Beyond 18: What Happens When the System Stops Caring?
In a powerful conversation on the Secure Start podcast, Andrew Isaac, Chair of BSN Social Care and the Children’s Services Development Group, unpacks the challenges and opportunities within the UK’s foster care system. With decades of experience in children’s social care, Andrew provides valuable insights into how we approach caring for our most vulnerable young people.
The foster care crisis in the UK has reached alarming proportions. Since 2010, there has been a 30% increase in children entering care in England alone – from approximately 60,000 to over 80,000 children. This dramatic rise has placed immense pressure on an already strained system. As Andrew explains, this substantial increase isn’t just a number; it represents thousands of individual children requiring comprehensive support systems, qualified foster carers, and appropriate therapeutic interventions to help them transition successfully into adulthood.
One of the most compelling points Andrew raises is the critical importance of early intervention. He laments the loss of approximately 30-40% of Sure Start centres during the financial crisis, which provided crucial early support to vulnerable families. This shortsightedness has contributed to the current influx of teenagers entering the care system. The mathematics is simple but often overlooked by policymakers: investing one pound in early intervention yields multiple pounds in savings down the line. As Andrew passionately states, “I would love a politician to say if we spend this now, these are the benefits of the country over 10, 15 years.”
The statistics Andrew shares are sobering. Approximately 23% of the UK prison population has been through the care system. Young people leaving care at 18 are seven times more likely to commit suicide than their peers. According to research by the National Economic Foundation, every pound invested in a looked-after child generates a sixteen-pound return throughout their life cycle. Reducing the number of care-experienced individuals in prison alone would release nearly a billion pounds from the justice system. These figures highlight not just the human cost but the significant economic implications of inadequate care provision.
Perhaps most concerning is what Andrew describes as “the cliff edge at 18.” At this arbitrary age, young people transition overnight from having a single agency responsible for their wellbeing to navigating up to ten different agencies independently. While legislation called “Staying Put” exists to allow young people to remain with foster carers beyond 18, the financial structure makes this unviable for many foster families who depend on the income to pay their mortgages. The result is devastating – young people “sofa hopping” with nowhere permanent to live, falling out of education, and losing contact with support services entirely.
Andrew also addresses the changing landscape of foster carer recruitment. In today’s society, particularly in metropolitan areas with sky-high property values, potential foster carers must weigh financial considerations carefully. Media coverage of allegations against carers, legitimate or otherwise, further complicates recruitment efforts. Despite these challenges, Andrew emphasizes the importance of honest conversations with potential carers – addressing their concerns upfront while also highlighting the profound difference they can make in a child’s life.
Throughout the conversation, Andrew repeatedly returns to a fundamental truth: “Foster care is by far the best setting for most children that need care outside their own families.” The goal isn’t complex – as another expert referenced in the podcast states, “the great aspiration of children in care is an ordinary life.” This seemingly modest ambition represents a profound shift in how we might measure success in the care system. Rather than focusing solely on educational attainment or other measurable outcomes, perhaps the true measure is enabling these young people to lead stable, content lives and break intergenerational cycles of trauma and care.
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About Andrew
Andrew is a highly accomplished leader within heavily regulated healthcare, children’s services and special needs education environments.
Andrew is the Chair of BSN Social care, the parent company of six of the UK’s leading foster care agencies servicing much of England and Wales.
Andrew is also the Chair of the Children’s Services Development Group (CSDG), a coalition of leading independent providers of care and specialist education services, who work closely with policymakers, regulators and local authorities to develop policy solutions that will ensure the best possible outcomes for children and young people with complex needs.
Andrew was previously the marketing and communications manager for the National Fostering Agency, which is when we first interacted with each other.
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Transcript:
Colby: 0:00
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Andrew: 0:03
I would love a politician to say if we spend this now, these are the benefits of the country over 10, 15 years. If you reduce the number of looked after children or children who’ve been through the care system in prison, you would release almost a billion pounds worth of cost. The law at the moment in the UK at 18 is a cliff edge for young people. 18 plus are seven times more likely to commit suicide than their peers. So the balance of how you talk to foster carers or potential foster carers when they’re interested is really, really important. If I were talking to somebody that wanted to go into it, I would ask them what they were worried about first. There’s a sort of rule of thumb really. Most people react to something on the third prompt. Foster care is by far the best setting for most children that need care outside their own families. The best place for any child to survive is within mainstream education, but the mainstream education has got to have the right facilities to encourage that young person.
Colby: 1:19
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce and joining me for this episode is one of the earliest supporters of my work in the UK to make themselves known to me. Before I introduce my guests, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I come to, this meeting on the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and the continuing connection the living Kaurna people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Andrew Isaac. My guest this episode is Andrew Isaac.
Colby: 2:10
Andrew is a highly accomplished leader within heavily regulated healthcare, children’s services and special needs education environments. Andrew is the chair of BSN Social Care, the parent company of six of the UK’s leading foster care agencies serving much of England and Wales. Andrew is also the chair of the Children’s Services Development Group, a coalition of leading independent providers of care and specialist education services who work closely with policy makers, regulators and local authorities to develop policy solutions that will ensure the best possible outcomes for children and young people with complex needs. Andrew was previously the Marketing and Communications Manager for the National Fostering Agency, which is when we first interacted with each other. I was under the impression that Andrew had since retired some time ago, but, as we’ll hear, that does not appear to be the case. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew: 3:17
Thank you, Hi Colby.
