It will take all society to make Care Review wishes come true

Fiona Duncan's much anticipated Independent Care Review, which has been three years in the making and took on board an unprecedented scope of experience, has been scathing in its findings.

We currently have just shy of 15,000 young people in care and the outlook for those young people falls far, far short of what is anticipated for children and young adults who are not looked after or accommodated.

They are more likely to end up homeless, some 45 per cent will experience mental health issues, around 30 per cent will become unemployed. School attainment figures show a broad gap between what is achieved by looked after children and what is achieved by non-looked after children.

There is a gulf between pupils in the care system who are excluded from school and their peers who are not.

Damage done from a poor experience of being looked after away from home - whether in foster care, kinship care or a residential unit - is devastating and life long. It has a huge emotional cost and also a financial cost to society as we fund the inputs needed to try to correct, or at least support, the worst impacts of poor early experience.

Ms Duncan's report, in essence, recommends ripping up the system and building it anew while putting love at the very centre of everything that involves children from families where external and internal pressures mean they are not receiving the best possible childhood.

The care review details what must happen to make life in Scotland equitable for children from care and non-care backgrounds.

Many of the issues raised in the report are familiar reading to anyone involved in the "care system": children and families feel they are not listened to; there is not enough support in place for these families; outcomes, as detailed, are poorer for care experienced children.

What will also be familiar are many of the recommendations - because these are things that should already be happening: early intervention and prevention; children's homes and foster carers providing loving environments; children being put at the centre of decisions, particularly at children's hearings. The report, for example, says: "At the moment it is only children who have to go to [children's] hearings. Scotland needs to think very hard about whether Local Authorities, families and social workers also need to be made to go to Hearings."

Families are already compelled to attend hearings and social workers routinely attend. That these basics are not taking place is cause for real concern.

The solutions detailed in the report are easy - centre love; support families; support the workers who are responsible for supporting families; rely more on social connections rather than professionals; keep children at home wherever possible; do not separate sibling groups.

It is the "how" that is far more difficult. How does a vast and contrasting system dramatically alter in order to make perfection reality?

Within what is a comprehensive report that will require real societal and community change as well as professional change, Ms Duncan creates a wishlist that does not detail the implications of demands, leaving questions still to be answered.

A team will now be set up to form a plan to deliver the changes proposed in the review. It has a daunting task ahead of it.

Ms Duncan is critical of the bureaucracy that surrounds the care system. Much of this, though, is designed to protect both children and the adults working with them. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, it will be interesting to see how those involved with children's care can be encouraged to balance child protection with a more relaxed, open and intimate relation to children.

For a long time now adults have been encouraged to maintain a professional distance from children that removes, say, friendly touch from interactions. Breaking that instinct down and rebuilding it will be a difficult task.

A theme of the report is supporting families but, again, the how is missing. Not all families want to accept support. Is this because it is unsuitable and needs to be redesigned? Or is it because trauma or violence or addiction or mental health issues or poverty prevents them? The care system cannot address this issue in isolation. We need a massive investment in mental health services, a health-based approach to drugs services and ways of lifting families out of poverty.

Involving parents who don't want to or cannot make changes to their lives is no straightforward task.

The Scottish Government is addressing these issues separately, yes, but it has to be acknowledged on a broader level that social workers are constrained when wider societal issues are not supported.

Care experienced young people have clearly said they do not want to be separated from their brothers and sisters, a view the Care Review has supported. To ensure sibling groups stay together, foster carers with the skills and facilities - large enough homes - will have to be found who can accommodate three, four, five or more children together.

This is no easy task to address and, again, solutions are missing from the review. If there is no foster placement that can home a large sibling group, what is the alternative? Leave them in an unsafe home? And do we keep children together at all costs, even when it might not be in the interests of all children to be together?

Most vital is the question of how we fill the care system with love but Ms Duncan declines to define what this means. Children in care know when it is someone's job to look after them yet the foster care system is becoming more professionalised. Social workers are doing a job and have the right to a work/life balance.

We also, as a society, must normalise the fact that non-familial ties can be as important as blood relations so that children may feel justified in placing the same importance on a relationship with a carer as they do with a parent or grandparent.

So much work has been done by charities to cut the stigma attached to young people who have been care experienced but the stigma is still there. It is impossible to bring love to the lives of care experienced children when society judges them.

The notion of the 'corporate parenting' was introduced to place an emphasis on ensuring organisations took a holistic view of their responsibility towards care experienced children. Perhaps 'community parenting' should take over.

The Independent Care Review is an impressive piece of work but it is merely a starting point for a great deal of work still to be done and to be done by everyone in Scottish society, whether they are a social worker or someone challenging day-to-day stigma, in order to make sure the necessary change happens.

These are complex problems and it is going to take innovative solutions to make the care review's wishes come true.