Kinship carers in Scotland: a lottery of support, by Heather Scally, Mentor UK

Kinship carers in Scotland: A lottery of support

by Heather Scally,
Mentor UK, Scotland

“I just felt so lost, I didn’t know where or who to turn to”

Over the last three years, Mentor has been working closely with kinship carers across Scotland as part of a European project. Our research published earlier this year, shows that a lack of support for kinship carers is still badly letting down the children in their care.

Traumatic early experiences mean around half of all children being looked after by kinship carers have serious emotional or behavioural problems. Their carers often struggle to cope and many worry that as the children reach their teenage years, they will follow their parents by turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with stress, or to fit in with their peer group.

Carers told us that they wanted support and advice in dealing with these specific issues, and also support for the children.

“My granddaughter constantly hits me. One minute she can be a lovely little girl, then she turns to this horrible monster. I just don’t know what to do with her.”

As kinship carers deal with emotional turmoil, they also face a financial drain on resources. Beds, clothes, furniture and toys must be bought and savings quickly disappear. There is no consistent definition of kinship care amongst Scotland‘s 32 local authorities and each treats kinship carers differently.

“I get £74 a week, while Sue gets £57 and Liz gets £26 and yet we are all in the same arrangement, it just doesn’t make sense.”

The lottery of financial support also extends to whether a carer receives practical help. The majority of kinship carers are not in touch with services at all, but for those who are, there is no guarantee that their social worker will have the knowledge or find the time to help them effectively. Kinship support groups can be a lifeline where they exist, but many carers do not have access to them and remain isolated.

Mentor will continue to make the case for a consistent entitlement for kinship carers for support and services to meet their needs. We also want to help carers access what they are entitled to and will shortly be launching an updated edition of our successful guide for kinship carers in Scotland and the professionals who work with them. The guide will be available for download on www.mentoruk.org.uk from the middle of December and hard copies will be widely distributed across Scotland by the Scottish Government.

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“Giving Extended Families The Credit They Are Due,” by Lord Freud, DWP

“Giving Extended Families The Credit They Are Due,”

by Lord Freud, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Welfare Reform

 

Whether through volunteering or caring for a child or young person, the support provided by grandparents and older people hugely benefits their immediate recipients and wider communities too.

The older generation provide this help everyday and in various ways, from collecting a grandchild from school enabling their son or daughter to fulfil their job commitments; by caring for a toddler once a week so a friend or relative can take up part-time work; or by helping a troubled teenager turn their life around by taking part in the Grandmentor (http://www.csv-rsvp.org.uk/site/grandmentors.htm) scheme I launched last year with the CSV.

 

The role older people play in society, often undertaking jobs that would otherwise full on the state, is enormous – and we must not be ambivalent about this. We must ensure older people get the recognition they are due, when they are supporting others to take advantage of work opportunities.

 

At the Department for Work and Pensions where I’m Minister for Welfare Reform, one of the first changes we made when the Coalition came into Government was the introduction of Grandparents Credits. This will mean that those below state pension age can start building up credits for a State Pension if they are caring for young children rather than working. Further information will be up on Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk) in time for applications to be made in 2012.

 

And I’ve been meeting with kinship carers’ organisations as part of my ongoing work into how Universal Credit will support family and friend carers.

We know that family and friends carers’ circumstances vary widely, and under Universal Credit we will have the flexibility to apply conditionality in a way that is responsive to their needs. We will not impose full-time work search and availability requirements on carers responsible for younger children, and there are specific safeguards on this in the Welfare Reform Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

 

As people are living healthier and longer lives, we are increasingly depending on the experience, skills and support of older people for a greater period of time and we must recognise and support this – both as individuals and as a society.

For further reading please see Sarah Wellard’s (Grandparents Plus) blog here.

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Grandad-hood: the early days, by Terry Smyth

Grandad-hood: the early days

By Terry Smyth

 

Terry, who looks after his grandchildren while his daughter is at work, remembers how he felt about becoming a granddad and those early days of providing childcare.

 

I’ll come clean about me and grandad-hood. It’s a prospect I had long avoided facing due to the peculiar social status that attaches to being ‘a grandfather’. Listening to grandparents talking about their grandchildren always seemed to be the same, full to overflowing with gooey clichés. ‘They give me such joy, and you can always give them back’, cheek by jowl with a fixed grin that implied ‘but you wouldn’t understand’. Worse still, I had seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Spending the whole day in bed may have it attractions, but imagine the crumbs, the tedium … and the smell.

