The BLAIR Snatch Project
 image© First post |
||
The BLAIR Snatch Project Are things bad and getting worse, then? 16 May 2006 Source: Guardian Adoption experts certainly agree on the need for change - and social services directors would acknowledge that more needs to be done. However, the trend appears to be moving in the right direction. Rob Hutchinson, children's spokesman for the Association of Directors of Social Services, says: "Social services departments have been making progress, not least because they have been given new resources by the government under the Quality Protects scheme. You can't just simply work on the basis of statistical figures - we can't push children into adoption to make up our figures - but generally more children are being adopted in local authorities." Last year, 2,700 children who were looked after by local authorities were adopted - representing half of all adoptions in England. This compares with 2,200 in 1999 and 1,900 in 1996. Of those 2,700, 420 were given up voluntarily and 1,100 were "freed for adoption". Tony Blair made adoption his crusade last summer, when he headed a review. "When children cannot live with their birth parents, for whatever reason, we all share a responsibility to make sure that they have a chance of a fresh start, and an opportunity to enjoy the kind of loving family life which most of us take for granted." Blair admits failing most needy children Tony Blair began his Let's Talk initiative by admitting that both his Sure Start scheme for under-fives and policies for children in care have failed the socially excluded. Let's Talk is seen by No 10 as a new version of the Big Conversation and a crucial vehicle for reforming public services through a series of events designed to establish Labour's next manifesto. In front of public sector professionals, private sector managers and Labour members, including some of his recent critics inside the parliamentary party such as John Denham and Karen Buck, the prime minister admitted that the government has "not yet found a way of bringing the shut-out into mainstream society". He said figures for the number of children in care receiving decent GCSE results were appalling and problem families sometimes had as many as five agencies supposedly helping them, as a result of which no one actually did. Mr Blair said of the multibillion-pound Sure Start scheme: "If we are frank about it, there is a group of people who have been shut out against society's mainstream and we have not yet found a way of bringing them properly in. When we started Sure Start - I was always a bit sceptical that in the end that we could do this - there was an idea it would lift all the boats on a rising tide. It has not worked like that. Sure Start has been brilliant for those people who have in their own minds decided they want to participate. But the hard to reach families, the ones who are shut out of the system ... they are not going to come to places like Sure Start. Their problems are so multiple, and if you have one organisation dealing with one aspect of their problem, these families then end up having five or six organisations dealing with them, but no one is actually dealing with them. If we are to change that we need a different way for government to operate and we need different systems of delivery. The government in such cases needs to make full use of the voluntary and third sector, some of whom have greater expertise than the organs of government do." He said it was appalling that the government was spending as much as £2bn on children in care and yet only 8% were gaining five decent GCSEs and only 1% went on to university. Mr Blair told his audience there "has to be a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate", and continuous reform was the only way public services could meet ever-increasing public expectations. |
||
|
Go Back |
||