necessarily know have these issues. I was contacted this afternoon by an adoptive parent who works down the other end for quite a well-known opposition MP. She called me today to say, “I think there is a debate today. Is that true?” I said yes, and asked her, “Is there anything you would like me to say?” She simply said, “What I would like you to say is that if it hadn’t been for the fund, my family would have had adoption breakdown. I think we would have lost our child, and we might well have lost our marriage.” One can have no better celebration of the fund’s success than that. With that, I wish everybody a therapeutic Recess.

Motion agreed.

Children’s Homes etc. Inspection Fees, Childcare Fees, Adoption and Children Act Register (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

That this House regrets that the Children’s Homes etc. Inspection Fees, Childcare Fees, Adoption and Children Act Register (Amendment) Regulations 2019, in revoking the duty on adoption agencies to provide information to the Secretary of State about children approved for adoption and approved prospective adopters who have not been matched, and in allowing the adoption register for England to lapse from 31 March, have failed (1) to put forward satisfactory evidence to justify these decisions, (2) to offer a timetable for and clarity about a replacement for the register, and (3) to explain how Her Majesty’s Government intend to mitigate the risk of reduced provision for children who may be harder to place (SI 2019/835).

Relevant documents: 49th and 50th Reports from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a governor of Coram, which has been looking after the interests of children since it was established as the Foundling Hospital in 1739. I also place on the record the fact that Coram ran the Adoption Register for England on behalf of the Department for Education for the last three years of its existence. I am also an officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Fostering.

I wish to make it crystal clear, however, that I am not speaking on behalf of Coram; I am expressing my own personal concerns. Above all, I am speaking on behalf of a small group of children, a group often described as the hardest to place, who have been waiting to be matched with adoptive parents for 90 days or more—often a great deal longer than 90 days. These are often children with special needs, children with disabilities and sibling groups.

I also wish to make it crystal clear that I do not put forward this regret Motion to try to castigate and embarrass the Government. On the contrary, as I said on the record in this Chamber on 14 May, in the debate on adoption initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, Governments of all political hues must be congratulated for a succession of initiatives which have significantly improved the standards of operation across the adoption sector and the chances of giving children new lives with loving families. It is fortunate that the Minister was at the Dispatch Box during that debate.

Under the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005, adoption agencies were given a duty to register this category of children unmatched after 90 days. During the last year of its operation, over 80% of the children referred to the register were in this category and it succeeded in making 275 matches. Despite it being a statutory requirement for this group of children to be registered, it is an open secret and accepted fact of life within the sector that not all of them have been. We simply do not know, and have never known, exactly how many children there are in this category.

Exactly five weeks ago today, it was brought to my attention that the Minister for Children and Families would be giving evidence to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee about his decision to stop the operation of the national register. I went to listen to the proceedings and was interested and encouraged by the obvious concerns felt by members of the committee. I was equally interested, if occasionally slightly baffled, by some of the explanations given by the Minister. The chairman of the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, spotted me lurking in the back of the committee room and kindly asked me if I had any questions for the Minister. I asked specifically about the potential impact of the loss of the register on the group of harder-to-place children, and was left at the end of the session with a nagging concern that the Department for Education seemed broadly satisfied and relatively unworried that there might be any negative impact, without having undertaken any really detailed analysis. This is not helped by the fact that we do not know, and have never known, exactly how large this group of children is, who and where they are and how long they have been waiting to be matched.

The Minister stated that he felt confident that, in particular, the excellent database and matching service provided by the market leader—a social enterprise called Link Maker, created by adopters five years ago—was already taking care of the needs of this group of harder-to-place children. Link Maker uses up-to-date technology which is particularly user-friendly for social workers and potential adopters. It is far fleeter of foot and more focused on customer experience than the somewhat clunky and technically less well-resourced national register. As of today, every English local adoption agency is happy to pay an annual fee of £5,000 to access Link Maker, which also provides the online platform for the Scottish and Welsh adoption registers. I have spoken at length with the chief executive of Link Maker, Mr Andy Leary-May, whom I thank for his help. He shares my concern, and that of Coram, about some children falling through the net. He wrote to me as follows: “The evidence suggests that, where a child’s agency has the resource and the will to proactively seek matches for harder-to-place children, the right tools are in place. However, we know that not all children in this cohort were referred to the register and it is fair to assume that not all are added to Link Maker. There is no mechanism currently in place to enable scrutiny of this, yet such a mechanism is perfectly feasible”. I will return to this theme later.

