Guest Blog by Robin Sen, Lecturer in Social Work

Short Version

This a summary version of a much longer blog which follows below. The key points in the longer version are:

• Under Government proposals to regulate currently unregulated accommodation for children in care, 16- and 17-year-olds in care will have no right to receive care.
• This is despite the state’s responsibilities to promote the welfare of children in care.
• The Government’s proposals will create a legal nonsense that some 16- and 17-year-olds in state ‘care’ will not be entitled to day-to-day care.
• The Review of Children’s Social Care has pronounced itself in favour of the Government’s proposals to exclude care for 16+s, at the same time as bemoaning the fact that the ‘state is not a pushy parent’ and that there are ‘poor outcomes’ for those who have left care. This position lacks consistency and integrity.
• The core reason the Government is proposing to legislate in this way is cost, in the context of a broken market of placement provision for children in care.
• 16- and 17-year-olds should not pay the price of the Government’s failure in allowing a broken market to develop in regard to placement provision over the last decade.
• The Government needs to address the failures and gaps in current placement provision for 16- and 17-year-olds in care, while ensuring their rights to care are properly protected and promoted.
• If we do not oppose this move to undermine the rights of children in care, we are complicit in it.
• The Government can still do the right thing by ensuring all 16- and 17-year-olds have a right to care while in care.
• Meanwhile, Article 39 children's rights charity has applied to the High Court for a judicial review.

To support of this campaign there are two core asks:

• Sign the @TogetherTrust 's petition or ask others to do so if you have already: https://secure.togethertrust.org.uk/uk-government-keep-caring
• Consider pledging a donation to support @article_39 ‘s legal action: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/care-for-every-child-in-care/

Longer Version

I am grateful to Christian for allowing me to use his account to blog (at significant length) about the #KeepCaringTo18 campaign. I should also establish at the outset that I am a campaign supporter rather than a member of its Steering Group, and any comments and interpretations here are my own rather than those of the official campaign.

Background

For those who don’t know, this campaign is seeking to ensure that all children and young people under 18 who are in state care, have the right to care. This may seem an obvious ask – which has sometimes elicited the response – ‘don’t they already?’. The answer, in England in 2021, is surprisingly no. There is currently no restriction on a child in care being placed in ‘unregulated’ accommodation which has no minimum standards, as foster care and residential care do, and is not inspected by the inspectorate Ofsted, as those services are. Three quarters of unregulated provision is owned by private providers (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). There is considerable variation within it – from high quality, specialised accommodation that effectively amounts to an ‘unregulated children’s home’ to hostel and bedsit accommodation that is truly dire and unsuitable for any under 18. A series of Newsnight reports last year focused on unregulated accommodation and provide illustrations of how dire the poorer end of this accommodation really is for young people who should, as Looked after Young People, be entitled to the special care and protection of the state. Similarly, this Guardian interview with an unaccompanied asylum seeking young person provides highly concerning insights into the use of unregulated accommodation at the current time.

The Review of Children’s Social Care is a UK Government established review of children’s social care system in England due to run from March 2021 – March 2022. It is supposed to be independent of Government, though this claim is highly disputed by critics, including myself. In June 2021, it produced its Case for Change (also here referred to as ‘RCSCCFC’) document stating what it believed the main current challenges in the system are, and it specifically addresses this policy issue in one part of it, stating its support for the Government’s proposals. I substantively analyse its position below, but it is worth highlighting at the outset that that the framing of the needs of children and young people care in the Case for Change is inconsistent with its support for this Government policy. This document makes a strong statement that, within the current system: “The state is not a pushy enough parent when it comes to getting access to the support children in care need.” (RCSCCFC, 2021, p.12). Despite this, it then goes on to pronounce itself fully supportive of the Government’s proposals to deprive young people in care aged 16+ of the right to care (RCSCCFC, 2021, pp.62-63). Notably the Case for Change’s section on the Government’s plans for unregulated accommodation reads like a tendentious governmental defence of its own policy proposals, rather than an independent exploration of them and its position begs the question: what pushy parent stops providing care for their daughter or son on their 16th birthday?

