WHEN Donna Marriott took over at the helm of Children’s Services in April 2024, she knew she was inheriting a department with a trust problem.
It was not her first encounter with Jersey’s services. In 2018, while working for the English Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, she carried out the first inspection of the Island’s Children’s Services following the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry.
“At that time, one of my resounding bits of feedback was how negative the narrative was and how the department wasn’t going to change unless we shift that,” she explained.
“How people work with you, how they perceive the department, the public view of engaging with it, people’s ability to ask for help, is all going to be questionable if nobody trusts.”
Eight years later, rebuilding that trust remains a challenge.
Earlier this week, the Royal Court delivered a stinging criticism of the government’s care of a vulnerable teenage girl who had repeatedly gone missing and sometimes lived on the streets for up to two weeks.
The court found that almost two years of intensive state intervention had failed to stop her repeatedly going missing, left her education “markedly lacking” and did little to address the underlying causes of her behaviour. It refused the Children’s Minister’s application for a final care order and described plans to move the teenager to the UK as a “colossal gamble”.
This interview with Ms Marriott was conducted before the judgment was made public and her comments were therefore not made in response to the court’s criticism.
But she was frank about some of the wider challenges facing Children’s Services – from instability in the care system and difficulties finding suitable homes to shortages of permanent staff, vulnerable children going missing and a lack of foster families.
Her message was that change is under way.
At the heart of that work is an as-yet unpublished eight-page improvement plan built around three priorities: supporting families, “Loving Homes”, and care and support.
“Everyone says, ‘Why is your plan so long?’,” Ms Marriott said. “And it’s like, actually, our plan’s not really particularly long. It probably won’t be long enough.”
Creating stability and loving homes
The “Loving Homes” section has perhaps been the most visible part of the work so far, helped by a recruitment drive which Ms Marriott said had generated “a lot of interest”.
That includes Islanders being recruited into trainee positions and given the opportunity to qualify as residential practitioners, alongside efforts to fill harder-to-recruit roles such as registered managers.
For the trainee roles, “we’re going to be overwhelmed with interest, I think,” Ms Marriott said.
“That’s really good, they will be able to get the qualification over those two years, and they’ll become residential practitioners, and there’s a pathway to becoming a senior manager.”
Creating a more permanent workforce is intended to build resilience into a system where instability has been a longstanding problem.
Children’s Minister Richard Vibert acknowledged some of those difficulties in the States Assembly in June, identifying a lack of permanent staff and suitable premises for residential homes.
The aim, Ms Marriott explained, is for those homes to “look like an average large house – like a family home”.
A standard model would accommodate four children, while providing additional space for workers, meetings and activities. Older teenagers could live in a larger home or in “supported accommodation”.
Three properties have been refurbished to create new homes, including one temporary property, as part of a £22 million plan approved for the next five years.
“Predominantly, a lot of it is capital funding for building improvements on existing properties,” Ms Marriott said.
“The whole premise is really built on how we create a system on a tiny island. How we create a system of care for children that has a sustainability to it.”
But creating that system in Jersey brings its own difficulties.
Children’s Services is “struggling”, Ms Marriott acknowledged, to find buildings which meet the requirements of a children’s home at a time when suitable accommodation is already in short supply.
The problem is not simply finding enough bedrooms. The department wants properties which can remain permanently within the care system, rather than homes opening and closing as the number of children fluctuates.
“A lot of the work has been about creating [homes] so that we end up with permanent homes in the estate, that as your children’s numbers might flex up and down, can work in a way that enables those homes to stay permanent,” she said.
“Whereas what was happening historically was we’d be using old buildings that weren’t really configured to be proper children’s homes.
“As a consequence, they may be temporary, so they’re opening and closing, and that [creates] a lot of instability for children.”
That instability is precisely what the new model is intended to reduce.
“So we want to create the right number of properties, the right sort of properties, that then children can stay still,” Ms Marriott continued.
“And then we’ll start to tackle some of the issues we’ve got about children having too much instability and not enough permanence, which is what they need to have.”
Preparing for adulthood
The department is also turning its attention to what happens when children approach adulthood.
Further accommodation is planned for 16- to 19-year-olds, with the aim of helping them “make a good transition into adulthood”, before work with Andium should enable them to be housed outside the care system.
Historically, care leavers have had no specific status in law, Ms Marriott said, but new provisions and legal changes mean young people can remain in newer homes beyond their 18th birthday.
It is part of a wider attempt to make the system less dependent on short-term solutions and provide greater continuity as children grow up.
That theme – permanence rather than repeated disruption – runs through much of what Ms Marriott says she is trying to change.
When children go missing
Another issue that was already high on Ms Marriott’s agenda when she arrived in 2024 was the response to vulnerable children who repeatedly go missing.
It is an issue given added significance by the recent court judgment, which detailed how one teenager had been reported missing around 87 times before an interim care order was granted and continued to abscond whenever she was not in secure accommodation.
Ms Marriott said Children’s Services had carried out “extensive” work on its response to missing children and now held a daily meeting involving the police, Health and education.
“We’ve done work around missing children – extensive volumes of work. What we’ve done is built a newer system for that,” she said.
The daily meeting considers children and locations which are “a worry”, with the information feeding into individual care plans and assessments of the risks they face.
“That filters into children’s plans and their risk management, so there’s a lot more oversight of that.”
A relatively small group of young people accounts for much of the repeated missing activity, Ms Marriott said.
For Children’s Services, she argued, the response has to be about persistence and relationships.
“Our job is to build relationships with children, keep holding on and being there, and building trust.”
There is no single response when a vulnerable child disappears, she added, with decisions dependent on the risks facing that individual young person.
“You’d never leave children if their risks were high. You would take action, and sometimes you’ll have children that go missing, and we’ve got a whole network of capacity about how we understand children – we’ve got the street teams that work in the youth service.
“We know where the children are, often. People might have their eyes on children through the police, through CCTV. It’s a lot of different factors that come into your risk assessment.”
She added: “It’s not like a child goes missing and nobody knows about anything.”
A ‘hive’ of foster carers
Finding enough foster families presents another challenge.
Children’s Services is currently “short” of families, Ms Marriott acknowledged, although it does not have a target number of placements it is seeking to recruit.
One initiative is based around the idea of a “hive”, with a “hub carer” bringing together and supporting up to five foster families.
Ms Marriott likened the role to that of a grandparent – or a queen bee surrounded by smaller hives – with the hub carer providing support to the same families, including overnight stays.
The hope is that providing foster carers with that network around them will also make fostering more attractive to prospective families.
The themes of the wider improvement programme are also visible in Children’s Services’ new headquarters within the Union Street Government building.
The department maintains a separate entrance, while inside the walls feature murals and spaces intended for children and their families to spend time together, including areas where they can cook.
For Ms Marriott, however, changing Children’s Services cannot happen in isolation.
The improvement plan is “really focused on joining things up and everyone being part of it”, she said, with different departments across government expected to play a role.
And underpinning that work is the same question of trust that she identified when she first inspected Jersey’s services in 2018.
Ms Marriott believes perceptions will ultimately change only if the department can demonstrate that the service itself is changing.
“And then, if you start to deliver something, I think it does eat away at a negative narrative,” she said.
“And if we’re going to make things different for children, you have to challenge some of that negative narrative to say, ‘that was then’.”
The problems facing the service have not disappeared – as the recent court judgment made clear – but Ms Marriott’s argument is that the answer lies in building something more stable for the future.
“You can’t go back and undo the wrongs of the past, sadly,” she said. “But we can make things better.”