Colby: 3:19
You sent me a bio and it was quite extensive and impressive and you asked me not to include all of that in my introduction. But was there anything that I missed there or any comment you want to make about the retirement scenario?
Andrew: 3:38
Well, I never really ended up retiring, so it was more about a point of what you know and, uh, you know the experience that you’ve had and you can benefit other people, so you just keep going, which I’m sure you will do so yourself yeah, well, uh, maybe, um, who knows, maybe I’ll be.
Colby: 4:01
I’ll still be doing podcasts, um, when I, when I give up uh, consulting, I I think you podcasts when I give up consulting.
]Andrew: 4:06
I think you will when you give up being active. I think you won’t, because you’ll still be doing it. I’ll almost wager a lunch on that with you. Aye, aye.
Colby: 4:18
Well, yeah, and a lunch, as we were just talking about before we came on, a lunch over in your neck of the woods in the UK would be a very attractive proposition for me, as long as it’s not above 30 degrees, as I’m hearing that you’ve been having lately there in the UK.
Andrew: 4:38
Well, it’s probably good Australian weather actually.
Colby: 4:41
Every time I’ve been to Australia.
Andrew: 4:43
It’s been in your summertime and it’s been wonderful. I’m thinking, oh, oh, I wish we could have that weather over here and uh, and so we have. My wish has come true. Well, it’s the case. We don’t cope with it as well as you do.
Colby: 4:55
I don’t think I don’t know if you’re set up for it like we are, although you do often have double glazed windows in your houses, which we don’t, which is quite uncommon in south in australia. So heat transfer from outside to inside is a is an issue, but we do have air conditioning by and large in our houses. Um and look, I’ll correct you on one thing there is a difference between the hot weather in the uk and the hot weather here, particularly where I am, I’m in the UK, and the hot weather here, particularly where I am. I’m in the middle south part of Australia, in the driest state on the driest continent on earth. The heat is dry and whereas in your neck of the woods it’s humid, and we do have parts of Australia where the heat is humid. But I just don’t like humidity at all, having always been here and in fact funny story whenever I used to go to Ireland for work, I used to take jackets with me and never wore them.
Colby: 5:56
And uh one one day I was with my son. We were out on uh at a lighthouse on Fannad Head in uh County, donegal, so right out on the Atlantic Ocean, out in the west, and it was 10 degrees Celsius at the time and I was feeling warm in a T-shirt and a local Irish lady came up and started seemingly berating me and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying because she was berating me in irish and uh, and then, I think, when I looked perplexed enough, she corrected to um english and uh, yeah, it was just basically so. How can you possibly be standing out here in this force 10 gale in in in a t-shirt? But you know the humidity that you have there is just horrible from from my perspective, growing up in a dry environment well, I suppose, and the differences as well.
Andrew: 6:53
When you walk around here, especially springtime, the, the green color of the trees and the grass is fabulous. I’ve never I’ve traveled all over the world and I’ve never seen it recreated in in the way you get it for those few weeks in the spring, although the autumn is different, because you go to various parts of the usa and you have lovely autumn colors, but the spring green is uh, it lifts your spirits hugely yeah, so I got you on because you have had a long career in management and something of a post-career, but the career has been ongoing in social care and related sectors and I firstly just wanted to ask you, andrew, how you got into management in the social care setting.
Andrew: 7:52
Well, ironically, I used to work for Marriott International and they merged, which is a family company company, and they merged with a company called Sodexo, which is also predominantly a family company, and for some reason I ended up in the healthcare division in the UK for Sodexo, dealing with healthcare provision in the NHS hospitals, which I had no experience at all. But with sales and marketing and communications experience, you suddenly learn what you’ve got to do. So I found it interesting for a number of years. And then my old CEO moved sectors. He moved into the National Fostering Agency in the UK as a new CEO in the UK, as a new CEO, and you know, he and I got on extremely well and effectively.
Andrew: 8:55
I moved with him thinking, ah, what have I done? Well, your skills are transferable and actually it’s probably the best thing I ever did, because when you look at the difference you can make, particularly in children’s social care, it doesn’t matter whether it’s fostering or special needs education, you can use your skills to. Let’s take fostering, for example. Um, there was a very quaint view of quaint, perhaps that’s that’s a little bit unkind an old-fashioned view of foster, foster carers and how they were recruited, and you know what they did.
Andrew: 9:33
Um, and when the market in the uk was deregulated in the late 90s, there was an opportunity for independent fostering agencies to be created yeah um, and as part of that, then people had a choice as to whether they went to work for local governments to foster carer or they went to work for an independent fostering agency, and basically there’s never enough foster carers. I’ve never come across any country in the world where there’s enough foster carers that are doing it in a in a professional manner, and I think this is where we need to drive it forward even more in. Foster carers need to be regarded as being professional. Yeah, so I realized that, uh, part of my job would be how can we recruit foster carers in a more professional way? It also meant using my market marketing experience to to make sure that we we we gained the interest of people wanted to know about it, but once they wanted to know about it, making sure they were fully informed before they made their decisions and then making sure that during there’s a very lengthy assessment process in the uk probably on average takes at least six months, and that’s going through all the appropriate background tracks, blah, blah, blah but also, during that process, making sure they’re trained to deal with all sorts of things. Now, that was 20 odd years ago and it worked extremely well and we we recruited lots of foster carers, and our organization at the time became the largest provider of independent fostering services in the uk, and I thought, gosh, I need to learn more and more and more. So, part of my communication skills, I began getting involved with children’s Services Development Group as a member, and, looking at the legislation that applies to social care is outmoded and outdated because it was written for a time that doesn’t exist anymore.