The Government’s Problematic Proposals

The Government is not proposing to do nothing. It has laid a statutory instrument before Parliament, which sets out the different settings that, from 9 September 2021, will count as ‘other arrangements’ for children in care aged 15 or younger. This effectively bans local authorities from putting children this age into what’s called ‘semi-independent’ or ‘independent’ accommodation. The list of settings is all regulated and inspected places where children receive care. For young people in care aged 16 and 17, however, the government is proposing a new set of National Standards for what will be a newly regulated semi-independent and independent accommodation, though we don’t yet know how often Ofsted will inspect or even if the inspections will be of providers generally, or the places where young people are living. The four proposed new National Standards for the currently unregulated accommodation are Leadership and Management; Protection; Accommodation and Support and conspicuously omit any mention of care (I’ve uploaded an online copy of the proposed new National Standards here).

If the Government’s proposals go through any 16+ year old in care in the newly regulated accommodation will be excluded from receiving day to day care. What difference will this make? It is worth as a comparison looking at the 9 quality standards that apply to Children’s Homes, and against which they are inspected by Ofsted, particularly the ones that relate to care. I would draw attention to the fact that the ‘purpose and quality of care’ standard in the Children’s Home quality standards includes requirements to:

Provide personalised care that meets each child’s needs, as recorded in the child’s relevant plans, taking account of the child’s background [6) (2) (iv)];

Help each child to understand and manage the impact of any experience of abuse or neglect [(6) (2) (v)];

Help each child to develop resilience and skills that prepare the child to return home, to live in a new placement or to live independently as an adult [6) (2) (vi)];

And, make decisions about the day-to-day arrangements for each child, in accordance with the child’s relevant plans, which give the child an appropriate degree of freedom and choice [6) (2) (viii)].

By contrast, the proposed Support Standard for newly regulated accommodation has a far more residual, hands-off, set of requirements that conspicuously omit the provision of day-to-day, personalised care and support. The provider must ensure: “That the service is conducted in a way which is compliant with equality legislation and promotes the rights of young people.“ Yet, equality legislation would apply in any case, and a generic requirement to ‘promote rights’ – while having merit as an aspirational value – is highly difficult to enforce, especially as the Standards themselves makes no other explicit statement as to what these rights actually are, or any reference to other statements of young people’s rights to which providers will be obliged to adhere. Where the Support Standard refers to services which a young person needs, the provider is framed as, at best, a broker of these rather than a direct provider of them. The wording also suggests that the accommodation provider has no direct responsibility for ensuring these other services are actually delivered to the young person. Rather, that is implied to be the young person’s own responsibility: the accommodation provider must engage “with other organisations and community services to encourage and enable young people to obtain a range of services such as advocacy organisations and training providers.” And the framing of the provider’s role in supporting positive relationships for those young people in its accommodation is also hands-off. The service is tasked with ensuring that: “Young people are enabled to maintain appropriate and safe relationships with family and friends.” This may sound fine as far as it goes but it is some distance from the expectations that I suggest most people have of those entrusted and paid by the state to look after some of our most vulnerable teenagers.

Similarly, the difference between the proposed new Standards in respect of health support, compared to children’s home standards should be a real cause for concern. For children’s homes there is a specific quality standard on health which states:

(1) The health and well-being standard is that—

(a)the health and well-being needs of children are met;

(b) children receive advice, services and support in relation to their health and well-being; and

(c)children are helped to lead healthy lifestyles.

In the newly proposed National Standards, the requirements on health are contained within the ‘Leadership and Management Standard’, rather than there being a specific standard dedicated to young people’s health and well-being needs. The requirement it sets out is only that arrangements be in place “to protect and promote the mental and physical health needs of young people at the service.” It does not establish an obligation on the accommodation provider to meet these needs or set out that the provider has any final responsibility to ensure health and well-being services are in actuality provided to a young person. Given young people in care are known to have enhanced health needs this is highly problematic. In particular, children and young people in care have five times the diagnosable rates of mental health ‘disorders’ than their peers (Meltzer et al., 2003), and it is well known that there is currently a dire shortage of adolescent mental health service provision.

