Care system must improve its parenting skills, says Martin Narey

Martin Narey is not a man to shy away from controversy. The Whitehall mandarin turned charity chief has brought just as much blunt speaking to the issue of children in the care system as he did to prisons when he was head of that service in the 1990s.

Shortly after taking over as chief executive of Barnardo’s in 2005, he caused uproar when he suggested that not enough children were being taken into care. Too many parents, he said, were being given too many chances to mend their ways.

This challenged the orthodox view that all efforts should be utterly exhausted before children were removed from the family. Mr Narey was accused of trying to drum up business for Barnardo’s children’s homes, even though the charity had abandoned that line of work many years before.

However, the abuse and death of Baby P in Haringey, North London, in 2007, sparking a furore over the performance of social services, caused others to conclude that Mr Narey might be on to something. Lord Laming, who had led the inquiry into the death in 2000 of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, also in Haringey, followed suit — as did the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And more social workers clearly feel the same way, to judge by the number of children being taken into care. It is up by 30 per cent since the Baby P court case.

Mr Narey is now setting his sights on the care system itself and asking whether it is in need of the same sort of reform that social work is undergoing.

However, he begins his analysis of the problem with an apology. “When I took over at Barnardo’s, I did what everyone else did and looked at the lamentable GCSE results and other outcomes of children in the care system, and concluded the state fails children terribly,” he says. “That was simplistic [given the disrupted education they may have had before] and wrong, and I regret it now.”

In 2008, only 14 per cent of children in care achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE, compared with 65 per cent of the general population of children.

However, that is not to say that it cannot be improved. In particular, Mr Narey is focusing on adoption, fearing that too many social workers prefer other, less permanent forms of care in which contact between the child and the biological family can be maintained. “I am clearly not recommending a return to the 1960s and 1970s, when so many single mothers felt compelled to give up their babies,” he says. “But I am concerned that adoption has fallen out of fashion as the best solution for children who cannot live with their birth families.

“The research shows that while care improves matters for children, adoption transforms their life chances, and it needs to be given greater priority. I know targets are very unpopular in the public services, but there needs to be a sense of urgency brought back. I am an unreconstructed fan of targets in this area. When we had them, they worked.”

Tony Blair introduced targets in 2002 and local authorities were measured according to the proportion of children in care who were adopted, and the time it took to find them a new permanent home. Controversially, councils were rewarded with cash for hitting the targets. The number of children adopted rose from 3,100 in 2001 to 3,800 in 2005. However, as soon as the targets lapsed, the numbers fell back. Last year, only 3,300 children were adopted.

Mr Narey wants to see more urgency in planning a child’s long-term future when he or she enters the care system. “Permanency planning, when social workers are supposed to draw up a long-term plan, is not as timely and effective as it should be, especially for children under five.” he said. “We need to be rigorous in starting permanency planning four months after care has begun. There is too much drift about long-term decisions for a child, and the longer the time goes on, the more difficult it is to find a solution for a child.”

That also means a hard look at some of the sensitive issues around race and ethnicity.

Searching for the right ethnic match is important, he says, but “if necessary, we need to compromise to succeed”. He adds: “We know adoption is more successful the earlier it can take place. Black and other ethnic minority children wait roughly a third longer to find an adoptive family. The law is clear on this. Adoption cannot be unduly delayed while the perfect match is sought.”

For the majority of the 60,000 children in care, adoption is not going to be an option, perhaps because they are too old to settle into a new permanent home, or there is a chance that their natural parents will, in time, be able to care for them properly.

Although Mr Narey regrets what he has said in the past about the calibre of the care system, he believes that a few changes could make all the difference.

He wants children in care to be protected from exclusion from school, and he wants local authorities to make sure that they are not forced to move schools in their GCSE year.

However, Mr Narey is also concerned about the assumption that fostering is always the best option. “Fostering can be fantastic and so many of the carers are great,” he said. “But I don’t think we should shy away from acknowledging that some children overwhelm foster carers; for them, residential care should be an option. Other European countries appear to provide small-scale, loving, ambitious, high-quality residential care without much difficulty. I hope we can move this way, too.”