Separation anguish

When 14-year-old Francesca was placed into foster care outside her home city of London six years ago, her one consolation was that the council responsible had guaranteed her weekly contact with her six siblings.

The children had been on the London council’s child protection register due to neglect, before social workers decided to put the five youngest children into care, scattering them into three separate foster placements miles apart. To make the separation less painful, the council stressed in court that family support workers would bring all seven of them together for family activities once a week. But after a year, this arrangement stopped completely with the authority claiming it could no longer afford to sustain it. Francesca and her siblings felt betrayed. Francesca, who is now 20 and left foster care two years ago, says the council’s termination of the weekly contact arrangements meant that the seven siblings only managed to get together around once a year. “I just think it was so bad of them to do that because it hasn’t worked out for the best,” she says. “We’re not as close anymore. We used to be responsible for our younger brothers ourselves. Now I have one brother who’s very rude and doesn’t respect us anymore.”

Francesca believes her younger siblings have been showing signs of separation anxiety and lack of self-esteem since the regular reunions with their older siblings stopped. She says the youngest, six-year-old Mia, has been questioning whether they still love her and whether they are really her brothers and sisters.

She says she and her siblings stuck together closely throughout their years of parental neglect, when they were also cut off from social contact with others. “Contact with siblings gives you strength,” she says. “I loved my foster carer, but every time I had an argument with her, she was always talking about ending the placement. She was upset when I left and used to call me 24/7 when I lived with her. But now, she doesn’t really call me. I believe she loved me when the money was right. But your family won’t see you as a job, they’ll always have that unconditional love.”

Living apart
Francesca’s experience is likely to strike a chord with tens of thousands of looked-after children and young people across the country who have siblings also in care. According to last year’s Children’s Care Monitor report by Roger Morgan, the children’s rights director for England, 73 per cent of these young people live apart from their siblings. His annual surveys show the separation rate hovering at around 75 per cent since 2009 when it started to be monitored. This is despite the fact that the Children Act 1989 states that siblings should be placed together “so far as is reasonably practicable and consistent with [their] welfare”.

There are widely acknowledged logistical reasons why councils so often separate siblings. They can be placed into care at different times. And there is a well-documented shortage of foster carers able or willing to take on more than one child at a time.

But Delma Hughes, founder of Siblings Together, which runs annual camps and other activities to reunite separated looked-after siblings, sees the high level of sibling separation as a contributing factor to generations of children ending up in the care system. She says social workers need to start seeing the nurturing of sibling relationships as part of their safeguarding duties, rather than as something that could compromise their child protection work. “I think the system can interfere too much and can be very risk-averse,” she says. “If you try to protect children by taking everybody out of their lives, you’re causing problems for the future. I know a lot of children who go on to have children very young because they’ve got nobody and want some unconditional love. If we can build on these life-long sibling relationships, people will not be so dependent on the system.”

Roger Morgan says sibling contact needs to be higher up the agenda for everyone involved in care planning, case reviews and the commissioning of care placements. “I think we’re doing better at awareness of parental contact these days,” he says. “But we haven’t put sibling contact at quite that same level.”

He argues that the key to tackling the issue lies not just in increasing the awareness among professionals, but among members of the public who might consider becoming foster carers. “Making legislation does not actually increase the availability of placements and families able to take siblings together. That’s more to do with raising the profile of the issue.”

Practical support
The need for more regular and quality contact between siblings who are separated is another frequently raised issue in Morgan’s surveys of children. The Fostering Network says contact arrangements could be improved by ensuring that foster carers are given the financial and practical support they need to make it happen. Others argue that more sensitivity and careful planning is needed on the part of both foster carers and social workers to help nurture sibling relationships.

Victoria Hull, head of policy, projects and participation at The Who Cares? Trust, says more thought should be put into the meeting places that are chosen. “What we’ve heard from children and young people is that sometimes, contact takes place in very public areas, halfway between two foster carers’ homes at McDonalds, for example,” she says. “It can be quite emotional if it’s a brother and sister who have not seen each other for ages, so having a safe, private space is really important.”

