Children in Care

Care Should Not Feel Like Being Moved On

Children
In Care

The single most damaging thing the care system does to a child is move them. Move the placement, and the school goes. Move the school, and the friendships go. Move often enough and the child learns the lesson the system teaches without meaning to: nothing here is permanent, so do not get attached to it.

Every commitment below is aimed at the same thing — fewer avoidable disruptions, and a proper reason on the record for the ones that cannot be avoided.

What This Seat Will Push For

A stability test before any move. No looked-after child is moved for placement-management or budget reasons without a written decision, seen by the child, recording what else was tried. Cost may be a real constraint; it should never be an unspoken one.
Siblings stay together unless a court says otherwise. Separation of siblings in care should require an explicit, reasoned, reviewable decision — not a shortage of beds in the right size of home.
An end to distance-by-default. Out-of-area placements sometimes protect a child, and sometimes just protect a budget. Every placement made outside the authority's area should be published in aggregate, with the reason category, so the pattern is visible.
School first. Where a move is unavoidable, the presumption is that the child keeps their school and their exam year, with transport funded by the authority that caused the move.
Advocacy that is genuinely independent. A child should never have to raise a complaint about a council through a service that the same council can quietly defund. Advocacy for looked-after children must be commissioned at arm's length and reportable to someone other than the body complained about.
The child's own view, recorded and answered. If a looked-after child states a preference about their placement, school, contact or care plan, the decision must record what they said and why the outcome differs. Being overruled is sometimes necessary. Being unheard never is.

The Rights Already Exist

Enforcement,
Not Invention

Almost nothing on this page requires a new right to be invented. It requires existing rights to be made enforceable by the person who holds them.

Article 8 — Private and Family Life

A child's relationships with their siblings, carers and community are family life. Breaking them up for administrative convenience is an interference that has to be justified and proportionate. In practice that justification is rarely written down, so it is rarely tested.

Under the All Citizens Protection Law, the same claim that tests the equality duty tests the Article 8 breach — instead of the child losing in the gap between two separate Acts.

Article 2 of Protocol 1 — Education

Repeated placement moves mid-key-stage are one of the clearest routes to lost education in the country, and they happen to children the state is responsible for. Where an authority's own placement decision costs a child their school year, that is not bad luck. It is an act by a public body, and it should be answerable as one.

Corporate Parenting With Teeth

The corporate parenting principles say a council must have regard to the child's wishes, promote their health, and prepare them for adulthood. Excellent principles — owed, at present, to no one enforceable.

The commitment is simple: make the corporate parenting duty a duty owed to the child, breach of which the child or their advocate can raise, with a positive duty on every public body — not only children's services — to consider the impact of its decisions on looked-after children.

The Test

A good corporate parent should be able to answer one question about any decision it takes: would this be acceptable if it were being done to a child living at home with their own family? Where the answer is no, the decision needs a better reason than the one currently on the file.