The challenges in planning for permanency.

Selwyn, Julie

Julie Selwyn highlights the importance of recognising children's positive relationships and ensuring that children are connected to adults who will offer a long-term commitment.

The principles of 'planning for permanency' have been around a long time. In England, the initial impetus to permanency planning came from the finding that there were large numbers of children drifting in the care system without plans made for their futures (Rowe and Lambert, 1973). At about the same time, psychologists were highlighting the poor developmental outcomes for children in care who drifted without attention paid to their relationships. The classic text Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (Goldstein et al, 1973) laid out three principles of planning:

* Placement decisions should safeguard the child's need for continuity of relationships ...

* Placement decisions should reflect the child's not the adult's sense of time ...

* Child placement decisions must take into account the law's incapacity to supervise interpersonal relationships and the limits of knowledge to make long-range predictions.

Looking again at these principles more than 30 years later, they are still as relevant today as they were in the 1970s. Indeed, a great deal of subsequent research has reinforced the importance of understanding how children's early relationships affect well-being throughout the lifespan.

Yet, the vision of a planning process that actively supported children's relationships was never realised. Very quickly, permanency planning became synonymous with making a plan for adoption and the focus on safeguarding children's relationships was replaced by an emphasis on finding a placement. Perhaps this was because the death of Maria Colwell in 1973 and the subsequent Inquiry heralded an era where the emphasis was on assessing risk, and the structures and organisations social workers operated in became increasingly legalistic and procedural. During the 1980s, permanency planning became discredited in the UK, partly because of the almost exclusive association with adoption but also because services to support birth families were severely lacking. Research, however, continued to highlight the lack of attention given to children's relationships in care planning. For example, a Dartington study (Millham et al, 1986) showed how children in care often had no meaningful links with their birth families and that the connections had withered away, leaving them isolated and without adequate support networks.

The late 1990s saw a renewed interest in permanency planning. Once again, children drifting in care, poor developmental outcomes and a build-up of long-term looked after children put pressure on the care system and sparked concerns. Another Inquiry, this time into the abuse of children in care (Waterhouse, 2000), led to a governmental review of adoption policy and practice (Performance and Innovation Unit, 2000), which was quickly followed by new legislation: the Adoption and Children Act 2002. Guidance (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2002) stressed the importance of permanency planning in reducing delay in decision-making and in securing better outcomes for children through the timely planning of a permanent placement secured by a legal order. In practice, permanency planning again quickly became associated with a one-off event--a placement and primarily an adoptive placement. The principle of ensuring all children had positive adult relationships that were able to offer life-long support was lost again and the popularity of adoption moved backwards and forwards on the seesaw of placement options.

Perhaps this came about because the importance of understanding and working with relationships (what used to be termed casework) became unfashionable. Instead, social workers became case managers, referring on work that once they would have done themselves; supervision became focused on whether tasks had been completed within a set timescale rather than on understanding the processes, systems and dynamics of working with families. The families themselves became reduced to 'service users' (or, even worse, described as 'users'). Indeed, the importance of the continuity in the relationship between the worker and the child or family was given little weight in planning, as administrative arrangements dominated decisions about when children's cases were transferred between teams. Yet, having secure positive relationships over time is at the heart of normal healthy development.

The continuity of relationships and life-long connections

Research has shown that having a network of positive social relationships means that as adults we are likely to have higher self-esteem, do better at school, be employed and have a greater sense of well-being and better health (Fursentenberg and Hughes, 1995; Scholte et al, 2001). Children need connections to adults committed to their welfare. For children abused and neglected these connections provide a buffer from the risks and vulnerabilities they carry and enable them to use the 'social scaffolding' that enduring adult relationships provide (Massingham and Pecora, 2004).

Therefore, the challenge of permanency planning is not simply to find a placement but to ensure that every child and young person has lifelong connections to people who will continue to offer positive relationships and support. The social work role in enabling and supporting these relationships is crucial, as is the belief that it is never too late to find such relationships. Of course, children's relationships can be secured by providing support and returning children to their birth families or by placing with kin. However, many children cannot be reunified and alternative positive adult relationships need to be secured.

Adoption

Finding an adoptive family is one way to provide new positive adult relationships. Research (Rushton, 2003) has shown the remarkable improvements in children's development as a result of having loving family care. Over the last 30 years, there have been many challenges to practices that exclude certain groups of children or prospective adopters from being considered for adoption, but there is evidence that some unhelpful practice continues.

It is difficult to know exactly how many children are not found an adoptive family, although it could be as many as a quarter of those with adoption recommendations. The primary reason is a lack of suitable adopters but also perhaps 'good-enough' families are being turned away. There is still suspicion of foster carers who wish to adopt and of 'non-traditional' adopters such as single parents, gay/lesbian carers (Hicks, 2005) and adopters whose motivation is not driven by infertility. In some areas of the country, prospective minority ethnic adopters are not being assessed if their ethnicity and religion does not 'match' that of waiting children. In all other regards, they might make excellent parents for the many waiting white and minority ethnic children with adoption recommendations. Reluctance to pay an interagency fee or provide adequate financial support to adopters also restricts choice. There is evidence that some social workers are pessimistic about children's futures and have beliefs about which children are adoptable and that this results in reduced family-finding activity (Cousins, 2009; Selwyn et al, 2010).