Andrew: 11:40
If you look, should we say over the last say since around about 2010, there’s been a 30% increase in children in care in England and that’s a phenomenal amount. It’s gone from 60-odd thousand to 80-odd thousand. If then you might say, oh well, yeah, that’s only 30,000 children, but sit and look at what’s behind it. Look at the number of foster carers, look at the number of residential settings and then into your world, look at the number of therapies and and social care support that’s needed to ensure those children that should be at the focus of everything that everybody does that they can transit into adulthood and and develop a life for themselves. That’s pretty level-headed and straightforward. Doesn’t matter about whether they’re yeah, how, whether they go to university or not, but it’s about their life skills and all sorts of things. So you suddenly take that and you suddenly got a huge, huge range of support organizations that need to be there to help a young person on their journey through life, and when you get that in huge numbers, that then starts putting a huge amount of pressure on the infrastructure that’s actually used to support them.
Andrew: 13:07
I’ll I’ll take you back, maybe to the the financial banking crisis. At that particular point, um, lots of funds were taken out to make economies and and all sorts of things and, uh, give you, give you time on sure stocks. I know you know the early years of you. Know I’m as passionate about the early years as as as you are, in the sense that if you can intervene at an early stage with a young family, um, or a child, you can make such a difference in those early years where they don’t need support later on in life.
Andrew: 13:44
Now, probably about 30 or 40 percent of short start centers were lost during that financial period. Now everybody said, oh, that’s, that’s fine. Now, 10, 12, 14 years on, there is an influx of young middle teens people coming into the care system. Now I’m sure with your experience, you know the difference between looking after a 14, 15 year old, six foot two young man than it is a four or five year old. So that doubles the workload that you need to do to help them go through the issues that they’ve got, and often issues that they’ve developed over a long period of time. So, on top of that, you’ve increased the volume of what’s going through. But also, going back to the short start areas at the beginning, you’ve also lost the intellectual property that was around at those times. That isn’t passed down to new people that are coming into the sector. Yeah, so you do have at the moment, people entering the sector for all right reasons and great qualifications, etc.
Andrew: 14:58
What you don’t have is a huge amount of um older people work, older, more mature people that have been in sector a long time to be able to pass their knowledge on, and that’s that’s an area that um I I’m probably disappointed in life in, really, because, um I’m not a social worker and I have met social workers who’ve had who are career social workers and their understanding of how to help a child or a young person is phenomenal.
Andrew: 15:29
It’s almost um an automatic insight that they have with all the different types of uh elements that present themselves with the young person. So I suppose um rattling on a bit here, uh, as I worked through um with, with national fostering agency, I could see, along with my other senior colleagues, the more work, more work that needed to be done, um. And when I left, uh, um, nfa, or my quasi-retirement, so to speak, switching, I was fortunate enough to maintain my children’s services development group role, and, you know, as chair there an independent chair, because my company I actually work for are not members, that is, you know, a small membership organization of larger companies yes um.
Andrew: 16:30
You know, 90 percent of their um, their settings, are all rated outstanding or good. So the quality thresholds are there. But importantly, we can’t all say, because we’re we’re all outstandingly, you won’t have issues. You know, you’ve worked with children long enough to know that one issue and all sorts of things can go wrong. But they have an infrastructure set up to deal with a problem if a problem occurs at a grassroots level. Part of that also in the UK. It’s a mixed economy. Part of that also in the UK. It’s a mixed economy.
Andrew: 17:05
Overall in children’s services maybe 40, 43% of services are delivered by the independent sector and the rest by the state. But in England alone we have 150 plus local authorities with their own character, their own style, their own political backgrounds etc. So things are always done slightly differently. But legally the local authority is the corporate parent of a child in care and that counts as statutory obligations. And when you see the rises that we’ve talked about in volumes, you can actually see what the problem could be when one the legislation doesn’t change for it but sadly, when the funding doesn’t keep pace, yeah, yeah. So what worries me in today’s society is, you know, we don’t want the child to become a transaction People that are looking after and have responsibility for that child to look and say what does that child need? What does that young person need? How best can we work with them to deliver the right things they need to transition into adulthood?Colby: 18:23
And those questions, andrew, that you pose. They’re predicated on people who work in the sector having the time to stop and think about the young person and think about their needs and think about what services would be of assistance to them and what the outcomes look like. As it is, I think, in probably a great many jurisdictions around the world, including my own jurisdiction here in South Australia the exponential increase in the number of children coming into care, coupled with not enough funding to keep pace with that, has meant that the work has become more procedural and less reflective is how I put it.
Andrew: 19:12
I totally agree with you. You then look, and it doesn’t really matter which country you’re in certainly Australia or the UK most of the original legislation was created in the late 90s. Now, in the late 90s, bringing up a child was in a certain, you know, type of environment and setting. Today, the society doesn’t relate at all to what it was in the 90s. You know pressures on individual children, I mean especially with all the things they’re exposed to on social media, and you know the use of the internet and the you know lack of development of, you know, interaction with, with people. There’s 101 different things that people far more qualified than I can can recognize my, my view from, from, from trying to persuade the government to look at it. What’s appropriate to children and young people today is different to what it was 25 years ago. Yeah, you know, and you need then to reflect the type of service that you give them. If you take residential care.