During his evidence, the Minister said that he agrees with the observations and recommendations of the report into foster care conducted by Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers together with the House of Commons Education Select Committee. He said that:

“The work we do for the most vulnerable children in our care is far too siloed; fostering sits in one place and adoption somewhere else. We need to bring together our thinking and that is what the future will look like”.


He went on to describe his ambition to take all the databases sitting in local government, voluntary adoption agencies and fostering agencies and bring them into a single pipeline, so that everybody is looking at the same data, whether in fostering or in adoption. He did not make it clear whether this new capability would be designed to meet the requirement, stated by the chief executive of Link Maker, that all children up for adoption should be clearly and accurately identified. I think it would be fair to say that the Minister’s inability to say in his evidence exactly where this ambitious technology project is today, how long it may take to come to fruition and be in full operation and how much it will cost, did not appear to impress some members of the committee. None of the members, I suspect, are here, because the committee is in session as I speak.

When doing the homework in preparation for today’s debate, those with far more knowledge than me have suggested that the vision of joining adoption and fostering at the hip may be partially impracticable. What Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers actually said in their report was that adoption and fostering should be seen as a continuum. As I understand it, their recommendation is that fostering, which has specific characteristics very different from adoption, should follow the lead of the many improvements in the adoption sector and find the best way to emulate adoption’s success. One person summed this up forensically by saying that specialism is not the same as a silo. The department needs to have another long, hard look at some of the assumptions that appear to be the foundations of the Minister’s vision of the future.

I return to the issue of the potential impact on this group of harder-to-place children. I was somewhat perplexed to read on page 6 of the Explanatory Memorandum to the statutory instrument, under the heading “Impact”:

“There is no significant impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies. There is no, or no significant, impact on the public sector”.


There is no mention or analysis whatever of the potential impact on children. How can one claim to be totally child-centred in one’s approach while simultaneously failing to analyse rigorously what effects one’s actions will have on the child?

It is timely that only yesterday afternoon, several of us met with the Children’s Commissioner for England to be briefed on her forthcoming report on vulnerable children. I want to highlight two of her four key recommendations. The first is that a focus on children should be the starting point of any initiative. The second is that our aim should be children having happy lives and good prospects. I think most of us would find it difficult to disagree with these eminently sensible recommendations. However, I feel that the Government’s approach to the abolition of the national register, in appearing not to have clearly thought through the analysis of its detailed impact—let alone what, when and how some of its duties and activities will be continued—is not in the best interests of that subgroup of harder-to-place children. Some of these children are invisible or not present within the existing registration system.

Coram estimates that some 925 children in this subgroup are waiting to be matched today. The National Deaf Children’s Society is extremely concerned that the particular needs of disabled children up for adoption are best met by looking for matches at a regional or, preferably, national level, rather than at a local level. Given the concerns stated by many that the children will potentially be put at a disadvantage by a system that, today, does not necessarily identify and register them all, and that this state of affairs looks set to continue for an uncertain period of time, to be replaced by a registration system that has not yet been clearly defined, I put it to Her Majesty’s Government that this is a genuine cause of concern and for regret, which is why I have put forward my Motion.

The suggestion put forward by many, which I share, is that the Government should move expeditiously to create and manage one centralised national list of children and adopters, clearly identifying each individual in real time, and then allow the market to develop, without charge, applications that access this data and provide social workers and adopters with different ways of searching for and identifying potential matches. Many believe that an initiative such as this would also help to accelerate the creation and operation of the new regional adoption agencies. The chief executive of Adoption UK, Sue Armstrong Brown, states that a key constraint is how to develop new adopters: “There are examples of councils that turn away would be adopters because they do not fit the immediate needs of children coming on the local list. This might be because of a family’s ethnicity or an unwillingness to consider sibling groups when these features might match children elsewhere in the country”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I assure the noble Lord that I will specifically address the issue of harder-to-place children in a moment.

Since we announced the closure back in August 2018, the Government have not received any feedback to suggest that local authorities and adoption agencies are having difficulties matching children. In fact, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services said that,

“local authorities continue to take responsibility for our children who need adoption and the adopters we approve, and have never relied on one system alone in the matching process”,

and ahead of the closure, the sector leaders spoke out about their support for the decision.

