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Comment on the White Paper
The recent White Paper, Valuing
People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century,
is to be welcomed for acknowledging that support for parents
with learning difficulties is 'patchy and undeveloped'. Indeed,
Valuing People is distinguished as the first official policy
statement in the UK to recognise that there are people with learning
difficulties who are parents too. Their recognition is important
because embracing the key principles of rights, independence,
choice and inclusion, rightly promoted by the White Paper, will
undoubtedly mean that more people with learning difficulties
will make the same decision as their fellow citizens to become
a parent.
That said, the White Paper falls way short
of honestly following through its vision, that every 'individual
should have the support and opportunity to be the person he or
she wants to be' (para.2.1), in the case of those who choose
to be parents.
The call for Directors of Social Services
'to ensure effective partnership working' between children's
and adult's teams an appeal made without incentives, guidance
or sanctions is woefully inadequate, in terms of imagination
and resources alike, as a response to the yawning gaps
in support that exists for parents.
Likewise, the limp admission that 'further
work' is needed to help staff use the new Framework for the Assessment
of Children in Need and their Families, in order to 'ensure that
assessments result in appropriate services', completely fails
to address the growing evidence
of injustice perpetrated against parents with learning difficulties
and their children by a child protection process now almost fully
geared to policing as opposed to supporting families and a welfare
system that is worryingly likely to harm those it is supposed
to help. Until we pay as much attention to the destructive effects
of system abuse
as to the curse of child abuse, parents with learning difficulties
will continue to receive rough justice and their children will
get a raw deal.
The White Paper has established a principled
foundation on which to build for the future. It is evident, however,
that parents with learning difficulties present a challenge to
this strategic vision by highlighting the uncomfortable gap between
the values so clearly set out in the White Paper and the means
willed to achieve them.
The Adoption and Children
Act 2002
The Adoption and Children Act 2002 presents
a major threat to the security of families headed by a parent
or parents with learning difficulties.
The new approach to adoption embodied in
the Act heralds the biggest overhaul of adoption law in over
25 years. A key aim of the raft of reforms it has introduced
is to speed up the adoption process. Social Services Departments
are being exhorted to see adoption as 'a positive, responsible
choice'. The Government is committed to bringing about a 40 per
cent increase in the rate of adoptions. Individual councils will
be faced with performance targets for the number of adoptions
they are expected to achieve. These targets will comprise one
of the indicators in the system of Performance Rating that the
Government intends to use to reward star performing councils
and 'name and shame' the poor ones. A new Adoption and Permanence
Taskforce has been set up to work with 'under-performing' local
authorities to help them meet their targets.
These measures create a system hungry for
adoptable children. They threaten to distort the incentives that
drive social workers' decisions about what is in the best interests
of children from vulnerable families. The 'looked after' system
is full of older children, especially boys, for whom there is
a chronic scarcity of prospective adopters. Hitting targets is
more likely given a steady supply of younger, more eligible children.
Why work hard and spend money supporting families in need when
you can win more resources and avoid being shamed by placing
their children for adoption? This calculus of despair is particularly
loaded against families headed by a parent or parents with learning
difficulties.
Parents with learning difficulties already
face a high risk of having their children removed because the
odds are stacked against them. The Government's own Social
Services Inspectorate has shown how the hold of such parents
over their children is weakened by 'a "professional knows
best" culture' characterised by insufficient
knowledge, poor assessments, an over-zealous attitude to risk, a lack of
awareness of disability equality issues,
fragmented services, and serious shortcomings in service provision.
Freeing up the adoption process, without
first tackling these known defects in family support that contribute
to children entering the 'looked after' system in the first place,
marks a further turn of the screw against parents with learning
difficulties. The Government is pumping new funding into better
post-adoption supports for adoptive families without first plugging
the support gap that undermines
the coping abilities of birth families. Under the new approach
to adoption, councils are required to provide a full package
of support services, including financial help if appropriate,
to adoptive families. Yet too often it is precisely the absence
of such supports that triggers the crisis leading to children
being removed from their natural parents.
And so we end up where a young mother with
learning difficulties, coping alone with three young children
under five, in substandard housing on a rough estate, with no
support from family and precious little help from the services,
is driven by depression, and a lack of respite from the never-ending
pressures in her life, into giving up her eldest son, who's running
wild for want of a bit of discipline, as the price for holding
on to the other two, only for him to be adopted by a middle-class
professional couple who immediately qualify for 18 weeks paid
adoption leave.
The Adoption and Children Act reflects
the greater political clout of adoptive parents as against poor,
disadvantaged and disabled parents. Birth families comprising
a parent or parents with learning difficulties are least likely
to fight for their rights or attract public sympathy for their
cause. They are in no position to defend their interests or the
interests of their children. The new approach to adoption makes
it even more likely that they will lose out.
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