The Real Reason for the Government’s Proposals is Cost

The Government’s proposals come down to finance. There has been a large increase in the use of unregulated accommodation in the last decade. The Case for Change partly recognises this in quoting statistics from the Children’s Commissioner for England’s (2020) report:

It is unlikely this type of [currently unregulated] provision is right for all of the 1 in 8 16 and 17 year-olds currently placed in this provision and we are sceptical that the 69% increase in its use since 2012/13 has been driven by what is right for children (Children’s Commissioner, 2020a).

(RCSCCFC, 2021, p.69).

The Children’s Commissioner for England’s report (2020) also details that in 2018/19 nearly 12,800 young people had spent some time in unregulated accommodation during the previous year. The vast majority of these young people -over 12,000 – were 16- and 17-year-olds. Though there is a lack of definitive data, there are clear indications that it is cheaper to place young people in unregulated accommodation than children’s homes (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). It would certainly cost more to require all the newly regulated accommodation to provide care than not to do so. The Government no doubt fears both the cost and a shortage of available placements if it were to regulate in this way. Though it probably did not intend to do so, the party currently in Government has allowed a broken market of placement provision to develop in England over the last decade. This is characterised by a shortage of placements, their increasing expense, a large number of private, profit-making, providers and some profit-making providers who are owned by large private equity firms seeking to make very attractive returns out of care placements. At the same time, for a number of reasons, the number of older teenagers in care has increased notably – up 39% in the last decade according to the Case for Change. Therefore, requiring all young people who are currently in unregulated accommodation to be placed in settings which provide care will indeed require significant Government funding and intervention. But this is exactly what the Government needs to do to meet the state’s core legal, and moral, obligations to young people in its care.

The Government’s case for its own proposals has argued that continuing to allow semi-independent and independent accommodation without care is what some 16- and 17-year-olds want. But it is clear that the expansion of unregulated accommodation has not been driven by what 16- and 17-year-olds in care want, but a lack of other provision in which they can be placed (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). Placements in currently unregulated accommodation tend to be shorter and the young people in them have more placement moves (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). In 2018/19 astonishingly nearly half (46%) of young people placed in unregulated accommodation were placed away from their home area (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). Alongside the individual accounts cited above, these statistics support the view that unregulated accommodation is less likely to meet young people’s needs, it is more likely to be away from young people’s home areas, and young people are more likely to feel unhappy or unsafe in this accommodation. There is also clear evidence of disproportionality on the basis of ethnicity. The Government’s own data, show Black and Asian Looked after Young People are over-represented in currently unregulated sector – those who are Black are particularly disproportionately placed in both ‘semi-independent’ and ‘independent’ accommodation. This should be of concern given we know from the USA how the ‘adultification’ of young black people can underlie institutionally racist practices, and how it can negatively impact on young black people’s life chances (Dancy, 2014).

The Government’s proposed policy is really not about meeting the needs of a very small number of teenagers in care aged 16-18 who may wish to remain ‘looked after’ in state care but also desire greater independence – their needs and wishes could surely be met via negotiation within a policy regime requiring care be provided to all 16- and 17-year-olds. The reality is that this policy decision is about denying care to the many more 16- and 17-year-old Looked after Young People who would want it, due to an unwillingness to finance the alternative. Do those advocating for the Government’s proposals believe the proposals will prevent all those 16- or 17-year-olds in who want care being deprived of it? If they genuinely do, they should stake their reputations on a pledge that no 16- or 17-year-old in state care who wants care will be denied it under the Government’s proposed policy. Legislating that all Looked after Young People must be in settings which provide care will not automatically mean that this happens in practice either. However, crucially, it would provide a legal framework to which young people and their advocates, have recourse. It would push Local Authorities to develop placement choices which provide care for all the young people in its care. And it would allow Directors of Children’s Services and the Local Government Association to argue for more funding from Government in order to meet such requirements.