On harder-to-place children, the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Watson, sought reassurance that such children would not be more vulnerable or drop out of the system because of the loss of the register. The adoption register was never intended to be solely for harder-to-place children. Rather, it was to provide an alternative source of potential adopters for all children. To some extent, all children who are not placed locally, so needing a matching service, could be regarded as harder to place. But “harder to place” is generally understood to mean sibling groups, ethnic minorities, children over five years-old and children with a disability. One of the commercial alternatives contains a high number of hard-to-place children. I understand that its recent child cohort included 50% in a sibling group, 12% aged over five, 27% who did not identify as white British and 15% who had multiple health or emotional needs. I hope that that also addresses the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey.

In a recent survey by Link Maker, the alternative provider that was discussed, 67% of respondents said there had been no change to their ability to find matches for harder-to-place children, 14% suggested that it was now harder and 17% suggested that things had improved. Indeed one of the comments said,

“by far the most matches for the harder to place children, siblings groups etc, came via Link Maker rather than through the Adoption Register”.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked how many children were likely to miss out on placements. That is the most crucial question in this debate. I would like to reassure noble Lords that children are not being left behind following this decision. There is no gap in provision; children are and will continue to be matched with loving families. The Government will of course continue to monitor this and robust action will be taken if this changes.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked about a lack of proactive searching. I understand that there is concern that the alternative provider offers only a system, whereas the register provided an additional service. As the noble Lord said, the register employed 10 regional business partners to search for links. In 2018-19, it found 120 matches. During the same period, the main commercial alternative found 967 matches. If a child has been waiting for a long period, the main commercial provider system will proactively contact the social worker to provide assistance.

Alongside the register, agencies have used a range of other services and also use the exchange and activity days that I have already mentioned, including commissioning them for their areas. It is important to acknowledge the important work of Coram in this area. I recognise the important work that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, does with Coram and the support he provides to it.

Naturally, I understand concerns when we talk about commercial providers, but I assure noble Lords that we are not talking about large organisations making a profit at the expense of children and adopters. The main commercial provider, Link Maker, is a social enterprise run by a group of adopters. It monitors the progress of children added to the system, and if a child has been on the system for an extended period, an email is sent suggesting ways of finding matches. I understand that another service is being launched and will be run by Coram, which, as I said, is respected for its work.

For the main commercial provider, subscriptions by local authorities are paid on an annual basis, not per child. There is no reason—in particular, no financial reason —why a commercial service would ignore harder-to-place children. Local authorities have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child they are looking after, and I trust that they will continue to fulfil this duty.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked about the cost of Link Maker. I appreciate the concern about the cost of commercial alternatives. As the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State said to the committee, on average it costs a local authority about £5,000 a year for the subscription. I appreciate the concern when considering that the adoption register was a free service, but it is important to state that the majority of adoption agencies—around 93—were already paying for a subscription.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, asked about our future plans. The Motion refers to work we are undertaking on the feasibility of a future digital infrastructure to support this area. This brings us to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, about the Select Committee and Sir Martin Narey. Both reports suggested that the Government’s work for the most vulnerable children in our care is too siloed. The reviews found that considering the component parts of the care system, for example fostering and adoption, in isolation,

“creates an unhelpful divide in the way we approach a child’s experience in the system and his or her routes to permanence”.

In response to this, we are trying to improve support across the sectors with better information and better systems. Agencies hold and share a lot of data and need to ensure that it is managed appropriately. We are exploring the feasibility of introducing a system that can bring it together to support better communication and present it in one place in a user-friendly way. We agree that this makes sound sense and we are actively considering the implementation of a single list.

Reflecting the findings of these recent reviews, we want to work with the sector to think through the best digital infrastructure to support adoption and fostering. My colleague, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, will write to colleagues to provide more detail on this work following the spending review.

Beyond the adoption register, I shall also say a few words about what else these regulations cover. They make changes to inspection fees for social care providers and childcare providers. They introduce a 10% increase to the fees payable to Ofsted by some social care providers to move closer to full cost recovery. This increase has been made annually since 2010. As well as this, Ofsted charges an annual registration fee to childcare providers on the early years register. This statutory instrument maintains the current registration fee of £50 for a specific group of providers that operate for only a limited number of hours each day, reducing the potential burden on childcare providers of a fee increase.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to the procedure used for these changes to the regulations. I understand that there has been some concern. We are advised that the negative procedure was correct for this type of change, and it is the procedure set out in the primary legislation. We spoke to the sector extensively, and it was comfortable with the adoption register coming to an end. We wanted to revoke an unnecessary duty; indeed, we were asked to do so by the sector. There was therefore a feeling that this was routine and that we were attempting to tidy up regulations so as not to leave a redundant duty. I reassure noble Lords that there was no attempt to hide this or slip it through under the radar.

