Care News: 'Life is getting better’ for most looked-after children

Life is improving for the vast majority of looked-after children, a study into the wellbeing of children in care has found.

Responses to the 10,000 Voices project, which represents the views of four- to 18-year-olds shared between 2016 and 2021, found that 83 percent of children and young people in care feel that “life is getting better”.

The research, undertaken by the charity Coram Voice and The Rees Centre at the University of Oxford, looked at the wellbeing of children in care in England and compared it with other data sets, including the Children’s Society Good Childhood report, wellbeing data from the Office for National Statistics and the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study.

Findings were more positive for children in care than the general population in some areas, with a “larger percentage” feeling “safe where they lived, liking school and feeling the adults they lived with took an interest in their education”, the report states.

But despite a third of children in care reporting “very high” levels of wellbeing,16 per cent of young people aged 11 to 18 years in care rated themselves as having “low life satisfaction” compared with nine per cent of young people in the general population. By the teenage years, this had increased to one in six looked-after children reporting “low” overall wellbeing.

The report also finds that girls and those who had been in care for longer had lower wellbeing than boys. And young people living in residential care or “somewhere else” - mostly supported accommodation - reported “lower wellbeing” than those living in foster care and kinship foster care.

Although most children in care felt included in the decisions that social workers made about their care, around one in seven “hardly ever” or “never” felt included.

More than 50 percent of four- to seven-year-olds did not feel that the reasons they were in care had been fully explained, and one in five reported that they did not know who their social worker was.

Bullying at school is another area impacting children in care’s wellbeing, with 29 per cent of eight-to ten-year-olds reporting being afraid to go to school because of bullying compared to 17 per cent of children in the general population.

In addition, around six out of 10 children aged eight to 18 said that they worried about their feelings or behaviour and white girls, in particular, were more unhappy with how they looked.

Linda Briheim-Crookall, head of policy and practice development at Coram Voice, said: “We need to shift the focus of children’s social care so that what’s important to children’s wellbeing is at its heart.

"To do this, those that make decisions, from individual social workers to government ministers, need to understand how children and young people feel about their lives.

Whether measuring the impact of new policy initiatives or planning the care for individual children, the focus should be on what children in care say makes their lives good.”

The 10,000 Voices report, published as part of the Bright Spots programme, calls on local authorities to have mechanisms in place to capture how children in care feel about their lives and calls on professionals to be mindful of the wellbeing concerns of different groups of children in care, especially girls and those in residential care or living “somewhere else”.

Source:
www.cypnow.co.uk

---