A System On The Brink
A Very Brief Overview of the English Approach to Child Protection
(Click here to access the website version of this newsletter.)
The English child welfare system has been gasping for breath for several years. Struggling with mounting caseloads, making do with eviscerated budgets, and dealing with the fallout emanating from a litany of economic and social challenges plaguing the country, the system is buckling. While there are green shoots of hope out here, the policy advocates I’ve spoken with aren’t sugarcoating anything: a lot of work needs to be done to truly care for children and families in England. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on four aspects of the English child welfare system: the Baby P case, privatization, poverty and child welfare, and some reform proposals.
Before I begin, I have three quick notes for you:
No single newsletter is sufficient to capture the complexity of a whole child welfare system, so keep that in mind as you read this. I focused on the areas I did because as a foreigner, I found them to be particularly important or interesting, especially relative to the US.
I’ll be highlighting some pretty terrible stuff, and by doing so, paint a pretty damning picture of the English approach to child protection. This, though, shouldn’t be seen as an instance in which I’m ignoring the “plank in my own eye,” as long-time subscribers should know that I have no issue pointing out the various ways in which the US child welfare system is flawed.
In a few weeks, I’ll be sending out an additional email containing a survey. Now that I finished my exams, I will be focusing more and more on improving this newsletter, making it relevant to policy advocates and regular folks alike, and diversifying my content. I’d love for you to weigh in and tell me whether there’s any specific content you’d like to see. I would very much appreciate it if you filled it out when it came, because I endeavor to make The Legacy Project the best thing to hit your inbox every other Monday!
With that said, let us begin.
The Baby P Case:
The 21st-century English child welfare system has been intimately shaped by the Baby P case. Speak to anyone working in the system, and within fifteen minutes, this case will be mentioned. Read a research paper on the topic, and within a paragraph or two, there’s a good chance you’ll read about Baby P. As such, to fully understand how the system functions on this side of the pond, you must understand what happened to Baby P.
I won’t get into the tragic details — you can find them all with a quick Google search — but the death of Peter Connelly (Baby P) was a textbook example of a system that failed to do its primary task: protect children.
In August 2007 — after suffering more than 50 injuries and after being seen by social workers approximately 60 times — Baby P was found dead in his cot at home, with his mother and her boyfriend (and the boyfriend’s brother) found guilty for “causing or allowing” his death. Baby P was 17 months old at the time of his death.
Following his death, a political earthquake took place, and the media feasted on the story, transforming — almost overnight — children’s social care in England. Between November 2008 and November 2009, the media ran a story about Baby P nearly 3,000 times, with headlines that looked like this:
This coverage has been described as ‘distorted’ as it painted an overly-simplified picture of how child protection works, opting for two-dimensional renderings of key actors in the system: incompetent social workers, bumbling front-line managers, and devious parents. As you can imagine, such depictions transformed how the public perceived the system and thus how these on-the-ground social workers operated.
As one social worker recalls, case workers were inundated with referrals as folks were terrified of missing “another Baby P.” Such a flood of reports made it difficult to actually protect children, since these caseworkers had to sift through hundreds of frivolous cases in order to find the ones that required ‘urgent action.’
Worse yet, social workers were terrified of being the one that let a Baby P situation develop on their watch. This sentiment was expressed in the title of an academic article that explored the ‘Baby P’ effect: “I don’t want my face on the front page of The Sun.” Faced with this pressure, social workers were far more cautious in how they approached cases, and exercised less discretion. This, as you can imagine, had a devastating effect on families, particularly poor families.
One study found that there was a 42% increase in the rates of children entering the system from the poorest communities two years following the death of Peter Connelly. A 2017 study found that since 2009, child protection inquiries rose “93 per cent, child protection plans and conferences by 72 per cent and 66 per cent respectively and care applications 69 per cent.”
All told, the after effects of Baby P case permeate every part of the system. Tragically, his death was but one of many that occurred over the last few decades. Along with Peter Connelly, several other children have been failed by the child protection system, including but certainly not limited to the following children: Victoria Climbié (2000), Daniel Pelka (2012), Arthur Labinjo-Hughes (2020), and Star Hobson (2020). A case review was conducted for the last two cases — Labinjo-Hughes and Hobson — which highlighted several systematic shortcomings in the country’s child protection system, for those that might be interested.
To conclude, tragedy is a mechanism for understanding how the English children’s social care system functions. The system, while failing to protect the above children, is also failing in its response to its failure (if that makes sense) as it often just opts to siphon more children and families into its purview, even in instances where such siphoning is harmful.