Andrew: 20:26
Um, with residential, there are some children that benefit from being in residential care, whether that’s, you know, physical or mental or sensory, whatever it might be, there will be a need for residential care to be provided. Now, over the years, the uk has ended up with the majority of residential settings being provided by the independent organizations you know. Probably two-thirds of of local authorities do not either have any residential facilities or very few, and that’s just the way the the market goes. But then you have to question what type of child do we put into a residential care? What type of young person, what’s best for them? And you go back to saying what is it that young person needs? I know, and you know, that young person needs to be in a family orientated setting. Yep, foster care is by far the best setting for most children that need care outside their own families and that will provide them with a balance straightforward. So actually putting children into residential one is far more expensive, but doesn’t then bring the best out of them.
Andrew: 21:40
And then you take the next bit what other support do they need going around their foster care? What sort of trauma have they been through in their lives? Because, let’s face it, originally they’re in situations which they did not create themselves. So they they’re. Whether it’s, whether the families they’re born into, the situations they’re born into, was no original fault of their own. So therefore, once you understand that and saying right, okay, quite a lot of them could go into fostering. When they’re in fostering. Well support do we need to give the foster carers in order to deal with it? And secondly, what emotional support can they give them to get them through to their adulthood?
Andrew: 22:24
And in a lot of instances it is more than just training the foster carers. You do need external professionals to come in and help, particularly on the mental health side, in in being able to allow these young people to understand why their behavior is like it is, and then that in turn impacts on education, so they may be fall out of school. They’re excluded from school. Um, their, their, their learning becomes more inward looking and and here it just doesn’t happen. So, he’s, all right, you need some special educational needs.
Andrew: 23:02
Um, yeah, the best place for any child to to survive is within mainstream education, but the mainstream education has got to have the right facilities to encourage that young person, because they need to integrate back into the mainstream run in order to develop the social skills they need. And again, in a lot of instances mainstream school may not be the right place because there are here one-to-ones that probably need. I know schools where you have individual pupils that are probably needed. I know schools where you have individual pupils that are residential that require two or three adults 24-7. In those instances you put the price tag on that. That’s phenomenal. It might cost a lot of money, but that’s where the service is built around the child. So I’d love to go back to a situation where the social workers that are dealing with the child at the front line they’re dealing with a family where the where the child has come from, and they’re looking and say the foster care is where the child is planned to go, that they look at the matching skills behind it and they’re the ones that say this is the best setting for that child.
Andrew: 24:15
Yeah, doesn’t happen anymore. As you know, it goes up to. Well, this is, this is a transactional thing and this person x y z child x y z. You know that’s going to cost us this. That’s one of the alternatives that cost. Um, I don’t think that’s right, but I understand why we’ve got to that. But that’s looking and currently in the UK legislation is being changed phenomenally. There’s a big new bill going through Parliament currently which will bring a lot of things up to date, but that will require a lot of implementation.
Colby: 24:55
So you might have an Act of Parliament that’s passed, but then you’ve got to implement it, and that means detailed changes to regulation, to guidelines, which will take some time and look, there’s so much in that, in what you were talking about, and I think you’ve really laid it out in terms of that exponential increase in young people ending up in care in the UK over the last couple of decades.
Colby: 25:25
I want to take you back to your role in the National Fostering Agency and you talked a little bit earlier about recruitment of foster carers and I guess one of the biggest challenges has been, with that increase of young people coming into care, that there’s been a need to really step up the recruitment and you’ve been competing, I guess as well, recruitment, and you’ve been competing, I guess as well, with other independent bodies that came into the marketplace, so to speak. I’m really interested to hear about and I’m sure our listeners will be about the recruitment of foster carers, your experience as when you’re in the National Fostering Agency, what you thought helped or hindered that process of securing enough quality foster carers.
Andrew: 26:26
Yeah, I think, if you go back to the basics of foster care recruitment, it’s you need to attract the right person for the right reasons in the first instance, um, and going back a number of years, there was a situation where you could assure them well, actually, you’re not doing it all for nothing.
Andrew: 26:45
You are being given fees in which to cover your costs and and the time that you spend, because there there is a statute tax benefit statute in the UK which we managed a couple of years ago to get doubled so that they can have these fees which won’t attract income tax, and that’s part of it in today’s cost of living crisis. But going back to your original question, there’s a sort of rule of thumb. Really. Most people react to something on the third prompt. So, if you get interest from somebody who may have watched a tv program where fostering has been involved, and many of the soap operas, um, certainly in the uk, which I’m sure are broadcast in australia as well um have had storylines based around fostering now, I know that because we advised on on a number of them and you’re watching that and you think, oh, you know, you know our kids are getting older or left home empty nesters, all that sort of thing maybe we could foster.
