1. Failure to value children in the care system, listen to them, ensure they are nurtured and give them adequate opportunities to flourish in childhood and beyond. This includes lack of investment in the recruitment, management, supervision and continuing development of staff with suitable backgrounds and skills to care for children.
2. Failure to have in place an adequate legislative framework that prioritises the welfare of children in need or at risk. While the States of Jersey has always been able to provide sufficient resources to keep pace with developments in international financial law, Jersey’s child care legislation has lagged behind other jurisdictions in the developed world – often by decades.
3. Failure to keep pace with developments in social policy, child care practice and social work standards in the developed world. For example, in Jersey there has been an ill-considered, misguided and potentially harmful approach to secure accommodation that was used routinely for children whose needs would have not have met the threshold for secure detention elsewhere and without the thorough assessment or rigorous safeguards that were in place in other jurisdictions.
4. Failure to plan and deliver services in an effective, targeted manner to achieve positive, measurable outcomes for children. For decades, there was little evidence of a considered approach to the needs of and desired outcomes for individual children. At a strategic level, there was a marked absence of government initiatives to tackle the causes of social inequalities and deprivation or to promote the welfare of children. In the youth justice system, punitive approaches were taken to children whose misdemeanours likely would not have reached the threshold for prosecution in other jurisdictions.
5. Failure to establish a culture of openness and transparency, leading to a perception, at least, of collusion and cover-up. Jersey’s culture has not encouraged the reporting of poor and abusive practice. At times, efforts to protect the island’s reputation and international standing have led to insufficient acknowledgement of the gravity of the Island’s failings and the egregious nature of some of the abuses perpetrated on children in its care. Such attitudes have fostered the suspicion, within parts of the community, that most politicians and States employees cannot be trusted and that abusive practices have been covered up.
6. Failure to mitigate negative effects of small island culture and its challenges. Failures have included ignoring or failing to manage conflicts of interest and prioritising the welfare of staff over the needs of children. Social connections have meant that, at times, there has been insufficiently robust professional challenge to poor practices.
7. Failure to make sufficient investment in staff development and training. Dedicated staff have not been truly valued, while unskilled staff have been allowed to run institutions or care for children with severe and enduring emotional needs.
8. Failure to adopt policies which would promote the recruitment and retention of staff with essential skills in child welfare and child protection. Incentives and expedited residency qualifications are available from the States to draw highly valued individuals and financial organisations to the island. In contrast, little effort has gone into creating the incentives that would make Jersey competitive in recruiting and retaining exceptional managers and staff to care for Jersey’s children, who could be seen as the island’s most valuable asset.
9. Failure of the States of Jersey to understand and fulfil corporate parenting responsibilities, including adequate aftercare of children who have been looked after by the state. The overwhelming majority of adults who have been in the care system, and whose stories the Inquiry heard, still suffer from the effects of abusive or emotionally neglectful childhoods in the care system, their difficulties often compounded by being turned out, unsupported, into a world with which they were singularly ill equipped to cope.
10. Failure to tackle a silo mentality among public-sector agencies. States departments and institutions have been characterised by territorialism and protectiveness rather than openness to pooling resources and learning. As a result, there has been a lack of a comprehensive strategy to secure the bests interests of children in the island.