I welcome noble Lords’ interest in these regulations. I want to provide reassurance that the Government have spoken to the sector extensively regarding changes to the adoption register and that that dialogue continues. Feedback shows that users of the register are comfortable with the decision to end its operation. We have not received any feedback to suggest that agencies are struggling without it. I accept the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that it is early days; however, had it been crucial to the operation of local authorities, within three months we would have heard something from them.

I hope that I have been able to provide more context to these changes and to reassure noble Lords of the focused and necessary attention of these regulations. On that basis, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Russell, to withdraw his Motion.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has taken part in this brief discussion and thank the Minister for his response. I felt on occasions slightly as though I were sitting in an echo chamber and going round and round in circles. I appreciate that the ministerial response is written for him, but I still have genuine concerns about the fact that Her Majesty’s Government do not know, and have never known, the exact number of children—particularly harder-to-place children—who are waiting to be matched. We have never had a definitive figure; that is an abrogation of our duty. We have a duty to know who those children are, where they are, what sort of condition they are in, and to be able to track what is being done to help them find a match to transform their lives—for example, keeping sibling groups together, or helping a deaf or blind child to find a loving family who will understand how to respond to and look after their needs.

Despite the briefings that various organisations have provided, I decided to do my homework and have spoken directly to some of the people who provided the briefings, asking some awkward questions of what is behind the fine words. The answer is that, while much in the adoption sector is going well and has definitely improved over the last two decades—I take my hat off to various Governments for achieving that—we still do not know how many of these vulnerable children there are or exactly what is going on. I do not find that satisfactory.

I will not myself push this to a vote. If any other noble Lords wish to do so, that is up to them. I make it clear that, should it be put to a vote, I will abstain. My view is that this is a matter divorced from party politics; we have quite enough of that going on at the moment, including as we speak, with—to plagiarise Oscar Wilde—various members of the unspeakable classes in pursuit of the unachievable. But that is another matter. So I am not going to push this, but I hope that the Minister and his officials will read what I have said carefully; I hope that they will speak to various people in the sector to find out what is really going on, ask awkward questions rather than just listen to the answers one might hope to hear, and do everything possible to identify those vulnerable children. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Some Lords objected to the request for leave to withdraw the Motion, so it was not granted.

Schools: Adopted Children

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, for initiating this short but timely debate. Yesterday, he and I, along with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, attended the first day of an inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Fostering into the adoption support fund, which was very informative. This afternoon, I listened to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, on which I was allowed to freeload, and heard the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families, Nadhim Zahawi, discuss the current status of adoption strategy and the Government’s decision to end the national adoption register at the end of March. It was an interesting discussion; I do not think we were completely convinced by the Minister’s attempts to reply, but he did his best.

I declare my interest as a governor of Coram. We have been trying to do our best for children for quite a while—since 1739—so we have learned a thing or two along the way.

I praise the Government for their initiatives in recent years, which are a testament to just how seriously they genuinely wish to improve the lives of adopted and cared-for children. The combination of the Staying Put initiative, the pupil premium, the adoption support fund and the creation of virtual school heads are all laudable. They have also commissioned the Timpson report into school exclusion and have accepted many of its recommendations.

I shall embarrass Edward Timpson, in what I hope is the best form of being singled out. He was extraordinarily fortunate to be born into an amazing family, one of the children of the truly extraordinary Sir John Timpson and his late wife, Alex. They had three children of their own, adopted two more and fostered more than 90 children. It is therefore not hard to imagine how the environment he grew up in gave Edward profound insights into and empathy with the realities of early-life trauma and their consequences. In just under five years at the Department for Education, initially as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State and then as Minister of State for Children and Families, he made a real difference, bringing knowledge, insight and a relentless focus on the child, and he developed a huge amount of respect and affection across the political divide and throughout the organisations connected with children and families—perhaps rather a difficult act to follow.

While I wish the current Minister of State well, I find myself becoming increasingly irritated every time I see him sharing his views publicly about our present impasse over Brexit. I would infinitely prefer him to focus 100% of his time on what is best for children and families, and I gently suggest to the Minister that he whisper into his colleague’s shell-like ear that perhaps his predecessor would have behaved rather differently.