The Government’s Proposals are Inconsistent with Existing Requirements

The Children’s Commissioner for England until January 2021, Anne Longfield, called for a ban on any children and young person in care being placed in unregulated accommodation. Her office produced a report in (2020) which stated that trying to divorce care and support for children was ‘misleading and unhelpful’ (p.20) because meeting children and young people’s needs entails providing both. It is also misguided to construe care as in tension with promoting children’s independence. Good care for older teenagers is about recognising their growing independence and supporting it, as appropriate to each individual young person, and as appropriate to particular times in their lives. A mature and highly confident 16- or 17-year-old may wish for their carer to give them more independence, but a particular incident, or a change in circumstances, may lead to them needing more intense nurturing and support a few months later. This is a commonly accepted facet of growing up. A skilled carer will work with a teenager to negotiate how that care is provided in a way that respects the teenager’s individual needs and wishes, but also recognises that they are still a developing young person who is still legally a child. The carer may back off or step in more as appropriate to that young person’s changing needs and circumstances.

This does indeed seem to be recognised at one point in the Case for Change (RCSCCFC, 2021, p.63) when it states that: “Any child will have periods of stress, confusion or isolation where they will need a greater level of attention, support and warmth from the adults around them.“ But it is then unclear where a young person in the newly regulated accommodation would receive this greater level of attention, support and warmth from, since day to day care is expressly excluded from that which the accommodation setting is required to provide. In order to give such care, the semi-independent or independent accommodation provider would ludicrously have to apply to register, instead, as a children’s home with Ofsted. Or, the young person would be forced to move, at a time of crisis, to a place that is legally allowed to give them care. How is this in a young person’s best interests?

The tensions between the Government’s own proposed National Standards and existing guidance and procedures are very evident. By law a Local Authority must regularly hold a case review for every child and young person in care, of any age. This is stipulated in the The Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010. As the first part of the name of these regulations may suggest, the primary purpose of a case review is to review the care plan for a child or young person in care. Under the Government’s plans the Local Authority will be reviewing the care plans for young people in care, who will not be entitled to receive any care.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) is funded by the UK Government to produce to produce evidence-based guidance and advice for health, public health, and social care practitioners and to develop equality standards for England and Wales. NICE’s Quality Standards regarding the health and well-being of looked-after children and young people are explicitly designed for children and young people from birth to 18 years. Quality Statement 1 within these is that: “Looked-after children and young people experience warm, nurturing care.” The Statement goes on: “Fulfilling a child's need to be loved and nurtured is essential to achieving long-term physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.” It can be asked why the Government is proposing new National Standards that are inconsistent with its own evidence body’s quality standards on health and well-being?

The cul-de-sac that trying to make hard and fast distinctions between support and care leads to can be seen in the Government’s current consultation which tries to distinguish ‘children’s homes’ from ‘independent or semi-independent’ accommodation on the basis of providing one or the other. The proposed indicators can currently be found by following this link for the Government’s consultation, but I also post them below:

Indicators from Government Consultation Document on proposed differentiation of ‘Children’s Homes’ from ‘Independent’ and ‘Semi-independent’ accommodation

One the one hand these distinctions suggest that children’s homes standards are focused on the care of much younger children, or less independent, children. Indicator 3, for example, asks ‘Do young people have control over what they wear and the resources to buy clothes?’ and suggests that where they do not, the accommodation should register as a children’s home. I would invite the civil servant who drafted this to spend a little time working in a ‘children’s home’ if they think that most young people in them have their choice of what clothes to buy or wear controlled by residential staff! The term ‘children’s home’ is really a misnomer today. It should really be ‘young person’s home’ given it is rare for young people under 12 to be placed there, and the majority of young people in such homes are aged between 14 and 17. Not only this, but the Government and the Case for Change have both pronounced themselves in favour of the Staying Close scheme. This is a scheme whereby young people are provided – mainly as young adult care leavers – with some form of ongoing input from their previous ‘children’s home’. The Government’s suggestion that both the ‘children’s home’ quality standards and the care and support provided by these environments, are a large mismatch for older teenagers is belied by these facts.

