Children in care being failed by placement system, inspectors say

Children in care who are placed outside their home area and supervised by youth offending teams (YOTs) face “extremely poor” futures, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) found.

Basic checks are not being made by children’s services when placing these “vulnerable and potentially dangerous” children into homes, HMIP warned.

The inspectorate, along with education watchdogs Ofsted and Estyn, looked at 60 children in six regions in a joint inspection into the work of YOTs with children placed away from home.

Chief inspector of probation Liz Calderbank said she was shocked by the “distressing” findings, saying that “shipping” children over 50 miles away made offending “inevitable” in some cases.

“The system is failing in terms of how it trying to look after them.”

In one example, a 16-year-old boy was moved 31 times since coming into care at the age of three, including one placement which lasted less than 24 hours.

Around a third of children were placed more than 100 miles away from home and nearly two-thirds were placed 50 miles away, HMIP found.

Regulations require local authorities to allow the child to live near their home, as far as reasonably practicable, the report said.

But data from the Department for Education show 10 local authorities, including Hackney in London, have no children’s homes in their area.

In many cases, inspectors found it difficult to see why so many 
were placed away from their local area.

YOT staff and other agencies did not “always work effectively together in the best interests of the children”, HMIP said.

In two-thirds of the cases, children were not being sufficiently protected owing to poor planning and assessment.

A fifth of the children had themselves been a victim of crime while under supervision of the YOT and just over half the children inspected had offended within the care environment.

A 13-year-old girl, a victim of sexual exploitation, was found having sex with a 15-year-old boy in the children’s home. Sexual videos of her were later found on his mobile.

Ms Calderbank said YOT workers’ aspirations for the children were “depressingly low”. Many staff had become “desensitised” and were “under-qualified”.

YOTs found that the transfer of cases from other local areas had a significant impact on their workload.

The delay in receiving up-to-date information by the host YOTs potentially compromised the service to children. In one example, a host YOT was unaware a 13-year-old girl, who previously set fire to a children’s home, was in its area until two weeks after she arrived.

It then took three weeks to obtain assessments.

YOT workers also had a poor grasp of how living in care could affect a child’s behaviour, with little mention of “loss, disruption, loneliness or sadness”.

The HMIP report makes several recommendations to the Department for Education (DfE), local authorities, local children’s safeguarding boards and YOT managers.

The DfE should ensure regulations for placing children outside their local authority area are strengthened, it said.

Independent review officers, quality-controllers who work within local authorities, should ensure all agencies are working together.

YOT managers should ensure information about children is sent promptly to new local areas.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “Let down by families and local authorities alike, with a trail of failed placements and further and further from home, far too many children find themselves on the dreary, damaging route from care to custody.

“Too often, the state proves to be a poor parent as the tiny minority of children in care become the substantial number behind bars.”