Andrew: 27:52
And they think about it, um, and and, as they’re going through their daily life, they might see an article in a magazine, they might see something online, they might look at one of your podcasts, um, or they, they, they might see huge recordings, I mean, whatever it might be, might then be a second prompt and then probably a year or months or whatever later, they will come across a situation that they recognize on the how, the call to action, how to do it, and this could have a period of a few months, or typically that is over a year or so. Whilst people think about it, you know, and they then they’re, they’re moving from oh, it’s in there to. Well, actually, we really need to look about this now that at that point, whoever is providing the service and whomsoever they contact need to be aware of community and location. It is no good somebody in the north of england talking to somebody on the south coast telling them what it’s like on the south coast. They would need to talk to somebody in their, their vicinity, part of their community, that say in our community we have this number of children that need looking after. These are the types of children they are, and this is where you could make a good difference in that dialogue explaining the child and then understanding from the potential foster carers where they feel their skills like, bearing in mind that none of them would necessarily, apart from bringing up their own children, would would have any knowledge, and that’s when you talk to them about. Well, if you’re interested in looking after teenagers, then the type of training we give you will help you deal with situations you will come across and you know where your own, your own experience with your own teenagers is hugely helpful, but these probably are not as typical as your own kids would be. So that’s the process, then. Is is talking to them and not pressurizing and understanding what they have to go through to get it. Now, that’s part of it, and once I think, ok, I’m going to put my toes in the water and I’m going to fill in this application form, which is hugely long, can make the difference in talking to people and explaining this is hard, but the results are worth it.
Andrew: 30:41
And and going through the assessment process is challenging. Uh, it does go, you know. It does dig into your innermost thoughts, your personal life. It’s, you know. It can expose an awful lot of things. It talks to your family, all sorts of stuff. Yeah, for all the right reasons, because safeguarding is paramount for the child.
Andrew: 31:01
Um, so going back again is how do you approach people now in today’s society? Can let’s come up to date. Now you’ve got metropolitan cities? Uh, you know, you’ve know, london, manchester, birmingham, melbourne, sydney, etc. Property prices through the roof. If you’re in london and you’ve got a couple of spare rooms and you want to, should we say, increase your money into the household, you could probably rent the room out to to somebody for a lot more than you would get fostering. So therefore the property value becomes an issue.
Andrew: 31:39
You then have a lot of exposure in the media about accusations and allegations from children and young people and that people will say do I really want to go through that?
Andrew: 31:53
Yeah, because if you look through, you know, and yes, you know, these things happen and sometimes they’re they’re not good. I can mention a couple of cases in the uk where immediately, you would be fully aware of what what it was about, but there are also allegations made that aren’t uh, you know, aren’t true, and that has a huge effect on potential foster carers in the first place. Yeah, so the balance of how you talk to foster carers or potential foster carers when they’re interested is really, really important understanding, understanding their motivation. If I were talking to somebody that wanted to go into it, I would ask them what they were worried about first, what worries you about becoming a foster care? Because that way you’re bringing it to the front and not leaving it in the background somewhere, so that halfway through their assessment they’ve had enough. When they go to the more difficult training, well, you know what to do with, with restraint and all that sort of stuff um, you know they’re more equipped for that.
Andrew: 33:08
So, apart from recruitment, there’s also retention of foster carers yeah yeah, particularly those maybe had a bad experience or who haven’t been able to manage a particular placement and there’s been a placement breakdown. You then got to look at how you deal with that. Um, I’m at a couple in london and, um, they’d been long-term foster carers. They have three young people. They were full-time, they didn’t have other jobs. One young person was disabled but they went on all the relevant training to deal with his disability Great. They had a couple of other young people in one who had special educational needs and one who was a great kid with the other two. That makes sense.
Andrew: 34:03
And when one of the children moved on, they then turned to preparing babies for adoption, which the adoption process can be interminably long, even for little babies, and often they would have those babies from, you know, a couple of days old or a few weeks old, through to two or three. During that period, in order that child develops, they have to attach. So the child itself is going through the normal procedure and this couple were phenomenal at this and and the problem happens then when an adoptive parent is found and they then go through a number of months when they’re working with the adoptive family to transfer across and, you know all the usual things about the day-to-day routine, and then the day comes when the baby is handed over or the young child is handed over. They maintain contact for questions, questions, that sort of thing. And then we found the.
Andrew: 35:11
It was almost like a bereavement process for the foster carers. How then do we counsel them to? You know, they know what they’ve done is for the best interest of the young person child, but how do they deal with the emotional side of then relinquishing those two or three years and relinquishing, uh, and then the, um, the, the husband, um, he used to go for about three days into his shed for the bottom of the gut and bang nails into bits of wood and scream and yell at himself to get out that, yeah, um. So we, we developed at that point, uh, quite a lot of, uh, little bits of counseling that will wrap around them, make sure that they went through the process and realized they weren’t on their own. But that is a a difficulty within fostering. If you’re doing that, I so admire those people because you know you’re you’re an attachment specialist. I mean, I, I would struggle with that.
Colby: 36:23
I don’t know if you would uh, to perform the role Absolutely, and certainly for the children as well. I mean, children will not be unaffected by this process as well, and one of the things that you’ve talked about in terms of the recruitment of foster carers is that balance of what you say to them, how you prepare them in the early stages of them expressing their interest and then through the assessment process. And what I heard you say is that it’s important to be realistic and it’s. It’s interesting because I um, I have in in an earlier part of my career, I was involved in inter-country adoption assessments, assessing couples who wanted to adopt children, uh, from overseas, and everything was upbeat about it. You know, these were people who were going to ensure that children grew up in a family environment as opposed to an institution in a third world country, and it was also very positive.
