This is why we must do better for children in care

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 6 April, 2023

Rebekah Pierre shares a photo of herself. She’s standing with two friends in her school uniform. She’s smiling, but it looks a forced smile. The photo was taken when she was aged 16, months before she went into care, living on her on in an unregulated hostel.

“I look at that photo and just see a very vulnerable child who had very little coping skills, who was really struggling and who in no way was ready to be dumped into an unregulated hostel living with adults who had just got out of prison,” she says.

“It was a terrifying reality as a teenage girl, when I was a child trying to go to school.”

A visit from a social worker sticks in her memory.

“She was in the one good clinical nice office space in the hostel and I was 15 minutes late. She was calling me saying, ‘Where are you? You know you’re late again’.

“If you panned the camera upstairs, I was listening at the door to see if it was safe to walk down the corridor, because there were often fights, gangs, people trying to sell drugs.

“You've got the angry social worker asking why are you late again, and you've got the child at the door, asking, ‘Is it safe for me to go downstairs?’”

Rebekah and fellow social worker Rosie Tejani recently talked about their experiences of being in care during a webinar hosted by regulator Social Work England. Both say they initially felt they had to keep quiet about their care background when they became social workers.

“Even now I don't speak out much about it,” says Rosie. “I still see it as a barrier, and I don't want people to see me as vulnerable.

“I've spoken to a number of care experienced social workers, and they all say the same thing - that they don't share for fear of being judged. Some of them are very senior social workers.

“As social workers working in an anti-oppressive, anti-discriminatory manner, it's shocking that people still don't feel comfortable sharing.”

Rebekah says she kept her care experience hidden for a long time because she felt it “was a source of shame”.

“When I was in care I kept this diary. The moment I left care, I stored it away in a shoebox, where it gathered dust over many years. I think that was really symbolic of my attitude to care, that it was a relic of a former life. I didn't want anything to do with it. And it also didn't feel safe to share.”

Both Rebekah and Rosie highlighted the things that can impact on a young person’s sense of worth and value when in care.

Rosie says: “For example, that black bag that we have when we're moving from one place to another, and the significance of just having our belongings in a proper bag. I didn't even have a black bag. I just had the clothes on my back and that was because the clothes and the toys belonged to the foster carer. They weren't mine.”

The language used by professionals also has an impact. Rebekah describes her shock at the “dehumanising” language she heard when she became a social worker.

“I remember the first time I ever heard the term ‘corporate parent’ I honestly thought it was a joke because it seems so cold and formal. But then actually, within six months, I was using the same kind of language and that's despite having really good intentions to start with.”

Rosie talks about the need to “reframe” the language used by professionals about children and young people in care: “For example, aggressive could be described as 'assertive'; domineering, a ‘strong leader’, attention-seeking, ‘attachment-searching’ ­ so they’re seen in a positive way.”

She also believes social work needs to do some reframing itself to see care experienced people as more of an asset within the workplace.

“We've overcome barriers to come into the profession, to study and get our foot in the door,” says Rosie.

“It's about the fact that we've taken control and overcome these challenges. And we've got our own lived experience, so we are bringing an authentic voice and unique insights.

“We're definitely adaptable. We will have moved around and usually been in lots of different circumstances. And that is a top skill, especially when you work in a council that has a restructure every five minutes or new technology to get hold of, or a new procedure, or policy.

“We also have resourcefulness along with problem-solving skills; we are used to relying on limited networks and have lot of self-reliance.”

Rebekah, now a professional officer with BASW England, has been inspired in recent years by the campaigning work of organisations such as Article 39 to be more open about her care experience.

She has written for national newspapers such as The Guardian and published a paper that includes extracts from her childhood diary.

She also made a subject access request to receive the records kept on her during the time in the unregulated placement - and was shocked to be sent a four-page spreadsheet full of numbers.

“I was expecting some notes on my wellbeing, about me as a human being, what my interests were. But because the [unregulated] placement didn't have to adhere to the standards of a children's home, the only thing that they retained on me was my rent history.”

Last year Rebekah took the “very personal” decision of asking the local authority that she was in the care of as a child for the records it had on her.

What she received was so riddled with errors and dehumanising language that its impact could easily have been devastating.

Rebekah chose to channel her feelings into a powerful and moving open letter to the social worker who wrote her case notes. The letter, which you can read here, should arguably be required reading for any social worker working with children.