Baby Victoria: National review calls for urgent action

Our group statement

“We welcome the recommendations from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report into the death of Baby Victoria. In particular, calling for a stronger focus on trauma-informed practice when working with parents with children’s social care involvement in their lives, more effective implementation of pre-birth protocols and for the development of parent support plans when parents are no longer able to care for their children.

A decade of high-quality research makes evident that recurrent care proceedings are a significant issue across England and Wales. We recognise the urgent need for coordinated, specialised, sustained, and compassionate trauma-informed support for parents before, during, and after care proceedings. We consider these recommendations to be vital steps forward and we would like to see them strengthened further.

It is excellent to see the report call on Government to strengthen national guidance. However, we think that this should go further and for long-term, relational support to be available in every local authority for parents in these situations. However, the requirement for sustained, multi-agency support to parents who experience recurrent care proceedings cannot be resourced solely or primarily through already stretched local authority children’s social care budgets. This will require long term, dedicated funding arrangements that enable meaningful support. There are moral, ethical and cost benefit imperatives to this, with clear evidence of significant cost savings to children’s social care and wider public services (Boddy et al., 2020).

We have been working collaboratively to advocate for and improve support for parents experiencing repeat removals. The Community of Practice we support involves 75 organisations across all regions of England and is the repository of deep practice expertise that should be utilised in planning for the implementation of these recommendations. Their work demonstrates that timely, relationship-based, trauma-informed support can help parents stabilise, recover and make the changes needed to enable them to keep or be reunified with their child.

Where this is not possible, sustained relationship-based trauma-informed support, which responds to long-standing unmet health and welfare needs and recognises the trauma of previous child separations, remains essential in helping parents to make lasting positive changes and build more positive futures for themselves. This is particularly important for the significant proportion of parents who were themselves in care as children – understood to represent around 40% of mothers experiencing recurrent care proceedings (Broadhurst et al., 2017) – where the state carries a moral and ethical responsibility as corporate parent and grandparent. Providing this support can strengthen parents’ chances of maintaining relationships with children they are separated from, keep open the possibility of reunification in the future, and reduce the risk of further care proceedings, including by preventing the recurrence of removals for subsequent children and supporting better outcomes for those children.

We are committed to supporting parents with compassionate and trauma-informed responses that make lasting changes and build more stable, hopeful futures for themselves and their families, whether or not they are able to care for their children themselves.”

Signatories

• Susannah Bowyer, Deputy Director for Children and Families, Research in Practice
• Kate Tilley, Director of Partnerships and Engagement, Pause
• Pam Ledward, Director for Social Care Practice, Family Rights Group
• Lisa Harker, Director, Nuffield Family Justice Observatory
• Kirsty Kitchen, Director of the Birth Companions, Birth Companions
• Kaat De Backer, Midwife Research Fellow, King’s College London
• Dr Danny Taggart, Programme Director in psychology at University of Essex

References

• Boddy, J., Bower, S., Godar, R., Hale, C., Kearney, J., Preston, O., Wheeler, B., & Wilkinson, J. (2020). Evaluation of Pause. Department for Education.
• Broadhurst, K., Mason, C., Bedston, S., Alrouh, B., Morriss, L., McQuarrie, T., Palmer, M., Shaw, M., Harwin, J., & Kershaw, S. (2017). Vulnerable birth mothers and recurrent care proceedings. University of Lancaster.