Select Committee: children in council care or living away from home
Looked-after children's views were recently presented to the House of Commons Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families. At this first meeting of an inquiry into their care on 19 March 2008, Dr Roger Morgan, Children’s Rights Director for England, gave evidence and was questioned on a wide range of children's views and concerns.
Dr Morgan reported findings from his statutory independent consultation programme with children in council care or living away from home. He told the committee of children’s wish to be treated as individuals and to be able to challenge council decisions and failures to carry out care plans.
I welcome the committee’s decision to spend their first meeting on the system for looked after children by looking at children's views, concerns and wishes. I was able to put forward many of the views and positive suggestions that children had given us. Dr Roger Morgan
Dr Morgan had submitted written evidence in advance of this session. When questioned by the committee, and its chairman Barry Sheerman MP, he made a number of recommendations, stating that councils should not be subject to targets or quotas that might detract from making decisions in the individual child's best interests. For example, changes of placement and school are not automatically a bad thing for every child, even though they might be treated as such in performance monitoring processes. What’s more important is the reason for the change and whether things improved as a result. Councils can be under financial or policy pressures to remove children from successful placements outside their authority area, against the best interests of the child.
Dr Morgan stressed that the objectives of the White Paper and new legislation must lead to changes to everyday practice and improve each child’s experience, commenting on children's scepticism about this, and offering to secure children's views independently for the coming ministerial stocktakes of the care system.
Her Majesty's Chief Inspector Christine Gilbert also gave evidence on looked-after children during a Select Committee hearing on the work of Ofsted on Wednesday 14 May 2008. Read more in HMCI's 'Inside View' in this issue.
More about the work of Select Committees
Select Committees, made up of backbench MPs from across the political spectrum, scrutinise the work of government, covering each department and the agencies and non-ministerial departments they commission. Her Majesty's Chief Inspector (HMCI) is Ofsted's accounting officer and is directly accountable to Parliament and in particular the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee.
The committee’s current practice is to invite HMCI to two sessions a year: one on the annual report, soon after publication, and the other on the work of Ofsted, spanning all of our activities. Ofsted can also submit evidence to other inquiries, for instance our scrutiny of looked-after children, and be called to give oral evidence on an ad-hoc basis. Following all inquiries, including ‘the work of Ofsted’, the committee publishes its findings and recommendations and the Government must respond to our report.
On this occasion Dr Morgan was providing evidence to the committee in his own capacity as Children's Rights Director for England, rather than responding to scrutiny of Ofsted’s work.
The Ofsted report is available at the following link: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/070172
More information on Select Committees can be found on the UK Parliment website:
http://www.parliament.uk/what_s_on/hoc_news3/about_commons_committees.cfm