Having spoken about Edward’s depth and breadth of knowledge, I would like to ask the Minister about his own experience of working with adopted and cared-for children within the schools in the Inspiration Trust. How do these experiences inform his attitude and approach towards encouraging these government initiatives to go forward?

The comprehensive briefing pack we were given for this debate, provided by our wonderful Library, included Adoption UK’s 2018 report Bridging the Gap, which the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, mentioned. Its distillation of the issues where it perceives that there are gaps is masterly. It identified four principal areas: the understanding gap, which is the need for professional development for all educators; the empathy gap, which prioritises emotional and social literacy rather than league table results; the resources gap, which highlights the need to understand and even out the postcode lottery of uneven coverage and delivery; and the attainment gap—the need for accurate, timely data, continuously measured, analysed, understood and acted on.

Several things jumped out at me from the report. First, there is a problem. It is crystal clear that there is a link between better well-being and better academic achievement. Listen to this primary school head teacher talking about her dilemma, saying that,

“we have an entire school system built on high levels of cortisol and stress, a focus on accountability, results and endless testing. We are told to focus on children’s mental health within a system that seems determined to destroy it”.

What a cri de coeur.

Secondly, there is a solution. Listen to this adoptive parent. “My child moved from a school with no understanding or willingness to understand his attachment and trauma issues. It was horrific for him and horrific for us as a family. His new school is understanding, loving and kind and he is like a new boy”. It can work. It just needs people with the right attitude.

Thirdly, I have a reflection. This is the power of a redrafted school behaviour strategy. “Thinking of a child as behaving badly disposes you to think of punishment. Thinking of a child as struggling to handle something difficult encourages you to help them through their distress”.

I have three questions for the Minister, which he has heard in the past. What analysis have the Government done of how effectively the pupil premium has been used to support adopted children in education? Thankfully, the Government have accepted the Timpson review’s recommendation that the DfE should publish the number and rate of exclusion of previously looked-after children who have left local authority care via adoption. What further steps are being taken to ensure improvement in the collection and scrutiny of data on adopted children’s educational outcomes?

Finally, the work of Coram and other charities with adoptive parents and kinship carers has found that many can feel blamed and isolated, with a lack of support while their children struggle at school. What consideration have the Government given to peer models of support for those groups, where adopted and kinship carers support each other, which could complement the work of the virtual school heads? Will the Minister note that, from the evidence we heard yesterday afternoon about the adoption support fund, while there was much singing of its praises, it does not encourage or enable funding for groups of adoptive parents or kinship carers to work together? Will the department please look at that to see how it could make it easier? A problem or a learning shared can be so much more powerful than doing it alone.

I commend the Government for having moved the dial on adoption in a positive direction, but I plead with the Minister, given that Her Majesty’s Government appear to have the unwonted luxury of rather a large amount of time on their hands, to take advantage of it and forge ahead in this area.

Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education (England) Regulations 2019

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my registered interests as well as to my role as patron of the Terrence Higgins Trust. I begin, unusually, by associating myself with every word of the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I think she got it absolutely right. I also agree with my noble friend Lady Massey.

Interestingly, I too received the letter referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, but I did not throw it away because it reminded me of the opposition to equality, tolerance and understanding—three things that should be at the very heart of all education. The letter said that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans relationships were short and lonely. Perhaps my 31-year relationship with Paul Cottingham was short compared to others—I do not know—but certainly it was never lonely and I felt completely fulfilled.

What about the children in schools who come from same-sex families—who have same-sex parents? Are not their relationships and their families’ relationships as important and as viable? Should they not be properly represented, discussed and given equivalence with other loving relationships? Of course they should.

As soon as we put sex and education together, the bonfire starts—especially the bonfire of misinformation. Of course parents will and do maintain control. As was said earlier, whether a parent wishes to teach a child outside school according to their faith or none is entirely up to them. But, please, let us remember that people of all faiths and none are also lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans. It is vital that children and LGBT children receive comprehensive and inclusive sex and relationships education. In this regard I recommend to your Lordships a book to be published in June entitled Celebrating Difference: A Whole-School Approach to LGBT+ Inclusion by Shaun Dellenty. I have been privileged to see an advance copy.

I commend the Government for the guidance and regulations, and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, for the way in which he has presented them this afternoon to your Lordships’ House. I am grateful also to the organisations that have made contact: the Terrence Higgins Trust, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Children’s Society, Barnardo’s and the National Children’s Bureau, which provided excellent briefings.