Colby: 37:36
And then there was a movie that was made about the two lads that were adopted by a. Well, two lads were adopted by a couple in New Zealand from India. It centred around one of those particular lads and I cannot remember the name of it, but it was a very good portrayal of how complicated it is raising children who have experienced relational traumas or attachment traumas, at the least. And if a child has grown up in a family until they’re three and then they go to another family, there are consequences associated with that. And I’m well and truly on the side of being as open and transparent as we can be about both, both the the blessings and the and the curses, so to speak, because I think people need to be, they need to be prepared, and then that feeds into retention, of course, because you you don’t want people who find six months in 12 months, in two years, into providing a placement or placements that this is not what they were told it was going to be, because then you’ve got potential um harm for them, the foster, the foster parents who have to relinquish children because it is not what they were expecting.
Colby: 39:18
Usually they’ve not felt supported enough or that the decisions that are taken by the child protection authorities are run counter to what they think should happen. And in my jurisdiction, and I’m sure in plenty of others, birth family connection and birth family contact is one of those vexed issues, those vexed issues. So it’s not only is it tremendously impactful for foster carers to come to the realisation that this is not what they signed up for and that it is harming them in some way. But then those children as well, those children that have been in their home, the impact for them of a foster placement that has to come to an end. A lot of what you’re saying is really resonating with me. If you can’t tell the story, warts and all then how can people be prepared for it?
Andrew: 40:22
Yes, and I think you have to be truthful and establish what their worries are. But then you must also outline the benefits. Just to give you another example, a couple I know have three young people with them a brother and sister and now a six or seven-year-old. And the two older children were in a bit of a state when they arrived and this couple have done some amazing work with them, to the extent that um the issues with with family contacts was were dealt with. Um, and the two older children are now in a position to choose and select, and they chose no further family contact. It was their choice and they had all the right support in doing it. But the older children now, when they get to 18, want to change their name to that of their foster carers. That’s an amazingly successful placement where the two older children have been there eight, nine years now and they feel as if they’re in a fully fledged family environment. But they are also working with their foster parents on a younger child that’s come in who has been through a very traumatic time, and the youngsters are helping and I just think that’s quite wonderful.
Andrew: 41:59
So I suppose what you’ve got to, you’ve got to look at, is we often hear. Well, we regularly hear when things go wrong. What you don’t hear about is when things go right, and you know there, there are so many wonderful stories out there where things go right. Um, and it’s getting that balance. My other hobby horse is what happens at 18 um, because the law tell me what you think the law at the moment in the uk at 18 is?
Andrew: 42:26
Tell me what you think the law at the moment in the UK. 18 is a cliff edge for young people Transition into adulthood, Up to 18, there is a corporate parent structure where there are statutory obligations and they’re dealing with one agency. Day after their 18th birthday they deal with eight, nine, ten different agencies. Now you tell me what young person at 18 that’s had a pretty traumatic upbringing being stabilized by by good foster carers? How on earth are they going to cope with that? You know it’s your own children. You don’t kick out at 18. The downside is, whilst there’s a lot of rhetoric going on about it, the foster carers who make their life as foster carers, so the fees they receive per their mortgage and their bills and things like that, have no option, option at 18.
Andrew: 43:28
But if they’ve got a spare room, move on to the next young person coming in. If the older child is to say, there is a facility called staying put in the uk but the finances of that don’t work for the foster carer. So you imagine you’ve got. You know we did some uh cstg quite a lot of research a few years ago in terms of what happens to kids post 18. 23 of the uk prison population has been through the care system or contact with the care system. Yeah, there are 18 plus are seven times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.
Andrew: 44:12
We worked with a couple of homeless charities and the number of young people that were sofa hopping because they had nowhere to live. Because they had nowhere to live it. How on earth do we expect them to move into and become self-sufficient when we don’t track them through? So my advocacy at the moment is we need to do something to take on. And yes, there is statutory legislation. You get the the uh, the rhetoric back that they should do this. We look after laughed until they’re 25. Yes, the law is there that highlights that at a senior level, but where is the practical input.
Andrew: 44:56
You look at the stats and how many kids have lost contact with their original corporate parent. Therefore, we haven’t tracked where they’ve gone. And in today’s society they they fall so much easy, easily into the wrong areas. They become more statistics. There was a study done by the national economic foundation a number of years ago now probably more years than I care to remember. I think it still brings true every pound that was invested in a looked after child will have a life cycle of 16 pounds. As you go through now you hear the numbers on that. It’s huge amounts of money. If you reduce the number of looked after children or children that’ve been through the care system in prison, you release almost a billion pounds worth of cost out of the justice system.
Colby: 45:51
Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to hear it, but Graham Kerridge was a very interesting podcast guest of mine, one of the earlier podcasts. He’d worked at the beginning of his career in the Cotswold community and had thereafter gone into international health development, health management quite an illustrious career. But he got me thinking about well. He was very interested in human capital and that was what led him to get involved in social care at the beginning of his career. And when we create a better life for a young person, we’re also creating a better life for their long-term partner, their children and their grandchildren. Potentially that human capital created is intergenerational in effect, and also, as you say, the services that and this is tied up in the whole early intervention movement and the rationale behind its importance. But if we can keep our young people out of institutions like the justice institutions, there’s an untold capital almost.