Siblings Together plans to show hard-pressed social workers how they can use volunteers to help bring together young people in their care, by piloting a befriending programme in four local authority areas from September. The three-year pilot will involve volunteer befrienders bringing siblings together in a neutral space once a month.

Francesca’s elder sister Liberty, now 22, says it is wrong to leave contact arrangements to the discretion of foster carers, as her youngest sister’s foster carer does not make the same effort to keep them in touch as the carer of her three brothers, which is why she has not seen her since last summer. “The council said we’d have to arrange contact with my sister through her carer,” she recalls. “She was nice in the beginning, but she’s actually crazy. She wanted us to come to her house for just one hour and then leave. But it’s a whole day’s journey for us.”

Twenty-one-year-old care leaver Ailsa agrees that contact arrangements should not just be placed in the hands of foster carers. The older of her two younger sisters is allowed by her “really good” foster parent to come to stay with her every second weekend. But she is restricted to seeing her youngest sister every month in a contact centre. Ailsa, who was previously in a joint foster placement with both sisters where the youngest still lives, believes her sister’s carer is limiting contact with her because she believes she’s a bad influence. She is pressing social workers to intervene. “I feel that the foster carer is listened to more than we are,” she says.

Revised care planning, placement and case review regulations came into force in April last year. They include a requirement for care plans to set out the arrangements for maintaining contact between separated siblings. The accompanying guidance says this requires “the active involvement of social workers and children’s carers”.

Catherine Williams is child protection solicitor at Coram Children’s Legal Centre. She says this requirement should be made explicit in the legislation itself, and that it needs to be made more detailed and transparent by setting out contact requirements for siblings in different scenarios, such as those looked after by different local authorities. “There’s a vital issue here about how the child plays an active role in the process [of determining contact arrangements],” she says. “I’m never entirely sure how active councils are in promoting that young person’s right. They may believe they’re too young or too vulnerable.”

Specialist knowledge
Jeffrey Coleman, southern England director for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF), says there needs to be more specialist knowledge inside the social care system to enable social workers to carry out thorough assessments of the needs of sibling groups and to provide dedicated support to households. He forecasts that the current government drive to speed up the adoption process could get in the way of ensuring that sibling groups are housed together, an area of work which he says needs expertise and time.

But alongside these fears, there are also hopes that the prolonged spotlight on looked-after children will provide fresh opportunities for all those concerned to raise ministers’ awareness of the importance of sibling togetherness.

Ailsa, who now lives with her partner and 10-month-old son in east London, is now fighting for the right to look after her youngest sister herself. She says this will give her sister the freedom she needs and give her more contact with her other siblings. “Siblings should have contact with each other two or three times a week, it should not be just once a month,” she says. “My sister isn’t happy. She was happy when she was with me. I looked after her when she was smaller and I can’t let go of her now. I’ll fight until I can bring her home.”

Special guardianship in Hammersmith & Fulham

Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s head of service for looked-after children and care leavers, Neil Elkins, says any separation of siblings is not taken lightly. “If children are to leave their birth parents, then the most important thing they have is one another,” he says.

Elkins advocates finding permanent homes for looked-after children wherever possible, and says that such placements within their family networks can help maintain sibling relationships.

Permanent placements
The west London borough was last year ranked top in the country for its use of Special Guardianship Orders, which have enabled it to place children permanently with family members such as grandparents, aunts or uncles or older siblings. This solution was used for nearly one-fifth of all children taken out of the borough’s care in March last year, including sibling groups.

“If it’s a huge sibling group, it’s unlikely that one person will be able to care for all of them, so they could be split between two aunts,” says Elkins. “Although they’re separated, it’s a far more natural situation in terms of keeping in contact with each other because they remain within their family and their origins are kept alive.”

Elkins says his staff will often use independent experts such as child and adolescent psychologists or play therapists to advise on the pros and cons of separating particular sibling groups and to determine what arrangements should be put in place to sustain their relationships. Placements will be made on the basis of commitment to these arrangements and children are consulted about sibling contact at every review.