At the other end of the scale the Indicators for what constitutes both ‘semi-independent’ and ‘independent’ accommodation should provide considerable cause for concern. It is implied that a marker of these types of accommodation is that 16- and 17-year-olds should have no additional rules or restrictions applied to them than adults in the same accommodation, nor any differential supervision or support from adults living in the same setting. This is inconsistent with the fact that the state imposes greater legal restrictions on the conduct of any 16- and 17-year-old than on adults, and it also offers any 16- or 17-year-old greater protection in law. 16- and 17-year-olds cannot legally purchase alcohol or tobacco and there are restrictions on adults purchasing them on their behalf. 16- and 17-year-olds must legally be in some form of education, training, or apprenticeship until 18. They cannot marry without parental consent, and the Government proposes to change the law to make it illegal for 16- and 17-year-olds to marry even with parental consent, due its perception of this age group’s vulnerability. Though the age of sexual consent is 16, it is illegal to have a sexual relationship with a 16- or 17-year-old where that relationship has involved exploitation, or for an adult in a designated position of trust to have a sexual relationship with a 16- or 17-year-old. Neither restriction applies to adults. Young people of 16 and 17 years are subject to child protection safeguarding laws and procedures, which do not apply to adults. The very fact that 16- and 17-year-olds can become in law ‘Looked after Children’ is only possible by dint of the fact that they are legally minors rather than adults. It is therefore baffling that in this one respect alone, for a group of 16- and 17-year-olds whose needs mark them out as being more ‘vulnerable’ than most of their peer group, that the Government should seek to signify that a necessary indicator of provision be that it treats 16- and 17-year-olds no differently to adults.

Some may argue that even if the Government’s regulation proposals do not do all that is required for 16+s in care, they are at least a partial step forward. I have severe doubts about this argument. The Government’s proposals in fact carry a notable danger for all 16+s in state care going forward, even if this is not intended. The proposed National Standards risk enshrining in law a view of care as a discretionary ‘add on’ extra for Looked after Young People who are 16 and over, rather than viewing it as a mandatory and intrinsic part of what any child or young person in care must receive. The use of unregulated accommodation has increased during a period of sustained and severe austerity when Local Authorities have struggled to meet their statutory obligations, and more teenagers have been coming into care. Rather than taking us back to first principles of what children and young people need when they enter the care system, not only now, as children, but for the years and decades ahead of them, the Government has chosen the smallest of sticking plasters to protect fewer than 100 children aged under 16 and legitimate the absence of care for thousands aged 16 and 17. If care can legally stop at age 16, then won’t this become the de facto leaving care age?

Trying to Justify a Lack of Care

The Government and its supporters have been tripping themselves up trying to justify the proposed policy. Baroness Berridge, Parliamentary Under Secretary for the Department of Education, was challenged on the Government’s proposals in the House of Lords on June 21, 2021. She replied with the bizarre justification that some young people who are 16 and 17 are remanded into care on strict bail conditions, and therefore remanding them to semi-independent and independent accommodation without the requirement of care was the only feasible option. This is a perplexing answer. Firstly, young people who are remanded on very serious offences will likely to be remanded to secure children’s homes or the juvenile penal estate, where they should most certainly be provided with care as young people in care who are on remand in such settings. Secondly, it is not in the least clear how bail conditions applied to a minor make the provision of care less tenable, desirable, or necessary: by any reasonable reckoning it is the very type of situation where intense care and support should be provided.

Similarly, the muddled thinking can be seen within the Government’s proposed new National Standards. In the Accommodation Standard it is stipulated that a young person much have accommodation that is: “accessible, safe and secure, well maintained and provides for the young person’s individual and collective needs in a comfortable, positive and therapeutic environment.” This sounds positive. But it begs the question: if a 16- or 17-year old’s needs are such that they require “a therapeutic environment”, why would they not also need to receive care?

