Children From Poor Homes More Likely To Enter Care

By James Simons-

In a research put together by experienced professionals from more than five UK Universities, The Child Welfare Inequalities Project have used and evaluated data covering over 35,000 children in the care system being looked after or on a child protection plan.

Roughly one in every 60 children in the most deprived communities was in care compared to one in every 660 in the least deprived. Each 10% increase in deprivation rates saw a 30% rise in a child’s chances of entering care.

The research, presided by Professor Paul Bywaters at Coventry University puts the finding down to a relative lack of funding to allocate to children’s services.The highly conducted research aims to ”develop a theoretical frmaework for identifying inequalities in child welfare and establishing the necessary theoretical and methodological foundations of new directions and practices to reduce avoidable child inequalities in research policy”.

Bringing together in deoth expertise from Uiniversity of Coventry, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the research explores the causes, influences, and potential solution to child care.

The study found ‘high deprivation’ councils in England saw children’s services expenditure per child cut by an average of 21% between 2010 and 2015, compared to 7% in low deprivation authorities. By 2015 high deprivation councils were spending a larger proportion of their budgets on looked-after children and a smaller proportion on preventive and early help services.

The research also found that many social workers felt “overwhelmed” by the level of need they were seeing in families, with lack of money, food and housing seen as “significant” factors impacting children’s wellbeing.

Yet, current processes for assessing and managing cases in social care encluded such issues with practitioners paying “limited attention” to family poverty.

The report also found that practitioners and managers rarely ever made reference to poverty or the consequences of inequality without being prompted.

“Most social workers saw their core business as risk assessment, and regarded actions to address poverty (benefits advice, provision of food, rights advocacy) as services others should provide.”

Most practical and useful from the research was a conclusion for a “need for a step change” in the way social work and children’s services engage with the impact of deprivation, the study concluded.

“Supporting families to survive and thrive in this period of extended austerity should be a more central priority for children’s services, as a contribution to preventing fractured and damaging relationships in families and to protecting children from their consequences,” it said.

“This objective should be underpinned by wider economic and social policies. It has to inform education and training and be embedded in processes such as assessment, case review and managerial oversight.”

How poorer families should be supported was not clearly stated in the report. Parents of children from poor families are generally on child support or receive some sort of benefits, but most squander it on a habit of alcohol and drugs, with no system to check how they mange their limited money from the governemnt.

Families are usually left to their own devices to determine how to spend their cash, and most sopend it foolishly. A relevant issue not adequately covered by the research is how more money in the family will prevent children from poorer families entering into care, since much depends on what the money will go into in improving the chances of children from those home leading a better life.

The elite team of researchers also found evidence suggesting that th poorer familiesliving in affluent local authorities were more likely to have children’s services intervene than poorer families in more deprived councils.

Their concluded reason was pointed to the deprivation of resources in to allocate to councils in deprived areas, forcing them to ”ration scarce resources more tightly”.

The research found that the looked-after children rates for white children in the most deprived neighbourhoods in England were five times higher than for Asian children and 75% higher than for black children. The report added:

“Much more work is needed to explore the reasons behind these very large inequalities in children’s circumstances and patterns of intervention”.

“It will be important to dig below these broad categories. As yet, we do not know whether children are having better childhoods in some communities than others or if services are failing to reach some groups.”