The Privatization of Children’s Social Care:
While privatization of core governmental functions is as American as apple pie (see Daniel Hatcher’s The Poverty Industry for some examples of this), England also heavily relies on for-profit organizations to administer care to looked-after children.
According to a 2021 article, approximately 75% of the children’s residential care home market is run by private firms, and these firms charge exorbitant prices: the average placement costs (as of 2021) £4,000 a week, or about £200,000 a year (roughly $5,060 and $250,000, respectively). Private equity firms have gotten in on the action as well, buying up smaller companies, loading them up with debt, and extracting as much money as they possibly can.
Profiteering has gotten so out of hand that the UK government conducted a study on the issue. Specifically, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) — an entity tasked with promoting competitive markets and investigating unfair business practices — issued a report in 2022 that looked into the children’s social care markets in England, Scotland, and Wales, and found the following (the language below is pulled directly from the report):
a lack of placements of the right kind, in the right places, means that children are not consistently getting access to care and accommodation that meets their needs
the largest private providers of placements are making materially higher profits, and charging materially higher prices, than we would expect if this market were functioning effectively
some of the largest private providers are carrying very high levels of debt, creating a risk that disorderly failure of highly leveraged firms could disrupt the placements of children in care
This report states that between 2016 and 2020, the private providers they looked at had average profit margins of about 22.6%. For comparison, I took a look at Chevron — a large, multinational energy company — and their net profit margin was 10.21% as of March of this year.
In addition, the first point — the lack of placements in the right places — has meant that some children’s homes are “being systematically undersupplied in London, while large numbers of out-of-home children are housed in north-west England.” In other words, the cost of housing in London means that children who enter the care system in London might be shipped out of the area, away from any family, friends, and social networks.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but let me drop some more mind-boggling figures regarding the profits made by these firms:
“The top 20 private providers are making £250m a year in profits from the care of vulnerable children.”
Some councils — where children’s social care is administered — are “paying more than £1m a year for a single place in privately run children’s homes, with operators citing the cost of living crisis as a reason for raising their prices.”
There are even local authorities that state they are being quoted as much as £50,000 a week (£2.6m a year) for one child.
In short: if there is money to be made, some folks will find a way to make it. As I wrote about a few months back, some people see foster children as figures on a spreadsheet, or as productive assets.
The Intersection Between Poverty and Foster Care
Similar to the United States, the English child welfare system is intimately shaped by poverty. As Polly Curtis writes about in Behind Closed Doors: “If the rise of children going into care is a prism through which to assess society, you find it riven with bias about class, disadvantage, and wealth.”
What Curtis means about the rise of children into care is precisely that: there has been a significant increase in the number of children entering foster care in England. From 2010 - 2020, the number of children in care in England has increased by about a third, to 80,080, a number that has since risen to over 83,000. While the rate of growth has slowed a bit — according to the Economist, the number of children in care has grown by 23% since 2013 — this trend stands out in stark contrast with the United States, whose foster care population has largely remained steady and has even declined in recent years.
While poverty doesn’t describe every aspect, it certainly describes a significant amount of it. Again, according to Curtis, “across the UK, children are ten times more likely to be in care if they live in the poorest 10% of areas, as opposed to the wealthiest 10%.” One 2022 study suggested that child poverty has been linked to an additional 10,000 children entering the system over the five previous years.
Like much else with England, there are significant regional inequalities when it comes to child welfare. The North of England — generally lower-income than the rest of the country — has approximately 28% of the child population but 36% of the children in care. In one town in particular — Blackpool — 1 in ever 52 children are in the system.
I’ll stop with the statistical firehouse for now, but you get the picture: poor children and families are much more likely to be involved in the care system. Out-of-home placements are increasingly the only support a poor family can expect from the child welfare system, sadly.
A Radical Transformation of Children’s Social Care
I spoke about the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care last week, but now let’s talk about some of its policy recommendations, focusing specifically on its suggestion that England launch a ‘ revolution in Family Help”. This suggestion — more so than the others — aligns most with my own vision of child welfare reform.
Let’s start first by putting this suggestion into context, using another quote from Polly Curtis’ book:
“There are currently nearly 80,000 children in the care system in England. A third of them need never have come to court at all if social services was resourced to focus on this ‘pre-proceedings’ stage. That’s more than 26,000 children who needn’t be in the care system.”
What the above means, in effect, is that had early and effective help been administered to these families, roughly 26,000 children wouldn’t need to be taken away from their families. This is precisely one thing that the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care suggested: provide ‘targeted early help.’
Specifically, the authors argue the following (it is worth including the entire blurb):
“This new service would be delivered by multidisciplinary teams made up of professionals such as family support workers, domestic abuse workers and mental health practitioners - who, alongside social workers, would provide support and cut down on referring families onto other services. These Family Help Teams would be based in community settings, like schools and family hubs, that children and families know and trust, and the service they offer will be tailored to meet neighbourhood needs based on a robust needs assessment and feedback from the families.”
Put simply, these new teams would be embedded in the community, rather than interlopers outside of it, and that can make a tremendous difference in how and when a family gets help. As I have argued in previous newsletters, one central reason why families don’t get the help they do is because the “help” they receive is delivered by Child Protective Services, which has at its disposal only two tools: taking your kids away, or referring you to therapeutic services. Under this proposal, families can find help before they experience a crisis, with the hope that they wouldn’t need to be unnecessarily dismantled. This is precisely what I hope to build in the United States.
This newsletter is running a bit long, so I won’t dive into the other suggestions, but if you are so inclined, I recommend you give the 345-page review a once over!
Conclusion
This is a 30,000 foot view of the system in England, and obviously there’s much I left undiscussed. But for the folks back in the US, I hope what I wrote was just enough to get a feel of the English way of child welfare.
Thank you again for reading, and I look forward to popping into your inbox in a couple of weeks!
Current Read(s):
The UK elections are taking place this week, on July 4th, and so I’ve been reading some books about UK politics to learn more about the various parties, actors, and issues. One book I just finished — and a very popular one in the UK – is Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart. A former Member of Parliament who opposed Brexit and who resigned in 2019 following a campaign for Prime Minister, Stewart provides an inside look at how politics actually works, about the pressures that politicians confront, and about the compromises they inevitably make (moral and political). One of my favorite quotes from the book is about a former colleague of Stewart’s, someone who would eventually rise to become the Prime Minister (albeit the one with the shortest tenure in history):
“Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation.”
I think many elected officials in America practice this approach to politics as well, unfortunately.
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
Paris Hilton Testifies Before Congress on ‘Troubled Teen’ Facilities (New York Times) — This story has been sent to me maybe a dozen times this week, and thanks to everyone who sent it. There’s video out there for folks who want to watch her testimony, by Paris Hilton discusses the inhumane treatment she experienced at youth residential treatment facilities, such as being force-fed medications or being sexually abused.
Six Key Moments: Hearing on Strengthening Child Welfare and Protecting Children (House Ways and Means Committee) — Keep in mind that this emanates from a partisan source, but this article has some highlights from the hearing where Hilton testified at.
New Florida Law Will Limit Public Access to Images of Children up for Adoption (WLRN) — To protect the privacy of children eligible for adoption in the Florida child welfare system, a new Florida law will limit access to their online images by mandating private login mechanisms, among other safeguards.
Eyed By The Nation, California Plan Will Nearly Triple State Spending on Foster Youth and Their Caregivers (The Imprint) — Some great news from my beloved home state! The state approved $1 billion aimed at “ensuring foster youth have access to enrichment activities…specialized therapy when they’re suffering, and help with housing when they leave government custody as young adults.” Though this spending won’t be available for three years, there’s some other good stuff in here that is worthy of celebration.
Chairman Smith, Representative Moore Introduce Bill to Prevent Separation of Parents Due to Poverty (House Ways and Means Committee) — My thesis is basically exploring how can we prevent the unnecessary dissolution of low-income families. This bill would be a step towards doing just that, by allowing “child welfare agencies to deploy resources” to address the needs of families in poverty.
These Hill Interns Are Bringing Their Foster Youth Stories to Congress (RollCall) — A great story about the impact that former foster youth, as interns, can have on the legislative process.
Colorado Eliminates Financial Burden for Parents with Children in Foster Care (Colorado Department of Health and Human Services) — Parents with kids in the Colorado foster care system will no longer be automatically forced to pay child support to the state, which has been a practice that basically kicks folks while they’re already down.
Oregon Pilot Program Aims to Increase Graduation Rates for Kids in Foster Care (Jefferson Public Radio) — Compared to kids in the general population, foster youth are less likely to graduate high school, less likely to graduate high school on time, and less likely to attend and graduate college. A pilot program in Oregon is attempting to get those numbers up.