 

Accepting grandad-hood meant confronting ageing – stepping onto the top rung of the ladder where the gale threatens a fast departure. Then there was the anticipation of incontinence, the warm saggy aura of comfort eating, and the threat of a pernicious prostate clamped to my urethra. So far, so awful. But then the veil lifted to reveal two featherweight, fragile babies who had grown impatient with their uterine imprisonment and booked in early before the room had been made up. Overwhelming feelings first enveloped, then obliterated, all my selfish concerns. Truly, I hadn’t seen that coming.

 

 

When our daughter was planning how to cope with her return to work, we offered to look after the twins for one day per week. I can remember how anxious I felt at the time, because this was a promise that could not be broken. A day a week may not seem that much but we had to travel from Suffolk to south London, stay overnight and travel back late Monday night. At that time I was very busy as a freelance education consultant, travelling around East Anglia, and had to work out how to make current and prospective clients aware that I would be unable – ever – to work on a Monday (and also be pretty cautious about the Tuesdays given those regular childhood illnesses that afflict even the healthiest babies). And learning -  again! -  how to clean mucky bums, attach 21st century nappies, erect and then dismantle recalcitrant double buggies, and expel wind from two tiny reluctant tummies …. and then remove sweet smelling vomit from the back of my shirt.

 

So it was that, in May 2007, we began the most emotionally and physically demanding year of our lives – yet the most gratifying. The twins were eleven months old; we were considerably older.

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Parenting under the microscope, by Katherine Rake, FPI

Parenting under the Microscope

By Katherine Rake, Chief Executive of Family and Parenting Institute (FPI)
Celebrating Parents’ Week 2011, 17-23 October

While the focus on ‘problem parents’ has received renewed intensity in the wake of the riots, it is also an expression of a steady trend towards ever-greater scrutiny of parenting. Parenting has become one of the most charged political and cultural subjects of our age.

This scrutiny of parenting has led to the idea of a parenting ‘deficit’ and the view that there are a growing number of parents who are incapable. Yet, this focus on parenting skills is not matched by conclusive evidence about a decline in our standards of parenting.

The challenge for policy now is to find the right balance between supporting parents in developing their skills and capabilities and working to lessen the pressures parents face. To do this successfully, a positive framework for supporting parents needs to be created and concrete steps taken towards creating a more family friendly society.

In many key respects British society is far from friendly to families, for example in one recent FPI poll 76% of parents said that stress, including financial pressures (67%) and long working hours (37%), are undermining family life. This brings home that the reality that combining work and caring responsibilities is a very real challenge for families.

With higher expectations of themselves, and living in a society which asks them to seamlessly combine employment and childcare, the networks of support parents rely on come to assume greater significance. However, trends around migration, atomisation and couple separation mean that the social bonds which used to be central to family life have been weakened in some key respects.

But perhaps the most worrying by-product of individualising the act of parenting is that the role played in family life by the wider family and the community has been side-lined. Evidence is increasingly pointing towards a culture which is not supportive of child wellbeing and a flourishing environment for families. We may be quick to hold parents responsible for the failings of their children but we are much less willing to acknowledge the critical role played by society and our communities.

Parenting policy has reached a crossroads and there are set of important choices ahead for policymakers. There is a risk that the current debate on ‘problem families’ unhelpfully adds another stereotype to a modern mythology of parenting. Alongside the ‘pushy parent’ who helicopters around their child and elbows others out of the way in pursuit of their child’s interests, we have the deficit model of a feckless parent, who is in need of corrective state intervention. The reality of modern parenting is, of course, more complex than these stereotypes suggest, and it is clear that to move forward we will need a more positive, sustainable framework for parenting that both offers appropriate support to parents and creates the conditions in which all families can thrive.

This post is adapted from a long papers which appears on the FPI website, here, along with other expert views on the state of UK parenting

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Local authorities’ role in supporting grandparent carers, by Matt Dunkley, ADCS

Local authorities’ role in supporting grandparent carers

by Matt Dunkley
President of The Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Director of Children’s Services in East Sussex

More and more children are coming to the attention of children’s services in need of help and protection. This has partly been attributed to the “Baby P effect”. The tragic case of Peter Connolly  has made the public and professionals more acutely aware of the treatment suffered by some children at the hands of their parents. This awareness is a good thing, but it also puts increasing pressure on local authority children’s social care departments to make sure that these children have a safe and stable place to go. In a great many cases this stability is best provided by grandparents or other family and friends carers.

