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Among one-to-five-year-olds, it increased by 50 per cent. The number of children going into care has never been greater – 68,270 as of June 2020 – an increase of three per cent over the previous year, at a cost to the taxpayer of £10bn annually.
When 98 per cent of children in care are there because of parents’ needs rather than their own behaviour, it doesn’t take a shrink to conclude that a child’s back story may hold clues to their behaviour. The toddler who can’t articulate intelligibly may have no one at home who talks to them; the teenager harassing his classmate may be copying the way dad deals with mum.
And yet practitioners report that social workers in England focus on the child as an autonomous individual instead of a member of a network of relationships, failing to ask questions about whether there’s trouble at home, what kind of family structure the child lives in, or parental substance misuse.
This approach risks ignoring the root cause of the problem and leaving the child at risk of recruitment by gangs, of drug abuse, of going into care. Given that over 80 per cent of the 399,500 children identified as being in need in England last year had experienced at least one ACE, this is alarming.
We can reverse this trend: negative relationships can wreck a child’s life; positive relationships can transform it. Research has shown that just one continuous relationship with a trusted grown-up can help a child overcome even the most adverse experience. Fiona Duncan, who led the recent review into Scottish children’s care, argues that we should build a system that ‘enables loving, supportive and nurturing relationships as a basis on which to thrive’.
Understanding trauma, and how to deal with it, does not call for a huge investment, as a host of cheap training programmes are now available online. Over just a few sessions, they teach how to look beyond the child’s misbehaviour to their backstory, winkle out painful feelings, and react in a calm and non-judgemental way to even the worst provocation.
Schools that have adopted a trauma-awareness approach, training everyone from the dinner lady to the head, have seen significant results. In Wolverhampton, exclusions have been reduced by a third; in north east Somerset and Leicestershire, pupils as well as teaching and non-teaching staff reported improved wellbeing and even, in some cases, academic attainment.
Kevin Campbell, the American founder of the Centre for Family Finding and Youth Connectedness, says that ‘the challenge is not hardship – we are hardwired for that; the challenge is when there is no support to overcome that hardship’. Wise words. But then, note that Campbell’s ancestors were Scots.
Cristina Odone is head of the family policy unit at the Centre for Social Justice. Her report Safely Reducing the Number of Children Going into Care is out now.
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