Children in care: Experts fly in to help tackle crisis

The government is recruiting 60 highly-qualified social workers from Germany, Norway and the Netherlands to lead an experimental programme which could revolutionise the way children’s residential care homes are run.

European professionals are being sought to run a £1.5m pilot project in 30 children’s homes across England, which will introduce the concept of “social pedagogy” – a practice centred on helping children develop and flourish, rather than just working to meet their immediate needs and ensure their safety.

The three-year experiment is one of a number of radical initiatives being tried by the government, as it battles to improve prospects for children in care. Ministers admit that standards remain unacceptably low, with 53% of looked-after children leaving school with no qualifications, and disproportionately high numbers of care leavers ending up in prison, as teenage parents or homeless.

The European recruitment drive comes as campaigners for the rights of looked-after children express great unease about the poor training given here to frontline staff working with the country’s most vulnerable children. In Denmark, for example, most residential care staff have a three and a half year degree qualification. Here, workers are meant to have an NVQ3 (a much lower standard of training), but 36% currently have no qualification at all.

“Those members of the workforce with the most day-to-day contact with children and therefore the greatest influence over their experience of care, seem to be those with least access to training [and] least experience,” the select committee report into the state of care system noted yesterday.

David Crimmens, of the School of Health and Social Care at the University of Lincoln told the committee: “I do not understand why … we have not managed to educate to A-level standard people who work with some of the most troubled and troublesome children in our society.”

Jane Haywood, chief executive of the Children’s Workforce Development Council, added that without trained and skilled workers, residential care was tantamount to “warehousing” children.

An adviser to the pilot project, Jonathan Stanley, manager of the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care, said he was confident that social pedagogy was a model which could lead to better outcomes. However, success would rest ultimately on more money being invested in caring for children in residential care homes, and in training staff, he added.

Abby Ladbrooke, managing director of Jacaranda Recruitment, which specialises in recruiting social workers from Europe and is tasked with supplying candidates for the pilot, said interest in the concept of social pedagogy had risen dramatically in the past five years.

Barry Sheerman, Labour MP and chairman of the select committee report, said: “Professors told us that the one way to get into university with pretty awful results is to take a social work course. That really started ringing alarm bells,” he said. “There are some very good social workers but there is no doubt that there are some really big question marks about the present quality of the service that we give to looked-after children.”

In Hackney, Steve Goodman, deputy director of children’s services, told the committee that standards in many social work university departments had declined so radically in the past 20 years that training courses were often “not fit for purpose”. As a result, the borough had been forced to recruit consultant social workers trained abroad in countries like America, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.