It's not every day that young people in care or care leavers get the opportunity to have their voices heard, let alone come face to face with a Member of Parliament. But with the election looming, it is the prime time for vital questions to be answered. Kizzi Lopez, Erika Allcorn, Matthew Wilson and Luna Fernandez-Barham headed off to Westminster to put ministers on the hot seat.
| When I was in care no one bothered if I slept all day! You don’t only need ambition you need motivation. |
We started by asking health minister John Hutton whether our individual needs are being met.
He told us that a lot of things needed to be done to improve the provisions and services for people in care and more money would be injected into the system. He also believed that the Quality Protects Modernisation Program would improve the situation for young people in care. Advocacy would be made a priority. More money would be spent in that area, to encourage people to take the views of young people seriously.
But would that be the end to all the problems? Surely something else was needed?
'What we need is ambition, we just haven't had enough ambition for children who, for whatever reason, cannot be with their own families,' John Hutton added.
Later, Luna Fernandez-Barham said she was glad to hear it: 'When I was in care no one bothered if I slept all day! You don't only need ambition you need motivation, someone who will motivate you, a mentor of some sort. There should be more thought going into motivating young people instead of leaving them to their own devices. He also said that education was the gateway - the key to success… but no one encouraged me to go to college. I motivated myself to avoid a life of dole and handouts.'
John Hutton continued by saying that the system should take more responsibility for the welfare of young people and he hoped that the Leaving Care Act would give young people more opportunity to go on and make something of their lives.
'The Children Leaving Care Act will give young people approaching their sixteenth birthday two things: a proper pathway plan to allow them to plan for the future, in education, training, jobs, accommodation etc. It will also give you your own special advisor who will help you come to terms with some of these issues and make choices.'
But young people in care don't only need a good education; they also need stability in their lives. For 16 years Kizzi Lopez was moved to 20 different homes which made her very unhappy. She asked: 'How will a Labour government prevent this from happening to other young people in care?'
John Hutton said that his party had set targets to reduce the number of placements young people go into each year. 'We don't want more than 16 per cent of young people to have three or more placements in a year. Young people need stability and they need to feel at home somewhere and we want to reduce the number of unnecessary placement changes, and I think we are going to meet this target.'
To back up his statement he said that his government was committed to ensuring that young people found permanent places to live. We wondered if he meant residential homes, so we asked him what role he thought they played in the care system. He told us that he thought they had a role to play alongside a range of other options. And he said that some children he had spoken to prefer to be in children's homes.
We don't agree with his views about residential homes - to be honest we don't think that they play a role at all. They are too extreme and the government seems to have spent a lot of money on such accommodation for young people just to place them somewhere. They leave them there for many years and simply forget about them.
Maybe one of the reasons why some children might prefer to be in this form of accommodation is because they have been in foster care and been moved from placement to placement. They think: 'I just want to be in a residential home so I can be in one place. I would prefer to be unhappy in one place then be moved, as it seems, every ten minutes.'
We thought that John Hutton tried to paint a rosy picture of the care system, but at the same time he was trying to do something for young people in care.
We still had more questions to ask so we asked opposition front bench spokeswoman for women's issues and Conservative MP Caroline Spelman for her opinions.
We know what foster care is all about, after all, we have all been there…but how did she see it? She told us that she had two friends who had been foster carers and thought that foster care was there to provide a loving family environment. She also said that through her work she knew it was not always like that. Was she also aware that some children get moved around so much that it becomes difficult for them to form stable relationships? She answered:
'I think it is very difficult if children are actually pushed from pillar to post. I think that this is where the fostering system is falling down, in that far too many moves are made before a child finally comes to a resting place, if they ever do, in the system. It makes it much more difficult if you never know if this is going to be your permanent home or not. That is undoubtedly what we have to address,' she said.
Erika Allcorn asked: 'It wasn't only that situation that concerns us, it is also disturbing to think that children as young as six with special needs can get placed in classrooms with people as old as 16, or children with very different special needs.'
Caroline Spelman was aware of this and said: 'Lumping people together in a class of very mixed ages and ability is a feature of the institutional system.' She added that the reason why this was done was because there were not enough resources. Breaking the age groups down and better assessment of individual needs would improve this situation.
So does that mean that the system is to blame for not taking into consideration the needs of the child? She thought the system was a very anonymous thing to blame, but added that the system was not good at tailoring to individual needs. 'That is because any kind of system has to generalise about how a particular service should be provided. By the very definition it is going to be blunt when it comes to getting it right for individuals.'
If that is the case, Luna Fernandez-Barham wondered how the system could judge whether a young person, at the age of 18, is ready to leave care and go into the wider world? Caroline Spelman said that the Children Leaving Care Act would redress this problem by raising the period of care that the state is responsible for.
Although she answered some of our questions and was sympathetic towards us, we think that politicians need to stop talking to other politicians about what young people need and start talking to children in care. Children need to know more about their rights, so they know where they stand.
Next we turned to Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, spokesman for youth and Northern Ireland for his views.
What was his policy on fostering, what image of fostering did he have?
Lembit Opik thought that fostering was a very important part of giving people a chance to develop and establish normal relationships with people of their own age. He said that in his judgement fostering would be a better alternative then putting people into residential care.
When we tried to ask him more questions he replied: 'You have come here to ask me questions - it should be the other way around, because between the four of you, you will have about 35 years experience of foster care. I have a couple of weeks!'
We felt very comfortable with this person and felt like he would listen to us and give us a straightforward answer to any questions we asked… so we pressed on.
Matthew Wilson left the care system before he was 16, so he did not think he would get support from the government with accommodation when he leaves home. 'Do you agree with this?' he asked.
Lembit Opik said there should be some flexibility within the system. He referred to us as the customers of a service and said that in any business you work your business around the customer. He added: 'I actually think the age of 'adulthood' should be 16. Let's face it when we look at the governments that have been elected by people of 18 and above, 16-year-olds aren't going to make any worse decisions!'
So should the care system cater for individual needs? 'In the short term it costs more, but the way you should look at cost is the total effect on the individual,' he said. 'The individual doesn't have to fit into what's available, what's available is fitted around the needs of the individual,' he added.
In his view each individual has to be individually assessed, and their own point of view taken into account. If someone ends up having a drug dependency simply because they can't cope, or even worse, take their own life, it ends up costing society far more than if they did the right thing in the first place. He thought that once again it came down to resources.
We think that he got a lot out of us because he asked how we felt about the situations we were in. And he spoke in a language we could understand - he was really down-to-earth. He also noticed that there were problems that needed to be addressed.
Our overall impression was that he was prepared to get his hands dirty to find out what is going on. You need to get your hands into the work to find out what is wrong. Plus he referred to us all by our names, which made us all feel comfortable.
There are many things that need to be done, within the care system, but it is not all about money. To put money into the system will not automatically make it better; it has to be put into the right areas.
We all need to feel stable, secure and appreciated. And at the end of the day we are receiving support from society in advance, but later on in our lives we will be giving the same support to other people. We have a voice and we want to be heard… vote for the voice of the child in care.
About the team
This article was produced by Kizzi Lopez, Erika Allcorn, Matthew Wilson and Luna Fernandez-Barham, as part of the Children's Express London bureau's outreach programme. It was published in Foster Care magazine.