I will finish on a couple of points provided by those organisations in their so-called Sex Education Forum. They state:

“The majority of parents want schools to teach RSE”.


Some 92% affirmed that in an independent poll in 2016.

“Effective RSE is a partnership between parents and schools. Parental involvement is integral to the new RSE guidance … Education, not ignorance, is the only way that children will be able to recognise abusive behaviour and know how to seek help. 1 in 20 children are sexually abused and 1 in 3 did not tell an adult (Radford, 2011). Sexual abuse can happen to any child, so the only way to safeguard children is to ensure Relationships Education has no opt out … Bullying and … mental health affect LGBT young people at alarming rates. Nearly half of LGBT pupils (45 per cent) are bullied for being LGBT at school”,


as shown in the Stonewall survey of 2017.

“Schools are already required to teach in a way that does not discriminate on protected characteristics, so an LGBT inclusive approach to RSE is nothing new … Teachers need training in RSE so that schools can offer the high quality provision. 80% of parents want teachers to have training in RSE”,


according to the Sex Education Forum 2018.

I would like to see HIV and sexual health become a core part of the RSE curriculum if we are to empower and inform children for the real world in which they will live.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the Minister. This is the second time we have interacted today; he was brave enough to go into the lion’s den of the weekly Cross-Bench meeting earlier this afternoon, and received in general a very positive reaction. It is also a pleasure to listen to my noble friend Lady Deech, as somebody else has said, and to find myself for once agreeing with everything she has said. Long may that continue—let us not go back to the other subject, if you please.

I declare an interest as a governor of Coram. For 24 years I had the privilege of being the chairman of the largest educator into primary schools in the United Kingdom of health and drug education. During the course of my chairmanship we reached about 5 million children. We have quite a lot of experience of the challenges of teaching children about difficult subjects appropriately. I shall return briefly to the subject we spoke about this afternoon in the Cross-Bench meeting: it is difficult to teach an extraordinarily difficult and sensitive subject such as this really well. It is an enormous burden to place on a primary school teacher, with all of the pressures on them from all sides, to teach this really well; in a way that makes them feel proud as a professional; in a way that makes the children feel that they are learning something important; in a way that the parents feel respects the family and their own code of morality, but which is also appropriate for the strange and complex world of the 21st century in which the children are growing up. We cannot run away from it—it is all around us. Children spend an inordinate amount of time on social media and on their phones; if somebody does not teach them appropriately, you can guess where else they will learn it from, and whatever they learn, it will almost certainly be hilarious but perhaps disastrously wrong.

Young People

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for initiating this debate. I declare my interest as a governor of Coram, the children’s charity. Part of Coram, Coram Voice, delivers on behalf of the Department for Education the national advocacy safety net and advice service for looked-after children and care leavers, which goes under the name Always Heard. Our role is to attempt, as best we can, to voice the needs, concerns and experiences of the children and young people who are not represented here in person and who, in most instances, do not yet qualify to have their voices heard through exercising their right to vote.

The Prime Minister, yesterday morning, in what was perhaps even by her standards a rather busy day, said that she wants,

“a thriving economy with nowhere and nobody left behind; a stronger society where everyone can make the most of their talents”.

Those are laudable aims, but Brexit is, and has been, so all-consuming and reactive that it has allowed far less focus on those in danger of being left behind than they deserve. Debates such as this remind us of other pressing priorities. Surely, helping children and young people who are in many instances being left behind is a priority in which we all have a personal stake.

I will focus first on the issue of providing adequate independent advocacy for the more than 70,000 children and young people in England who are reliant on the state for their care and well-being because their families cannot safely care for them or they have suffered abuse or neglect. The complexities of and inconsistencies in the system mean that many children and young people are unaware of their rights and unsure where to turn for help, and they struggle to access the support to which they are legally entitled. An independent advocate could ensure that children’s views and wishes are communicated clearly and are taken into account—a point made clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

A 2016 report from the Children’s Commissioner for England indicated that half of local authorities were supporting less than 8% of the children they considered eligible for advocacy. Less than 10% of children in care and care leavers accessed a service in half of local authorities.

