Supporting care-experienced children: 1. Defining care experience

Stuart Guest:If we have a care experienced child about to start with us, we know there is a high likelihood there is going to be some additional challenges for that child.

Bea Stevenson:
To be confronted with a child who has these really overwhelming feelings and who has experienced some really difficult things in their life, I think a lot of adults fear that.

Matthew Blood:
A care-experienced child or young person is a child or young person who has been cared for, looked after by the local authority. That means they could still be looked after by the local authority or they could have previously been in the care of the local authority. Some of these children or young people would have gone on to be adopted or looked after by special guardians or they may have reached the age of sixteen or eighteen and have left care. It's often a term that is preferred by young people because it takes away the stigma of the term looked after or cared for.

Rebecca Brooks:
The problem with that definition is it excludes a group of children who may be living with people who are not their birth parents, because they couldn't live with their birth parents anymore, but were never actually in the care of the state. So it's a good catch-all term, but it doesn't quite catch everybody.

Tai:
My mum and dad's relationship was on and off. My mum, she was quite depressed and wouldn't do much. It'd just be me looking after my siblings for a lot of the time. I was twelve when we went into foster care. We went in basically because my dad was abusive to us all.

Rachel Hiller:
We know that most young people that come into care have experienced maltreatment in their family home, so that is abuse and/or neglect.

Tyrone Sinclair:
There are other young people who are also in care not just because of their parents, but sometimes because they don't have parents. When you're thinking about cases of refugees or when you're thinking about cases of trafficked young people, when you're thinking about cases of orphaned young people.

Rebecca Brooks:
It can be because of sickness. It can be because of mental ill health of a parent. Almost every reason you can think of why a child might not be able to live temporarily or permanently with a birth parent. When a child comes into care, sometimes that can be initially a voluntary arrangement, something to help a family over a temporary problem in the hopes that the child will be able to return to the family quite soon. Most children that enter the care system will either return home to their families or will remain in the care system until they become care leavers at a later date.

Molly:
I was about two and a half when I was adopted. When you are adopted and you're learning to trust people, because I think adoptees will learn it later, it's quite difficult to sort of understand what they want to hear from you. People often compare you to like Tracy Beaker and she's not even adopted.

Rebecca Brooks:
Historically adoption has grown out of being something that was about babies, I think if we go back fifty, sixty, seventy years. Modern adoption, as we might call it, it is always administered by the state and it will always have involved the state intervening in family life to remove a child into care and then a process through which not a social worker, but actually a court will decide that adoption or another form of permanence is in the best interests of the child.

Stuart Guest:
We have to realise that adopted children have gone through the care experience and they've also then had a further loss from their foster carers into an adoptive home. They will still have issues on identity. They still need a lot of support.

Tai:
And they were saying, 'Oh, you're going now.' We weren't allowed to say bye to one another. Like, we just saw each other in the cars. I remember I got a warning from my social workers that said, you know, if you get into any more fights or anything else goes wrong, it'll be your fault that you go from short-term to long-term. My first foster parents, they were very controlling about everything. If we asked for cake, they would just say no and throw it away in front of us. They were sending me to bed at seven at night, even though I was twelve which always made me feel even weirder or even more outcasted by the rest of my peers.

Rachel Hiller:
Really all young people in care, it's safe to say, have experienced quite a significant adversity, but actually being moved into care can be incredibly difficult and stressful for young people as well.

Rebecca Brooks:
We might look objectively at the family situation that they've left and think, 'Well, they're better off not living in that way or not experiencing those things', but from a child's point of view, it's everything you've ever known. It's everyone you've ever known. It often is for young children every object they've ever owned. They're taken to a stranger's home with no introduction. They're told this is your foster carer now with maybe just the clothes that they're standing in and they have got to start again. The house smells different. The food that you're given, it might be called the same name, but it's not the same as, you know, your mum used to make or it's not the same. Everything is different. That is no doubt a significant and serious trauma for a child. I cannot overstate that enough.

Elliot:
I was a month off from being ten years old. I went into foster care and my sister was around the age of eight. It was with a lady and she had quite controlling behaviour. She would try to control every aspect of our lives. We'd be told off if we got home even five minutes past the expected time. We weren't allowed in our bedrooms until a certain time in the evening, so when it went dark. So every single day, we had to go outside. It led to a lot of anxiety, it led to a lot of feeling worthless, not having a lot of confidence. I just stopped really wanting to engage with people.

Matthew Blood:
What we know about these children is that they've had incredibly difficult early life experiences and many continue to do. And that their trauma will impact significantly on their ability to develop successfully and, most importantly, to learn effectively in the classroom.

Rachel Hiller:
Exposure to that type of chronic ongoing early adversity can fundamentally alter the brain. That doesn't mean the brain is damaged. That is not a message that is helpful to convey, but it does fundamentally alter how a young person might see themselves and the world around them. And that has real consequences for what you might see day-to-day, in terms of behaviour, in terms of actions that you might see in the classroom or in other parts of their lives.

Stuart Guest:
You need to really understand about these children from not only a personal-social level, but from a neuroscience point of view as well, to know that children that have suffered trauma will have differences in how they perceive the world around them, and how they receive sensory input, and therefore then how they respond to that sensory input.

Tai:
You've got to be sad enough for your mum to realise that you're going to miss her and then you have to be OK enough for your siblings, so that they find the transition easier. And then you have to also be open to this whole new world of rules and different people's houses.

Elliot:
That was the beginning of when I just went through foster placements. Different people, different houses, different expectations, different ways of doing things and I felt like a burden that had to be put somewhere that was safe.

Molly:
I get quite offended at the curriculum sometimes, because obviously adoption is not included in family life and religion. It's important that we're acknowledged in the sense that we might not want to do activities such as, like family trees and they might be a bit more difficult for us.

Rachel Hiller:
One of the most important things to recognise when we're talking about care-experienced young people is they're not a homogenous group, but certainly they are a group that we know experience much higher rates of mental health difficulties compared to their peers. And that can be all kinds of difficulties. That might be things like anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress symptoms, behaviour difficulties. We know all of these challenges. Also, neurodevelopmental needs, higher rates of autism, ADHD. They're all much more prevalent in our care-experienced young people.

Stuart Guest:
I don't think anything is inevitable when it comes to a care-experienced child. There are many, many amazing examples of care-experienced children having difficulties and then getting the support and dealing with those and being very successful. I think it's really important that schools put in extra support for care-experienced children knowing that the data out there shows that they have poorer outcomes. So not just accepting where they're at. What more can we put in, what extra support, what extra tuition? Anything that they need to give them the best possible chances.

Bea Stevenson:
See the long term gain, and believe and trust that that consistently empathic response which sets down clear boundaries and appropriate expectations of the child, but is done with kindness and empathy and from a place of understanding will, over time, be able to support the child to see that actually healthy relationships and stable, dependable relationships are possible.