The child's age is one reason why adoption may not be considered. Finding adoptive homes for older children is more challenging but usually not impossible and late-placed children can have very good outcomes (Rushton et al, 2000; Selwyn et al, 2006). The numbers of those adopted older than four years has been decreasing (Department for Education, 2009)--perhaps because younger children are easier to place and therefore local authority adoption targets are easier to meet. However, also acting as a disincentive is a belief that because the risk of disruption increases with the child's age at placement, adoption should not be attempted. It should be noted that the finding that 'the older the child the greater the risk of disruption' also holds true for children reunified with birth parents (Farmer, 2009), and those placed with kin (Hunt, 2009) and with foster carers (Sinclair, 2005). Indeed, adoption placements are usually more stable than foster and kinship care (Sinclair, 2005; Hunt, 2009; Biehal et al, 2010).

During the last 30 years, there have also been rapid developments in understanding the links between brain development and behaviour (Glaser, 2000; Tomalski and Johnson, 2010). Perry and colleagues' work (1995) on the impact of severe neglect on infant brains has become particularly well known and has led to some practitioners feeling fatalistic about the life chances of children who enter care after many years of abuse and neglect. However, we are many years away from being able to predict with any certainty those problems that progress from childhood to adulthood (Masten et al, 2004).

Less well known is the research showing that there is a significant period of brain growth during late adolescence and early adulthood (Masten et al, 2004; Avery and Freundlich, 2009). There is growing evidence that this later development period provides an important window of opportunity whereby what appeared to be a deviant pathway can be changed.

Long-term foster care

Even if every effort is made, many children will not be found adoptive families and others will not want to be adopted. Long-term foster care should be able to provide the connections and lifelong relationships that these children need, but some children remain in unhappy but 'stable' placements, while others move around the care system and are never found positive secure relationships with adults (Sinclair, 2005). Research has shown that children who grow up in a stable foster family (kin or stranger) are generally doing as well as adopted children educationally and have similar levels of mental health difficulties when measured during early adolescence (Schofield, 2009; Biehal et al, 2010). However, current policy and practice are undermining the progress children have made.

Unlike young people in adoptive families, many of those in long-term foster care are expected to manage the enormous challenges that are involved in becoming an adult without much support. Studies have shown that visits from social workers decline and only about a third of foster carers continue to provide some help as young people leave care (Stein and Munroe, 2008; Wade, 1997, 2008). It is therefore not surprising that research has highlighted the poor outcomes for young people who lack the safety net of a family and the social support for a successful transition to adulthood. The evidence suggests that it is essential that young people are able to stay connected to adults, with whom they have positive relationships, during early adulthood.

Searching for lost connections and making new relationships

There is evidence from innovative projects in the US (Landsman et al, 1999; Louisell, 2009; Avery, 2010) that it is possible to find families for young people at risk of leaving care unconnected to adults. In these projects, new families were often identified through mapping and searching young people's past and current networks. Many of these searches were led by the young person and it was they who identified people already in their life who might become a potential permanent family. Sometimes this was birth family members or relatives with whom they had lost contact, or previous carers or professionals such as residential workers or teachers, who were willing to offer the necessary long-term commitment to the young person. Relationships were secured sometimes by adoption but not always. Importantly, the workers in these projects had a strong value base, tenacity and a belief that finding adults willing to offer the necessary commitment was possible.

Three immediate points spring from the US experience. First, the engagement of the young person in the search was crucial to the success of this approach. It has been previously noted (Sinclair, 2005) that children can make or break placements depending on whether they want to be there, but in the UK we have been slow to allow young people to lead. Second, it was necessary to identify young people's networks and important relationships. Most of these young people were placed successfully with people they already knew. There seems to be resistance or suspicion in the UK if a teacher, social worker, foster carer or health professional who knows the young person steps forward and asks to be considered. It is almost as though they have crossed a boundary and become 'unprofessional'. Third, it highlights the importance of the social worker's value base and their persistence in achieving the objectives. It is clear that the possibilities for children and young people should not be limited simply because they are older, of minority ethnicity, or disabled.

How might practice change in the UK?

Making permanency planning a reality would involve prioritising the maintenance and support of children's networks and relationships at every review. It is surprising that one study recently found that social workers were not always aware of who were the important people in a young person's life (Wade, 2008). Without this basic knowledge, it is difficult to envisage how permanency planning could begin. It has been argued that permanence is a 'state of mind not a placement' (Stuart Foundation, 2002). But, we need to ask, 'Whose state of mind?' If planning for permanence continues to be 'achieved' in social workers' minds by finding a placement, it is likely that targets will continue to dominate and children will continue to leave care unconnected to supportive adults.

We need a shift in focus to prioritising children's relationships and putting the need for a stable secure relationship back at the top of the hierarchy of need. The expertise and skills currently used for child appreciation days could be adapted to consider the networks of long-term looked after children. Birth families should not be discounted, as with the passage of time they might be able to offer a home (Masson et al, 1999). Family group conferencing could also be used at different points in a young person's life, as a way of identifying important adults.

So, the challenges ahead are to make permanency planning a reality by first ensuring that children's positive relationships are recognised and supported. These relationships may be with siblings, family members, present and previous foster carers, or other professionals. Second, we should not allow any child or young person to leave care without connections in place to adults who are willing to offer lifelong support. It should never be too late for a child or young person's relationships to be supported and secured. Third, we need to see a reassertion of the importance of relationships in social workers' own day-to-day work and the understanding that it is through relationships that it is possible to bring about positive change in people's lives.

Key words: planning for permanency, adoption, children's relationships

References

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[c] Julie Selwyn 2010

Julie Selwyn is Reader and Director of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol