I could not agree more. If we are reflecting for a moment on the past, Governments have invested a huge amount of money and resource into young people in care, and perhaps that money might have been better spent if more thought had
been given to ensuring that mental health was fully integrated with all the educational support that is given to young people in care.
Amendment 32A extends the ability of the Secretary of State to allocate functions and includes the provision of child and adolescent mental health services for children in the adoption system as well as an assessment of their mental health needs. I suppose that the Secretary of State might say of a charity such as the Brent Centre for Young People, “They do a very good job—maybe they should do it more widely, and maybe a certain local authority needs them to give it help in this particular area”.
Amendment 34A ensures that the quantity and quality of mental health support provided for in the adoption system will be maintained or improved by these steps to ensure that there is a movement forward, not backward, in any changes made. The headline I put to your Lordships is that, while this is quite narrowly focused on children in the adoption system, I hope that the Minister might allow me to make a plea for improved mental health support for young people coming into care. In particular and most important, currently, children who come into care have a health assessment by a GP, which is welcome. I will expand on this later, but they really need a mental health specialist or perhaps a clinical psychologist to give them an assessment that is focused on their mental health. Following on from that assessment, they need the services that follow to help them meet the trauma and the need to recover from that trauma that many of them will have. Therefore, that is the headline I put to your Lordships: an appropriate clinical professional at the very beginning, the services to follow up, then ongoing monitoring to ensure that those services are being provided, as well as of the mental health of the young people. That would make a huge difference.
I am most grateful for the many measures that the Government have taken to improve the adoption system, in particular with the assistance of my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss with regard to the adoption support fund. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how that will apply to this particular area, and on accelerating the adoption process so that children get to a loving family more swiftly than in the past.
There are challenges. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, 60% of children who come into care have experience of neglect or abuse, and 45% have a mental disorder in care as against 10% of the general population. Therefore it is not surprising that they will have often experienced trauma in their lives before arriving into care. Being taken into care—being taken from one’s family—is a traumatic process in itself; then there may be further trauma as regards shift of placements in care. Therefore, there is a huge mental health element to the work that needs to be done here as well as the educational attainment, which is being better grasped for.
It is very welcome that the Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson MP, is well aware of these issues. His father has written on the issues of attachment in the past and, of course, Mr Timpson has siblings who are adopted. He is very sympathetic and has been meeting
with the NSPCC and young people who have left care recently to discuss these particular issues. I commend him for paying such attention to this area.
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I do not wish to take up too much of the Committee’s time, but I shall give a little example. I worked 10 years ago with a 10 year-old who was just coming up for adoption. The placement was arranged by Anne Longfield, the current Children’s Commissioner, for which I am grateful. We had been working with this young boy of 10 for two weeks, and nobody had told us that he was about to come up for adoption. One might have guessed as he was behaving like a three year-old most of the time. He was aggressive and disruptive, and spent much of the breaks just lolling around in a tyre. He was behaving in a very infantile way, but he just needed extra support. We learnt that he was about to be adopted because as we were driving from Chessington World of Adventures in a minivan, he said, “I can’t wait to meet my new family. We’re going off to Butlins together and I’ll meet my new sister”. One really hopes that that worked out well for him. A child like that needs excellent support from the get-go, so any issues are sorted out early and he has the best chance of a secure and safe placement.
Another quick example is one produced in the film of Steve Jobs’s life. It is based on a biography but it is a fictional, artist’s interpretation of what happened. One sees that Steve Jobs is very unkind to his five year-old daughter at the beginning of the film. He rejects her and says, “I’m not your father”, in her presence, even though she clearly wishes him to be so and imagines that he is. At the end of the film, he comes to recognise that she is his daughter, but what also comes out is that he himself, as an adopted child, for a long time felt that he was not wanted and had been rejected. It seems that that pattern, which was unresolved, played through again in his fatherhood. It highlights the risks that if we do not deal with the issues early on, they will go on to plague that person’s life and the next generation. So, we need to act early and get the best and correct professional input from a clinical psychologist, or someone of that ilk with the appropriate training.
There are a couple of challenges, on which the noble Baroness can enlighten me. One is the prospective adoptees. What work is being done to ensure that prospective adoptees, who may perhaps have had several attempts at in vitro fertilisation and may be feeling quite frustrated at being unable to have a biological child of their own, have had the support to come to terms with that before taking on a child for adoption? I imagine that that may be dealt with in the adoption process.
The other issue is that many of the children coming up for adoption in the future will be older children. Because the Government have been so successful at getting more children through the system, we are now likely to be left with older children coming forward. That would be a challenge and I wonder how the Government will face it. That highlights again the importance of correct mental health interventions early on so that those older children get the help they need. I am not sure that I have got that right, but
perhaps the Minister would write to me about that. The correct thing for me to say at this point is: I beg to move.