PROVIDING long-term stability for children in care who have “often experienced disruption from an early age” should have been addressed in the near-decade since the care inquiry into child abuse in Jersey, one of the panel members has said.
Professor Sandy Cameron was part of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry panel which delivered a damning report in 2017 on the Island’s care system dating back to 1945 and said it was not fit for purpose.
A subsequent review in 2019 on progress found that while several areas had shown signs of improvement, there was still a significant amount of work which needed to be done.
Now, in the States of Jersey Annual Report and Accounts, it has been revealed that last year the measure of long-term placement stability for children in care fell well below its 75% target at just over 42%.
This is the percentage of children in care who have been looked after for two-and-a-half years or more, and have been in the same placement for two years.
The ability to meet this standard has “declined in the past 12 months and falls below that of statistical neighbours”, the report said, while highlighting the figures may be distorted due to the low number of children in care on the Island.
The same report highlighted that there is an “extreme risk” of Children’s Services having “insufficient capacity” to meet its “statutory requirement to care for children who need to be cared for by the state”.
Responding to the shortfall in providing them with stability, Professor Cameron CBE, a social work expert who sat on the inquiry panel alongside Frances Oldham and Alyson Leslie, said he would have hoped to see far greater progress in this area made by now.
He said: “We would hope that after the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, Children’s Services would be in a strong position to ensure an improved performance in this key area.
“Multiple placements are a long standing problem for young people in the care system for whom stability is a vital need in lives which too often have experienced disruption from an early age.”
Meanwhile, Jersey Cares chief executive Susie Richardson said she was “very concerned about the lack of availability of fostering options on the Island” and the “impact this has on stability”.
She added that the organisation, which supports Islanders with experience of care, was “expecting to see this get worse before it got better, which the data clearly demonstrates it has”.
“We can see the significant efforts going into attempting to recruit more foster families, including a recent campaign aimed at encouraging and supporting government employees to foster,” she said.
“We hope that with the right support for these families, this will create more options for children on the Island in the longer term, as with the investment commitment into new and improved children’s homes.”
And, she said that the election and potential change in government must not be allowed to derail the agreed investment.
“We continue to see children’s services, and the courts, having to make difficult decisions and sub optimal outcomes due to a historic lack of investment in the infrastructure for children in care, and we look forward to seeing better outcomes for children as new options come online,” she added.
The Annual Report and Accounts said that a driving factor for the number of times children are being moved between placements is a “shortfall in foster carers and homes for children in Jersey”.
“A key priority is to improve sufficiency with fostering and residential homes for children, to enable better matching to support placement stability from the outset,” the report continued.
“The substantial improvement plan which is supported with investment allocated in the 2025 Government budget setting process will support this progress.”
In relation to the wider risk of having insufficient capacity to care for children, the report said “prioritisation and investment means this is likely to reduce in severity in 2026”.