The Case for Change highlights “poor outcomes” for care leavers in the areas of health, offending, education, unemployment, and homelessness (RCSCCFC, 2021, pp.15-16). It also rightly goes on to say that we should not “casually accept such poor life experiences” It even states that “It is important that children are not forced to leave their children’s homes before they are 18 into semi-independent accommodation if this is not right for them.” (p.69). But it then still goes on to justify the exclusion of care for 16+ year olds in state care. This is wildly inconsistent, unless we are somehow to believe that those 16+s who are currently being placed in the unregulated sector have fundamentally different needs, wishes and situations from all the other 16+s who are in foster care, kinship care or residential care. Where is the evidence that this is so?

The rationale for providing care to all teenagers in state care is supported by underpinning research. This shows clear connections between the quality of preparation young people receive in the years prior to leaving care and how they tend to fare once they have left it (Stein, 2012). Young people are far more likely to be adequately prepared in settings that provide day to day care than those which do not. The body of leaving care research there is supports the argument that young people’s transition from care should be characterised as one of ‘interdependence’ rather than ‘independence’ (Atkinson and Hyde, 2012) to avoid a sudden cliff edge where care leavers are forced to fend for themselves when they are not yet ready. Accordingly, in 2017, the UK Government increased all care leavers’ legal entitlements to support in England until the age of 25. There is emergent evidence that this enhanced support is still insufficient – or at least that effective support for care leavers is inconsistently provided, and insufficient, for a number of care leavers. Notwithstanding that issue, it is notable how incongruous the Government’s current proposals to remove care for 16+s are with this wider policy agenda of extended support for care leavers until their mid-20s.

The Mischaracterisation of Campaigners’ Case and the Misuse of Young People’s Views

It is highly disappointing that the Case for Change badly misrepresents the case of prominent campaigners in the #KeepCaringTo18 campaign. It claims they want to ban all semi-independent and independent provision. This is not true. The campaign has consistently proposed that the quality standards which already exist for children’s homes (caring mostly for teenagers) be applied to accommodation, which is currently unregulated, perhaps with some modifications to further support young people’s growing autonomy. The crucial element of campaigners’ proposal is that care – and in particular young people’s right to have care where they live – will be included as a mandatory requirement, though always tailored to the individual needs of the young person. This is a crucial difference from the Government’s own proposals and indeed it is the Government and Review of children’s social care leadership who must answer the question of why they believe that “good quality semi-independent homes” for 16- and 17-year-olds in the care system would not be able to offer and provide care. As carers of teenagers will know, it is the being there, and the readiness to adapt care in response to whatever is going on in the young person’s life, that is critical.

A large concern I have about the Case for Change is the section on young people’s views of unregulated accommodation, and the way these views are harnessed to justify the Government’s policy proposals. The Case for Change does this without clarity on the context of how those views were collected and how they fit into a broader picture of other young people’s views on the same issue. The Case for Change states that:

the review heard from some 16- and 17-year-olds who are happy, safe and supported in good quality semi-independent homes.

And it further goes on to argue on this basis that:

a ban that would remove the option of high-quality semi-independent homes for 16 and 17 years would be to the detriment of some young people. (RCSCCFC, p.63).

I do not doubt that the first statement above is true. It is the case that there is some good quality provision within the currently unregulated accommodation, and there is some evidence that the young people in this high-quality accommodation speak highly of it. But the Case for Change does not explore whether 16- or 17-year-olds it spoke to were advised that good quality semi-independent accommodation with care could be an option. Given that the Case for Change badly misrepresents campaigners’ position as one of wanting to ban all semi-independent provision, this is highly doubtful. Further, neither the Case for Change document itself, nor the supporting evidence document which accompanies it detail how many 16 and 17 year olds they gained data from for this purpose, or how many stated they wished for semi-independent provision to continue without care. It does not detail whether any young people with experience of unregulated accommodation voiced divergent views. It is stated that the review spoke to ‘more than’ 700 people with lived experience. If this included any kind of broader sample of young people with experience of unregulated accommodation then it must be expected that some views in favour of greater regulation of this provision were expressed, given these views are prominent in other data which has been collected in the Children’s Commissioner for England’s report of 2020 as well as within numerous investigative journalistic reports. And, if the review did hear such divergent views from other young people on the Government’s policy proposals it must be asked why are these not also reflected and acknowledged in the Case for Change?