Removing a child from their home can have a traumatic effect on a child, particularly when they don’t understand the reason for removal. Care proceedings too can be a drawn out process full of uncertainty. Throughout the process children are faced with a number of ever-changing adult faces, for whom, however professionally dedicated they are, the child concerned is sometimes one of many on their caseload. Stability and familiarity can be worth their weight in gold and the grandparents’ home can be a safe haven. With a system under pressure from all sides – rising numbers of children needing placements and fewer resources to spend on each child, grandparents and the wider family ensure that at least some of these children can stay in places they know, with people they love and who love them.

There are those who would dismiss family carers on the basis that if the parents have failed, the grandparents must share some of the blame – that is a crude and brutal argument that has no basis in the evidence.  Indeed many of the heart rending stories on this website put paid to the stereotypes  that grandparents are  too old, or too traditional or not traditional enough to offer stability and love to their children’s children. All local authorities are now under a statutory duty to consider grandparents and other relatives as potential carers before the process of care proceedings begins. Family and Friends policies should be in place and I know that many grandparents’ groups around the country have been active in telling their local authority what they need to do more to support their young charges.

Such policies should reduce the delays and the uncertainty in the process and prevent needless court appearances and referrals for further assessment of family before any decision about a child’s future can be made. However, the local authority still has responsibility for assessing the ability of any carer for a child under the council’s protection.  For those of you who are eminently suitable to bring up your grandchildren I know that this can seem perverse and drawn out, but it is crucial that we make the right decision first time to avoid any further risk or disruption to the child. In many cases grandparents will be the best chance these children have for a stable future, and your fantastic contribution allows the professionals to focus more on those children who do not have the luck to find a home with grandparents or extended family.”

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Protect grandparent carers from welfare cuts, by Sarah Wellard, Grandparents Plus

Protect grandparent carers from welfare cuts

by Sarah Wellard,
Policy & Research Manager
Grandparents Plus

 

No one can disagree with the Government’s aim to make work pay and get people back into jobs.  But we have real concerns about the impact of cuts in benefits on families headed by a kinship carer who are already struggling to get by on low incomes.

Coming on top of the cuts in child tax credits and housing benefit entitlement already being implemented, it’s clear that kinship carers and the often vulnerable children they are bringing will be unfairly penalised. Two thirds of kinship carers have incomes of below £300 a week and four in 10 receive benefits like housing benefit or council tax benefit to help with household costs.

David Cameron has said that he thinks it’s wrong for anyone on benefits to receive more than the average pay of someone in work. So the Welfare Reform Bill includes a cap that means no – one  – except war widows and those on disability benefits – can receive more than £26,000 a year. It sounds like a lot of money, and in most of the country benefits carers receive are way below that level. But in London carers with larger families  are already paying upwards of £400 a week in rent, so the cap would leave future carers less than £100 a week to live on to cover all their family’s needs.

What message will the benefit cap send to  kinship carers who are thinking about taking on the care of a group of siblings who have suffered abuse or neglect or whose mother has died?   Bringing up someone else’s children is an enormous emotional and financial commitment.  Kinship carers save the state a fortune by keeping children out of care – it costs £40,000 a year for a child to be maintained in independent foster care.  It makes no sense to push children into care when they could be living with family members who love them.

Grandparents Plus, along with other members of the Kinship Care Alliance, is backing amendments tabled by Baroness Tyler and the Bishop of Leicester to exempt family and friends carers from the benefit cap.

We are also backing an amendment from Baroness Drake which would mean that kinship carers don’t have to look for work for the first year after children move in.  This would give them a period of adjustment to settle the children, find school places, attend meetings with social services and lawyers, and cope with the enormous upheaval of children arriving unexpectedly.  Three in 10 kinship carers say they have to give up work when children move in, and are often instructed to do so by social workers as a condition of the placement.  It makes no sense at all for one part of the state – children’s services – to be telling carers that they must give up work in children’s best interests, and for JobCentre Plus to be saying they must be available for work.