Colby: 47:15
When you’re talking about well, another podcast guest of mine you’ve touched on it a couple of times, but her name is Adela Holmes. She had this. It sends a chill down your spine quote that the great aspiration of children in care, children who have grown up in care, is an ordinary life. And wouldn’t that be great if they could just have an ordinary life, have their own children successfully raise those children, have grandchildren, and the saving not just the saving but the benefit to society of that happening is You’re so right because there’s been some fiscal studies on early intervention that if you invest one pound up front you’ll double your returns very quickly.
Andrew: 48:16
Up front in the early years will just save you so much money going forward. And that’s perhaps trying to change the narrative of how chancellors of the Exchequer and treasury ministers look at spending. It’s all short-term budget now, because maybe in five years time or 10 years time they’re no longer going to be in power. They’re not worried about that. Yeah, I would love a politician to say if we spend this now, these are the benefits of the country over 10, 15 years and you drive through.
Andrew: 48:49
You talked about the human capital. Now you take that and I want an ordinary life. So my human capital is going to develop. I will get a job, I will pay my taxes, I will have a partner, I will have children. They will grow up in a more secure environment. They will grow up in a more secure environment. They will grow up normally. Of course they’re going to need health care and dental care and schooling and that sort of stuff, but hopefully then they will move into job. So you then start creating revenue for the country as well.
Andrew: 49:20
Incidentally, but the person that kicked it all off the child account wanted an ordinary life. But the person that kicked it all off the child account wanted an ordinary life gets their wish granted and they become happy, as contented as they could. But they could best they could possibly be as a human being, and it doesn’t matter if you, you know, rich as creases or as poor as a church mouse. It’s about are you content as a human being that you’ve done your very best in everything that you do? And if you could give those young people the skills to be as good as they could possibly be, then that investment early on pays huge dividends to society. Every time you open a newspaper or you look online at news, there’s some sort of disaster regarding young people or you know young families. There’s a major crisis going on and you think, if you went back, how could that have been avoided? For a kickoff not knocking the backside out of early start, you know, 15, 20 years ago. I wonder if you can come back to that yeah, yeah.
Andrew: 50:33
It is something, but I mean it is what it is and we are where we are, but now we need to make sure that the money invested is invested correctly. The best place for any child that needs non-family you know none non-birth family help is in a family environment. It’s the same the whole world over. But I think the focus on that but it’s the short term the short-termism by governments all over the world is probably a fault there.
Colby: 51:06
Yeah.
Andrew: 51:07
And the narrative, the whole narrative needs to change, but change in any first world country takes time. And it’s not, you know it’s not political gold. That’s the problem. You know, the problem is always going to be there and children’s services tend to be a Cinderella service across the world.
Colby: 51:30
What do you mean by that? Sorry?
Andrew: 51:33
What do you mean by that? A Cinderella service that it’s out of sight, out of mind? If it’s just plodding along, that’s fine. The minute it makes a headline, something done about it, yeah. But most of the time it doesn’t make the headlines, because the much more interesting things that you know that politicians say and do that people want to read about and I don’t think the societal change over the last couple of decades is is reflected in how we look after our children. These days we’re very much reliant on processes, procedures, and we’ve always done it this way. That’s right.
Colby: 52:18
Somebody needs to make a change. That’s a nice spot to pause and reflect on. I mean, we were talking about it early on and I said that whenever you’re in a or I would say that whenever your resources are stretched, you’re time poor and otherwise your resources are stretched in whatever role that you’re performing. We do have a. There seems to be a human inclination to become very procedural. This is how we’ve always done it Stop thinking, stop stopping and thinking, but just becoming very procedural and I’ve said it in a number of podcasts Our service delivery, in those circumstances where we’re not thinking about ourselves and not thinking about the person, the recipient of our services, when they’re received procedural, they can be quite heartless and that that’s, that’s not a good outcome. Andrew, thank you for agreeing to come on. I always there’s so much I could talk to you about. There was so much in there that I could follow up on, and maybe, if you came, we might set up another time down the track a little ways and explore it a little bit more.
Andrew: 53:44
I particularly would love to talk to you more about the Children’s Services development group, um, as well yeah, yeah, quietly in the background, they do a huge amount of work to try and let politicians understand what the real world of children’s services is about yeah, yeah now, andrew, yeah yeah, well, I’d love to as well.
Colby: 54:10
Now, I always always well these. I’ve started a trend of giving my my podcast guests an opportunity to ask me a question at the end of the podcast.
Andrew: 54:18
I wonder if there’s a question without notice you’d like to um launch onto me, so to speak well, I think one of one of the things that I’ve always uh you know, admired, enjoyed and agreed with is how can we teach ordinary folk, whether they be parents, foster carers or workers in our sector, how can we give them simple tools to help with making children more resilient to their circumstances? What would you say, the simple tools that foster carers, ordinary parents, can use when they’re helping children, so those children in today’s society become more resilient?
Colby: 55:10
Yeah, well, it’s a good question. I think I don’t know if I’m aligned with others or a little bit different from others, but I often think that complex problems are not easily solved with complex solutions. Yeah, and in actual fact, the solved with complex solutions? Yeah, and in actual fact, the problem with complex solutions, such that they depart from conventional caregiving, they’re hard to implement and they’re hard to sustain over time. And our children, particularly our children, who have experienced disruption, attachment disruption, loss and trauma in their life, if there’s one thing that that triggers them, that gets them going, is inconsistency.