The views of all young people with experience of unregulated care are important to hear. However, when gathering views for policy development and policy recommendations it is also essential to transparently identify and recognise the divergent perspectives which are received. It is important to be transparent about how such different views are weighed and balanced. 16- and 17-year-olds are, as noted, a more governed group than adults. While consultation as to their views is highly important, this is not always decisive in policy change for any group, let alone a group of young people for whom the state has explicit additional welfare responsibilities. As a social worker, I worked with a number of teenagers who deeply disliked – and sometimes refused – mandatory education. I am sure it would not be hard to find other teenagers who would genuinely express the same opinion today. Very few adults – and none in Government - would suggest that mandatory education should be abolished as a result.

Notably the viewpoints expressed by young people which are recorded in the Case for Change differ very considerably from those expressed to the Children’s Commissioner for England’s Office on the same matter. The views in the Children’s Commissioner’s report (2020) are stated to be based on: “[v]isits and interviews with children and young people across England with experience of unregulated accommodation.” (p.4) . In the Children’s Commissioner’s report, two themes emerged from these conversations:

1. The quality of unregulated accommodation is highly variable and a significant proportion is very poor quality.

2. Even with high quality provision, unregulated accommodation is not right for the majority of children (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020, p.20)

Though theme 2 above does not provide a direct answer to the question of whether these young people would prefer “high quality provision” to be regulated with or without a requirement for care (the Government had not yet made its policy proposals at that time), it does suggest that there are likely to be a notable number of young people with experience of unregulated care who are in favour of much stricter regulation of that sector. It is telling that while the Case for Change references the Children’s Commissioner for England's (2020) report, it makes no acknowledgement that the young people’s views contained within it are in tension with the Government’s policy proposals, or its own support for them.

Finally, it is also notable that the Case for Change’s coverage of this issue would seem to suggest that the Government’s proposals are only to allow “high-quality semi-independent homes for 16- and 17-year-olds”. They are not. They will also allow 16- and 17-year-olds to be placed in “independent” accommodation alongside adults and where the support is largely undifferentiated from that provided to adults in the same setting.

Conclusion

Despite major differences, I do not doubt that the leadership of the Review of Children’s Social Care and the Government genuinely want Looked after Children and Young People and care leavers to have better experiences, in and after leaving care. However, if they genuinely will the ends, then the only position of integrity is to also will the means. 16- and 17-year-olds should not pay the price for the Government’s failure in allowing a broken market of placement provision to develop over the last decade. Requiring that all children and young people in care in England should receive care is a long overdue change into the third decade of the 21st century. But it is also one that can act as a catalyst for positive improvements in placement provision more broadly moving forward.

13-07-21.

References

Atkinson, C., & Hyde, R. (2019). Care leavers’ views about transition: A literature review. Journal of Children's Services, 14(1), 42– 58. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCS-05-2018-0013

Children’s Commissioner for England (2020). Children in care living in semi-independent accommodation. Available: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/cco-unregulated-children-in-care-living-in-semi-independent-accommodation.pdf

Dancy T.E. (2014). The Adultification of Black Boys. In Fasching-Varner K.J., Reynolds R.E., Albert K.A., Martin L.L. (eds.) Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice. Teaching Race and Ethnicity. SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-842-8_10

Meltzer, H., Gatward, R., Corbin, T., Goodman, R., & Ford, T. (2003). The mental health of young people looked after by local authorities in England. The Stationary Office.

Review of Children’s Social Care, Case for Change (RCSCCFC) (2021). Available: https://childrenssocialcare.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/case-for-change-supporting-evidence.pdf

Stein, M. (2012). Young people leaving care: Supporting pathways to adulthood. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.