Cuts to disability benefits will also hit hard kinship carers who are raising a disabled child.

We are urging our supporters to write to their MPs or directly to Lord Freud, the minister for Welfare Reform, asking him not to unfairly penalise kinship carers – it will only result in more children needlessly going into care.

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After the riots: what about the wider family? By Stephen Burke, Grandparents Plus

After the riots: What about the wider family?

By Stephen Burke,
Co-chair, Grandparents Plus and
Director, United for All Ages

 

Beyond the recent riots, our efforts must be on prevention. Prevention not just of more riots but to ensure that young people in particular have the chances and the support to do well in life.

The cranking up of the criminal justice system in August shows that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Politicians hope that swift punishments will act as a deterrent.

Now we need to devote as much energy to the underlying social issues. Much of the debate has focused on parents – where were they, what have they been doing – and whether they should also be punished for the crimes of their offspring, for example by losing their home.

But for many young people the wider family are or could be just as important as their parents.

For some children, the parents can’t be there because they have died or are seriously ill, have drugs, alcohol or mental health problems, or simply can’t cope. In these cases the wider family from grandparents to aunts and uncles are often the best alternative.

But family policy in Britain is two dimensional - focusing only on parents and children. We need a family policy that is multi-generational and multi-dimensional.

Hundreds of thousands of children already benefit from full-time care provided by their grandparents. They should be the first resort for social services. Extended families really are the early intervention many argue for, and low cost too.

For the vast majority of children, there is an important adult in their wider family beyond their parents - someone they can talk to in confidence, someone they respect and who is a role model.

Families are a wonderful resource. We need to use them, support them and recognise them for what they do and can do to give all young people the best start in life.

Let’s hope the post-riots review leads to a fundamental shift in how society views the wider family.

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Kinship Care and Imprisonment by Cherecee Williams, Prison Advice and Care Trust

Kinship Care and Imprisonment

by Cherecee Williams
Kinship Care Support Service Manager
Prision Advice and Care Trust

I work for a charity called pact (Prison Advice and Care Trust) which works with children and families of prisoners.  I am the Kinship Care Support Service Manager for pact and I am based at HMP Holloway. My remit is to support people who have taken on the role of looking after a friend or relative’s children when that person is sent to prison (kinship carers).

What do we know?
We know that when a woman is sent to prison, the imprisonment affects the wider family. If that woman has a child there is a 40% chance that the child will be left in the care of their grandparents, and a 20% chance that the child will be with other kinship carers.

We also know that there are fewer women’s prisons in England, so families visiting a woman in prison often have to travel a lot further.

What does that mean for kinship carers?
The burden is enormous. Families are, in effect, also serving the sentence. One of the kinship carers I’ve supported is a disabled grandmother with poor health who is taking care of five grand children between the ages of five and 13. Every two weeks she travels a great distance for a one hour visit to see her daughter in prison. She is afraid to seek help, because she believes that if she does the children will be put into care.

Another kinship carer at Holloway is an aunt who is looking after her four nieces and nephews. She is only 27 years old, and wanting to start a family of her own, but cannot do so because she has to take care of her sister’s children. She travels the six hour round trip from Cardiff to Holloway every other month so that the children can see their mother. She receives some financial support, but not enough to provide the children with everything they need.

These are just two examples, picked from the hundreds of cases I have been working on over the past two years.

What would make things better?
I would like courts to start considering the needs of children before decisions are made regarding the sentencing of a parent. Why put a woman in prison for 21 days when she has a disabled eight year old son who is completely dependent on her? Isn’t there a smarter way for justice to be served?

I would like to see more support for the wider family who volunteer to take on the role of caring for a child when the parent is imprisoned. They should be given the same support package—financial support, counselling for the children, respite care—that would be afforded to a non-related approved foster carer.

I would also like to see more services that support prisoners, their children and their families, more services that can deal with the difficulties of maintaining contact when a parent is in prison, and more services that understand the importance of support groups and home work clubs to support grandparents and other kinship carers.

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Too old to care? Opinion from the Children’s Minister by Tim Loughton MP

Too old to care? Opinion from the Children’s Minister

by Tim Loughton MP
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families.

Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Grandparents Plus conference, which was held in London to launch their report entitled Too Old to Care? A somewhat rhetorical question, you might think, to put on the cover of a study into the experiences of older grandparents who are bringing up their grandchildren.