Colby: 56:02
So the last thing you want to do, I think, is to advocate an approach to caregiving of our young people that is even difficult to implement in the first place, but certainly difficult to maintain over time, and particularly in the face of our young people. You know the ship doesn’t turn around quickly very often, and and and people can lose hope, you know, or lose faith in, in, in the worth of of strategies, and then they’ll revert back to some other previous approach. Now that’s the big problem is the reverting back. So our young people, just you know they’re left with thinking, oh, are you going to be like this or are you going to be like that? Are you going to be like that and how long is going to be like that? Are you going to be like that, and how long is that going to go on for before you end up coming back? So my view is that we need to have a look at conventional aspects of caregiving and relating that are very powerful and very important to the recovery, the reasonable recovery, that we can expect our young people to make. I say that because I think we’re all impacted by what happens during our childhood, and the best of us and everyone else as well, and so I think our children retain some enduring sensitivities, but we can put them on that path that you talk about of being resilient to challenges in life, of achieving that goal of an ordinary life where we um, where they get um, caregiving, that um is conventional, so it doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb, it’s not triggering. This is this is not what I’ve seen or experienced before necessarily um, and I say that because all kids who come into care have experienced some level of conventional care prior to removal. It’s just been inadequate, grossly inadequate often enough, but conventional approaches to caregiving and relating are still recognisable to the children. So all that by way of our children coming to care. Often enough, they’ve had a disrupted period of growth and development at the beginning of their life.
Colby: 58:40
So the things that we know that support happy, healthy babies and positive growth and development are things like a fairly consistent home environment with consistent carers, caregivers. Those caregivers are there for them, are accessible to them. They don’t spend a long time away from the infants. If they do move away, they check in on them frequently and in in doing that, the infant first learns you’re the people that look after me and later learns you’ll still be there to look after me even when I can’t see you hear, you smell, you touch, you taste you. In those circumstances they develop an appropriate understanding that that the people who look after them truly are there for them, are accessible to them.
Colby: 59:37
When their tummy is feeling uncomfortable after a feed, they get burped. When their nappy’s feeling a bit uncomfortable and wet and yucky, they get changed. When they’re needing comfort, they get held. When they’re tired, they get put to sleep. When they’re hungryucky, they get changed when they want to. When they’re needing comfort, they get held. When they’re tired, they get put to sleep. When they’re hungry, they get fed.
Colby: 59:56
So the infant’s experience is that that the people who look after them understand their experience, understand what’s going on for them, and they can trust you can trust this person because they understand me. And then they and and not only do they understand what’s going on for me, they respond to what I need, and when I’m happy, they’re happy. When I’m sad, they’re sad. When I’m screaming the house down, they’re looking like they’re about to have a meltdown, but then they get themselves under control and they come back and they calm down. And that’s so reassuring for me as a small child that I can trust this person to understand me in their thoughts, in their words, in their actions and in their expressed emotions. But they will then help me regulate back to a calm and contented place.
Colby: 1:00:50
So you did ask the question. This is a rather long answer, but what I’m really getting to is that those things that were really key during infancy and early childhood, that were often inadequate in our children in care, they’re the things that we need to enrich and put back in and make sure that our young people have a really good experience of it. It might look a bit different to how you do it with a baby, undoubtedly, unless you’ve got a baby in your care, it will look different. But what you want is a household that has some things that are consistent about it that the care that is delivered, including these other things I’m going to say, are delivered consistently. That you check in with the child or young person proactively. You just bob your head in, see how they’re going, so that they have the experience that you’re thinking of them, aware of them, and you’re there for them. That when you bob your head in, you notice what they’re doing In your words, rather than asking a question, you might say to them oh, you’re really getting into that game. I’ve seen you watching a lot of this program. You obviously love it. But they experience this as understanding them, just as the infant does when we change them when it needs changed or we feed them when they’re hungry, and that we, we anticipate some of their requests, their reasonable requests, that we would respond to and we delete. We respond to them without them having to ask their experiences. Wow, the I can trust this person. They understand my needs and respond to them without me having to push their buttons and pulling their strings.
Colby: 1:02:35
And play is every carer’s superpower. When you play, we fall into sync the adult and the child. You know we have a good time together, there’s good moments of emotional connection, and then the adult doesn’t let it go too far and they regulate back to calm and the kids come with us. They’re not, they’re not difficult. I mean a good example.
Colby: 1:03:00
Often our kids love all kids love hide and seek. But often our kids in out-of-home care really love hide and seek but they’re really bad at it because they can’t that when, when you get them to go and hide, they can’t hide without calling out I’m here, you’re getting close to the cup again, because they want to be found. That hide and seek such a great game because it it it helps children to tolerate temporary separations. But for our kids in care, it’s a great game because it helps them to experience that they will be found. So there you go.
Colby: 1:03:43
That was probably a 10-minute answer. You might have anticipated a five-minute one. But, yeah, being consistent, being consistent, accessible, responsive and emotionally connected to our kids, that’s the what I would. Um, yeah, thank you. Thank you again, andrew. Now, andrew, I’m gonna do something that, um, you’re the first person I’m going to do this, for it was a suggestion that was made by my colleague and somewhat of a silent partner for this podcast, Patrick Tomlinson. He has suggested it might be a good idea to get podcast guests to think of a question for the next guest. Now, I think that would be a little bit hard, a bit rough, unless you knew who the next guest was. So I’m going to tell you and I’m not going to tell anyone else, thank you.
