Food for Thought
The international drive to move from residential care to fostercare might not always be the best thing. Let alone adoption.
Below some food for thought:
Caring about children
- 3 Feb 09, 02:30 PM GMT
Imagine being nine years old and having no-one who cares about you.
I don't mean cares for you: making sure you do your teeth and your homework. I mean someone who devotes themself to nurturing you to adulthood: advising you, encouraging you, loving you.
I recently met a nine-year-old in an English care home who told me of his experience of being looked after by the state.
Q: You've been in care for a little while, haven't you?
A: Yeah, four years.
Q: How many places have you been in?
A: About six.
Q: Six different places in four years?
A: Yeah.
It is not an unusual story. Most of the children I spoke to had moved from foster family to residential care to another foster family - an institutional merry-go-round that's far from merry.
In a week when we are reflecting on the relationship between British society and children, the plight of the 60,000 youngsters "looked after" by the state tells us something about our priorities.
Yesterday, the government sent me figures for England which they hoped would convince me how things are improving.
"Between 2004 and 2008 the proportion of care leavers in education, employment and training rose from 55.4% to 64.9%." So 35% of children leaving care are "Neets" at the age of 19. But that compares with a national average of just over 6%.
The Department for Children admits that children in the care system are five times less likely to achieve five good GCSEs and eight times more likely to be excluded from school. They are less likely to go to university and more likely to end up in prison.
These are thoroughly depressing statistics, all the more so when one realises how some of our European neighbours do.
In Britain, six out of a hundred care leavers will go on to higher education; in Denmark, it is six out of ten. Wow.
I recently went to Copenhagen to try and understand how they achieve such different results. Yes, it is a smaller country. Yes, they take, proportionately, twice as many kids into care. But the short answer to the question is a philosophy called "social pedagogy".
I met Ahmed, who has just turned seven years old. The sixth son of an Iraqi refugee family, he was taken into care along with his siblings. But today, he is out on the streets of the Danish capital - all alone. With his anorak hood pulled tightly around his face, the small boy negotiates busy roads to get to the corner store.
Gitte Nielsen is the social worker with personal responsibility for his educational and emotional growth - his social pedagogue. For her, nurturing Ahmed to adulthood means taking risks.
"I think it's very important for children to feel that the adult who is close to them trusts them," she tells me. "Each time I let him out on his own I can see that he grows."
Gitte, like almost all social workers looking after children in Denmark, has a professional degree, is well paid and enjoys a job with high status.
"The first time he went, I was very scared and I was looking at the clock the whole time, like with my own children, but he proved that he could do it."
While we are closing children's homes in favour of foster care, in Denmark they are opening new ones. In the basement of the care home I visited, Ahmed and his brother Faisal were furiously bashing each other with giant plastic cushions as their pedagogues looked on.
I suggest to Gitte that in Britain, her counterpart might be anxious about the risk of the children hurting themselves and the possibility of being sued.
"Yes", she replies with a shrug. "And sometimes they hurt themselves, but of course I give them a hug or whatever you need to. And then they are ready to do it again."
The British state as parent has become reluctant to take risks, to show affection. A system corrupted by abuse and cruelty now tends to adopt a safety first approach.
But the outcomes for children in care are so poor that one local authority, Essex County Council, is introducing social pedagogy right across its services.
I watched as two trainers from Germany introduced care staff to the new philosophy. They asked them for their reaction to a picture of a little boy standing on a plank straddling a stream. He is holding a large saw and is happily cutting the plank between his legs.
"Get him off there," says one. "It looks really dangerous," says another.
"What is the worst that could happen if you let him continue?" asked the pedagogues. "And what advantages might there be in letting him continue?"
Pedagogy challenges traditional attitudes, and the care workers I met in Essex seemed genuinely liberated. Bridget Mellor told me she thought the system had become overly protective.
"You know, somebody has to love them. They need love so badly. I think people have been stuck in - 'I'm the carer, you're the child, you'll do as I say, this is the system.' But actually, they are children. They need a cuddle, they need a hug."
The paedophile scandals that contributed to the closure of many children's homes in Britain still damage young people. Staff are nervous about showing affection. They fear that an allegation of inappropriate behaviour, however unfounded, might wreck their career.
In Denmark, a self-confident and respected profession has no qualms about physical contact and displays of affection. In a Copenhagen cafe, I met a group of young people in their early twenties who maintain links with the care system.
Alex, an attractive 23-year-old woman, introduced me to "uncle" Bruno - her pedagogue. She described an intense relationship of mutual trust and respect. "I love him and I know he loves me. I could tell him anything. I think I could talk with him better than with my best friend."
Such intimacy made me feel uncomfortable - the pretty young girl and the older man. Does Bruno have concerns?
"She can call me her uncle. That sounds good but, in real life, it's not that way. I get money to deal with Alex and she knows that. We come very close to young people we are working with. But there's still the distance."
The children in Essex have been experiencing pedagogy for a few months now and have already noticed a difference.
"Before they started to mention all this 'pegagogy' thing, they didn't do as much involving us," one ten-year-old explains. "Normally, the adults make the decisions but, instead, they let us help the adults to make the decisions."
Q: Do you feel there's always somebody who can give you a cuddle?
A: Yeah.
Q: Do you like cuddles?
A: Yeah, I do actually. Definitely when I'm tired and don't know what to do with myself.
Pedagogy is not cheap. But the Danish welfare ministry says that taxpayers are willing to stump up. In fact, they say that the pressure is on the state to do more to protect children at risk.
Here in the UK, the government is piloting social pedagogy in 30 sites in England. The philosophy is gaining ground in Scotland too.
While there are many talented, committed and caring social workers doing their best to nurture vulnerable children to adulthood in Britain, it seems to me that we still need to do far more to shift from a system that cares for children to one that has the confidence to care about them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/02/caring_about_children.html