Unfortunately, it seemed the question was not quite as rhetorical as most of us would want to believe, judging from some of the worrying findings that were published in the report. Clearly, there are a number of local authorities who have quite a few issues they need to address.

For myself, I have to say that I felt absolutely privileged to meet so many people at the conference who are doing so much to support their families, often under some of the most difficult and extreme circumstances. To me, there was absolutely no question about whether or not they were “too old” to do what they are doing but rather were they getting the support they needed to carry on caring.

I heard stories of grandparents’ courage and success and sacrifice in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds – for the sake of their grandchildren. And all of us who are parents or grandparents, or aunts and uncles, will understand how family love can inspire us to give more of ourselves than we ever thought possible. But strong family ties don’t only give meaning to our personal lives – they also form the foundation of a healthy society. And every one of us benefits from being part of a healthy, supportive society.

So in one sense the time I was able to spend at the conference was an uplifting experience.  But I also have to confess to being rather disappointed by what I saw and heard, as well. I heard about experiences of discrimination and financial hardship and the fear of the child being placed for adoption if they are unable to care. Many of these stories, and more besides, have been documented in the Too Old to Care? report.

So I absolutely endorse the Grandparents Plus campaign to raise awareness among local authorities about the need to place children with family and friends carers where possible, and to give them the support they need. Continue reading

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Extended Family or Adoption? A personal response by Oonagh Murphy-Jack, Grandparents Plus

Extended Family or adoption? My response as someone raised by her aunt

By Oonagh Murphy-Jack
Grandparents Plus

As someone who was raised by my aunt and uncle and has had an incredibly positive experience, I want to give my personal response to the opinions of Martin Narey, the recently announced Ministerial Adviser on Adoption.  In his Blueprint for the Nation’s Lost Children published in the Times on 5th July 2011 he said that:

‘No one disputes that adoption offers the most stable and secure environment for a child who can no longer live with his or her own parents.’

I strongly believe that, even though in some cases adoption outside the family is the only viable option, kinship care should always be considered first and should not be dismissed or viewed as some sort of second class intervention.

I was raised by my aunt and uncle who were there from the moment I was born and offered me the love and stability my biological parents were unable to provide. I went to live with them permanently when I was eleven, a troubled child with emotional and behavioural problems.

We had a bond between us that was strong and special – the idea that I would go into care or be adopted by strangers was never an option. My grandparents, my aunt and uncle and the family home where I spent much of my childhood provided me with stability, love and a feeling of being safe in an otherwise chaotic life that I experienced with my biological mother.

The consistency of my family’s commitment to loving me, looking after me and keeping me safe laid the foundations for me to have better outcomes in my future. I had difficulties  growing up relating to my childhood, but “mum and dad” (my aunt and uncle) were there the whole way, supporting and encouraging me. I graduated in 2006 with a degree in Politics and Sociology. My first novel was published last year. My drive to do well in life is because of my family and the incredible job they did in raising me. So, I disagree with Narey’s  report which states:

‘other interventions in child care do not have the potential to utterly ransform the life chances of a neglected child in a way adoption can and does’

My “intervention” – kinship care – did utterly, absolutely and fundamentally change my life chances and even enhanced them. There are thousands like me out there and many more children who will reap the benefits of kinship care for generations to come. Furthermore, my story, and many others are testament to the fact that not all individuals of the same family are dysfunctional which seems to be a common misguided assumption that is repeated in Narey’s report.

Whilst Narey highlights the negative issues around other interventions there is nothing said about the negative outcomes of adoption. Not all children who are adopted have positive experiences, and adoption, just like any other care intervention, can and does break down.

I welcome Narey’s passion to reform and improve the adoption system and help vulnerable children to find the right family who are willing to provide the love and stability those children need.

Nobody wants to see children languishing in care unnecessarily waiting for good homes.  However, adoption should not be prioritised over kinship care. Decisions should always be about what is best and right for the child, not what is quickest, easiest or more cost effective. A kinship assessment or finding relatives may take a little longer, but if this means that as a result the children end up where they should be, then so be it.

Back our campaign: www.keepfamiliestogether.org.uk

What are your views on kinship care or adoption? Please let us know in the comments section below, especially if you have personal experience of either:


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