Now this cut back in public spending is a terrible thing to behold
Things that were here yesterday just are not here today.
We have taken a 10 year holiday from what we would call proper fostering. Not strictly true as we have done some quite complex work with the D's.
We are though completely yesterdays fostering as we live 100 miles from Daycasle and fostered children must be kept inside the county
Of course when it's us or a 3000 pounds a week residential placement we can seem suddenly oh so very attractive again.
You might know that we have done some piece work recently, last week we got called up about another young person.
Years ago when we first started, information about young people got shoved at us in droves. One day we went out and came home to find that the whole fresh roll of fax paper was all over the kitchen as we copped for the lot and got left to sift through it.
Then we went through a phase where only "professionals" could read files and we were excluded from information we needed to guarantee day to day safety.
Examples of this are someone who was a suicide risk and this being deemed confidential and so we did not "need to know".
There were also cases where things that put other children in the house at serious risk were withheld, in one case the looked after children would be removed if a former young person came to the house as the service had to protect them, there were 4 of our children living here who of course could be placed at risk
But anyway I digress
We have significant progress, today no child is placed without a "risk assessment".
We don't actually get a copy of this, it could after all get a bit embarrassing if this turned out to be wrong.
We get a risk assessment read to us over the phone, not by the person who did it but by a fostering officer who is not of course a social worker registered with the care council but basically a flunky
So we have had this delivered about this young lad and it seems we are a bit challenging.
"He was very rude and aggressive to a Police Officer but apologised later"
Fine by me but the question I wanted to know about was why the copper was there in the first place.
Was I being silly asking that?
It was question too hard time.
We got through things with a raft of other questions which eventually got answered this morning along with an announcement that the social worker then was not his social worker now.
We do a lot of talk about placements changing but what about social workers too, This is not at all directed at them as of course they should get out of bad teams but about their managers who should keep them on side, who should be explaining why they are losing their staff at hemorrhage rate. That could be some conversation: "The budget you set means the workload is impossible so the staff are leaving in droves" is another of those hard to put in the tick box things.
Lets go back to this lad though, Where things got well uncomfortable was our suggestion that we didn't need to speak to the social worker, we needed to speak to the mum who was struggling to cope, to find out what was really going on. Put another way, we had received the third hand information about this young person, we wanted the issues from the mouth of the horse.
Suggesting that the services role was to work holistically and identify what would need to go in to enable this family to hang together and deliver good enough parenting for this young man is about good social work not being a social worker.
There wasn't a box for that on the form that could be ticked for that either. It's about doing the job not filling the form.
There seems to be a culture that makes it all about National Occupational Standards that are about lists of competencies, filling in forms and not doing what people need and our daft idea that we need to speak to mum and determine what would make it work are really dangerous.
How this fits in with personalisation and how this reflects what this young man needs is beyond me.
I know there are both practitioners and academics reading this, your answers would be welcome..
Rhys
Things that were here yesterday just are not here today.
We have taken a 10 year holiday from what we would call proper fostering. Not strictly true as we have done some quite complex work with the D's.
We are though completely yesterdays fostering as we live 100 miles from Daycasle and fostered children must be kept inside the county
Of course when it's us or a 3000 pounds a week residential placement we can seem suddenly oh so very attractive again.
You might know that we have done some piece work recently, last week we got called up about another young person.
Years ago when we first started, information about young people got shoved at us in droves. One day we went out and came home to find that the whole fresh roll of fax paper was all over the kitchen as we copped for the lot and got left to sift through it.
Then we went through a phase where only "professionals" could read files and we were excluded from information we needed to guarantee day to day safety.
Examples of this are someone who was a suicide risk and this being deemed confidential and so we did not "need to know".
There were also cases where things that put other children in the house at serious risk were withheld, in one case the looked after children would be removed if a former young person came to the house as the service had to protect them, there were 4 of our children living here who of course could be placed at risk
But anyway I digress
We have significant progress, today no child is placed without a "risk assessment".
We don't actually get a copy of this, it could after all get a bit embarrassing if this turned out to be wrong.
We get a risk assessment read to us over the phone, not by the person who did it but by a fostering officer who is not of course a social worker registered with the care council but basically a flunky
So we have had this delivered about this young lad and it seems we are a bit challenging.
"He was very rude and aggressive to a Police Officer but apologised later"
Fine by me but the question I wanted to know about was why the copper was there in the first place.
Was I being silly asking that?
It was question too hard time.
We got through things with a raft of other questions which eventually got answered this morning along with an announcement that the social worker then was not his social worker now.
We do a lot of talk about placements changing but what about social workers too, This is not at all directed at them as of course they should get out of bad teams but about their managers who should keep them on side, who should be explaining why they are losing their staff at hemorrhage rate. That could be some conversation: "The budget you set means the workload is impossible so the staff are leaving in droves" is another of those hard to put in the tick box things.
Lets go back to this lad though, Where things got well uncomfortable was our suggestion that we didn't need to speak to the social worker, we needed to speak to the mum who was struggling to cope, to find out what was really going on. Put another way, we had received the third hand information about this young person, we wanted the issues from the mouth of the horse.
Suggesting that the services role was to work holistically and identify what would need to go in to enable this family to hang together and deliver good enough parenting for this young man is about good social work not being a social worker.
There wasn't a box for that on the form that could be ticked for that either. It's about doing the job not filling the form.
There seems to be a culture that makes it all about National Occupational Standards that are about lists of competencies, filling in forms and not doing what people need and our daft idea that we need to speak to mum and determine what would make it work are really dangerous.
How this fits in with personalisation and how this reflects what this young man needs is beyond me.
I know there are both practitioners and academics reading this, your answers would be welcome..
Rhys
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