Secondly, I want to highlight the concern that many local authorities are struggling to provide timely or effective support to children who present as homeless or at risk of homelessness. The charity Centrepoint estimates that 103,000 young people in the UK presented to their council in 2017-18 as homeless or at risk, and less than half received effective support. And this is nearly 10 years since the Government issued clear joint guidance to children’s services and local housing authorities about their duties to secure or provide accommodation for homeless 16 and 17 year-olds—guidance that has recently been reinforced as a result of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. An important part of that Act is a new data-collection initiative, H-CLIC, which has the potential at last to create a central uniform hub of information that can be used to inform wider policy. What progress has been made on implementing the H-CLIC software and putting in place the necessary staff training programmes?

I suggest four ideas to the Minister for the Government’s consideration. The first is a duty on local authorities to provide an active offer of advocacy support. The second is the right to an independent advocate, enshrined in law, for all children and young people receiving or seeking care or support from the state, including those leaving care to adoption. Thirdly, there should be a requirement for local authorities to ensure provision of independent advocacy support and its active promotion to any child approaching local authority children’s or housing services. Fourthly, there should be a requirement to collate data on children presenting as homeless, including how many receive support under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, how many receive support under Section 20 and how many were refused support.

Data is king; without it one is flying blind. It is difficult to identify trends, good or bad, in a timely fashion without it. It is essential in helping to identify best practices, and without reliable data it is impossible to establish appropriate key performance indicators, which create an easily intelligible shorthand to understand and analyse the extent to which we are succeeding in our legal and moral duty to help these children and young people.

Children: Welfare, Life Chances and Social Mobility

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, whom I think of as my noble friend. We are both members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and I can speak from direct experience of how highly regarded she is there for the wide range of work that she does. People listen to her very carefully. I should also declare an interest as a governor of the children’s charity Coram.

What a pleasant change it is not to talk about Brexit and to focus on something that, frankly, is of equal importance: our children and giving them the best possible future. As I thought about this subject and researched it, I suddenly felt myself morphing into a male version of Doctor Who entering the TARDIS. I emerged 30 years ago, when, amazingly, I was a rather younger and more hirsute Member of your Lordships’ House. I was actively involved with the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse and had become involved with a charity called Life Education Centres—now part of Coram and the largest provider of health education in primary schools in the United Kingdom.

The environment that we were navigating through was very complex in terms of delivery. There were far too many interested parties, lots of fragmentation, and three often competing and divergent government departments—education, health and the Home Office—apparently following a policy of “divide and despair”, “accept limited responsibility”, “avoid any blame”, “try to avoid the difficult subjects” and, above all, “keep your head down”.

The end of that impasse came with a demonstration of genuine leadership and courage from the then Prime Minister, John Major, who I personally very much regret is not a Member of your Lordships’ House, as I think that his counsel would be of great use at this time. He initiated the first ever joined-up holistic review of all aspects of drugs policy. He identified an outstanding civil servant, Dame Sue Street, who in 1995 produced Tackling Drugs Together, a landmark publication that recognised the problem and accepted joint responsibility for a joined-up and properly thought-through and funded approach to trying to do something about the issue.

What is the lesson for us today from that experience? The Early Intervention Foundation, in a very timely publication this week called Realising the Potential of Early Intervention, has essentially said that there are great similarities with the situation of 30 years ago that I described, and it proposes a very clear holistic review of the whole situation. We know that there are four key areas of focus. We know that there is the physical aspect, and we know that we have to look at social and emotional needs, cognitive needs and behaviour. We also know that there are three key red-flag areas that indicate potential problems for the future: substance misuse, risky sexual behaviour and child maltreatment.

We also know that late or ineffective intervention is costing us a staggering estimated £17 billion per annum. There has been a huge reduction in Sure Start centres. The following local authorities have closed more than 70% of their centres: West Berkshire, Camden, Stockport, Bromley, Oxfordshire—a flagship example of a leading Conservative local authority—and Staffordshire. I am afraid that it is not a great list to be on. Our poorest children are already 11 months behind their peers when they start primary school.

There are five key flaws in our current approach, including inadequate and inconsistent funding; short-termism—a besetting political disease; and a fragmented approach across no less than five departments of state: education, health and social care, work and pensions, housing, communities and local government, and that graveyard of political reputations, the Home Office. We need to deliver only what works and, above all, we need to use evidence, evidence and more evidence. So what can and must we do?

First, we need someone to emulate John Major’s leadership and courage, and that needs to come from the top. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, suggested, we need a cross-government task force under Sue Street mark 2 and an initiative that will join the dots and provide clarity of understanding, direction, long-term intent and commitment to resource allocation. I suggest that the report it produces should be called “Working Together for our Future, our Children”. Secondly, we need to create an independent expert panel to advise the Government and to develop and refine strategy and best practice. Thirdly, we need to accelerate concerted support for local areas to deliver effective and timely intervention. Fourthly, we need long-term investment backed by cross-party commitment.

I have three specific questions for the Minister, two of which he already knows about. First, will he identify the John Major of today, with the courage and leadership to put children first, and put the case to him or her with all the force he can muster? Secondly, what steps are Her Majesty’s Government taking to explore proposals to impose a legal duty on local authorities and other statutory deliverers to provide effective early intervention? How do they propose to ensure that sufficient funds are available, particularly for those areas that have been most impacted by severe reductions? Lastly, do the Government agree that a key performance indicator must be to measure early intervention’s ability to improve social mobility—and, if so, how are they going to measure it?

I would like to put on the record my admiration for and gratitude to the Sutton Trust and Sir Peter Lampl, who would be a great Member of this House, for setting an example to us all and reminding us of the talent we possess and what young people are capable of.

Vulnerable Children

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, for securing this debate and for the manner in which she opened it. If she is able to do that from a sitting position, one can only imagine what she can do when her back is better. I hope that will be soon.

I declare an interest as a trustee of Coram, which is the oldest children’s charity in this country, founded in 1739. We have a range of activities which, I suspect, touch every single one of the 32 groups the Children’s Commissioner identified. I was fortunate to be present at the briefing she gave here in this House on 27 November, and I thank her and her team for all the hard work that has produced this “work in progress” report.

Frankly, the reaction from those of us at that meeting was, how on earth did we get into a mess like this? There were some much more knowledgeable and experienced people than me in the room—for example, the noble Lord, Lord Warner. Several of them spoke of a long and tangled history of attempts to get a better handle on these statistics, and of failing again and again. There were comments about the persistence of a silo mentality across departments, agencies and regions; an embarrassment of data—most of it disaggregated and much of it confusing and contradictory; and myriad pilot schemes, which departments seem to be particularly fond of, most of which are expensive and now long forgotten. Governments change and Ministers come and go but, inexorably, vulnerability seems to have got worse and worse.

However, we now have an opportunity to be genuinely innovative, and there is some good news, which I will come back to. I have some questions I would like to pose to the Minister which I think his team is already aware of, so I hope he has the answers ready. First, on looked-after children with unresolved immigration issues, what is the department doing to identify those not in the asylum system, including EEA nationals? Secondly, how are the Government ensuring that local authorities have sufficient resources to regularise the status of looked-after children with unresolved immigration status? This is exacerbated by the lack of legal aid and by a hideously complex application form and expensive application fee. Thirdly, did the Government ever consider the vulnerability of children in care with immigration issues when they decided on a 10-year resettlement programme? Fourthly, what steps are the Government taking to help children excluded from school who have special educational needs? That is a particularly complex problem.

To return to the opportunity to be innovative, we live in an era of big data and data analytics, and we are entering the exciting but rather uncertain world of artificial intelligence. It is a sad truth that many of the large social media companies often know more about vulnerable children than all the different arms of government put together. I refer your Lordships to some investigative work—I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for pointing me in this direction—carried out in May of this year by the Australian newspaper. It published a story about Facebook’s having shown one of its advertisers its ability to determine whether young people were feeling—in its words—“stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, or a “failure”. It was also rather proud that it was able to give data on people who had body confidence issues or concerns about their appearance. It is a bit worrying that Facebook and other social media companies genuinely probably know more about these vulnerable young children than we do.

Now for the good news. In 2017, Parliament passed the Digital Economy Act. An organisation—which I will mention in a minute—says, on the implications of this Act, that it,

“enables the transformation of personal information held by government departments into an immensely valuable resource of anonymised datasets for research purposes”.

That may sound rather dry but it is actually rather exciting. It means we can have cross-sector, longitudinal analysis which can give us real insight and, best of all, knowledge. That organisation is the Administrative Data Research Network, which is under the ESRC, which is part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I appeal to the Minister, his officials and other departments to find out about this resource and use it, and to embrace 21st-century technology. We have an unprecedented opportunity to be child-centric. For the children’s sake, please go and do it.

Finally, I suggest to the Minister some Christmas reading: 210 pages of the OECD’s Integrating Social Services for Vulnerable Groups: Bridging Sectors for Better Service Delivery. It will keep him awake.