The Case for Concurrency Planning

The practice of concurrency planning places the needs, rights and interests of the child at the centre. The paper highlights the twin principles of concurrency planning: to place children with prospective adopters who are prepared to fulfil the fostering function while a rigorous, time limited assessment is provided to birth parents to give them the best chance of having children returned to their care

Changing the way we think about kinship care

There is growing formal recognition that children who are looked after away from home should be brought up in their family of origin wherever possible (Scottish Government 2007, 2009; Algate and McIntosh 2009). When children are at risk of abuse, or birth parents are unable to provide care, state authorities may intervene to remove the child and place them with other members of their family in ‘kinship care’. Children need carers who are able to meet their needs for life. There is concern in Scotland that the option of permanent kinship care is not always explored early enough, beginning after a child has been placed in local authority care, and resulting in additional, unnecessary placement moves and instability. Equally, there is concern that children are placed with kinship carers on an emergency basis and left too long with carers who are not able to meet their needs in the long term. Objective: This paper describes a project working to improve systems and practice in decision making and assessment for kinship. The project seeks to refocus kinship as a proactive child care intervention when there is a risk to a child, or when they are unable to remain in their parents care. Quality Improvement methodology (Langley et al 2009) and Active Implementation theory (Fixen et al 2005) are being used to create sustainable changes that include avoiding unnecessarily placing children outside of their family of origin. The project also tackles disruption and delay resulting from spending too much time assessing unsuitable kinship carers. Method: A number of strategies and methods are being used to bring about measurable improvement to the care experiences of children and promote their long-term stability. The project works in local areas to explore human behaviour, and understand and develop data and systems. This supports local managers and practitioners in developing a theory of change and identifying appropriate models to bring about positive changes. Results: Successes have included identification of more potential kinship carers, quicker assessment of suitability, and shifts in managers’ and frontline staff’s thinking. Data have been produced indicating how long it takes for the local authority to make a decision to permanently place children in kinship care, or to rule out kinship options. Importantly the data also identifies those children who are still waiting, allowing drift to be addressed. The project is changing the way we think about early identification, and more timely assessments of carers. The aim is that this will reduce unnecessary placement moves for children and allow timelier placement with suitable carers. Conclusion: The project seeks to build an evidence-base of good practice in the identification and assessment of kinship carers that can be used as a blueprint in other contexts. This work is part of a wider project that delivers Permanence and Care Excellence (PACE) (an improvement project delivered jointly by CELCIS and the Scottish Government) to a number of Local Authority areas in Scotland. The PACE project seeks to demonstrate active delivery of work from a multi-agency group to improve outcomes for looked after children

Legal representation in the Scottish Children’s Hearing System

In 1968 the Kilbrandon report detailed a system of panels for dealing with ‘juvenile delinquency’ which became the foundation for the Scottish Children’s Hearings System (CHS) in Scotland. The CHS makes decisions and recommendations about children where professionals feel compulsory measures of supervision may be necessary for the child’s wellbeing. Compulsory measures of supervision may be a helpful response to many serious issues in a child’s life, including failure to attend school, parental abuse or neglect, or criminal behaviour. As a result, almost all criminal and care and protection cases for children in Scotland up to the age of 18 are heard by the CHS. The CHS has wide-ranging powers, including the ability to dismiss charges or allegations, remove children from their parents, and mandate compulsory measures of supervision. Each hearing is presided over by a panel of three lay people who have undergone relevant training, this panel makes decisions based on the principle of the best interests of the child. Despite being a tribunal making legally enforceable decisions it has, until recently, been relatively uncommon for legal representation to be present in a hearing except in a minority of cases where there was a requirement that the child is represented by a lawyer (eg when secure care is being considered). Parents and relevant others have always been able to bring legal representation to a hearing, but following recent successful legal challenges regarding the right to representation, financial aid has been made available to parents and relevant other’s wishing to appoint a lawyer. This has led to an increase in legal representation in children’s hearings. Objective: This research was commissioned by the Scottish Legal Aid Board to examine the role of legal representatives in the children’s hearings process. In particular, in relation to the ethos of the hearings, the performance of lawyers/solicitors, monitoring and feedback mechanisms, and training needs of lawyers/solicitors to participate effectively in the hearings. Methods: A mixed methods approach was utilised, in order to gather a wide range of information. This included surveys made available to all solicitors, social workers, reporters and panel members involved in CHS, focus groups with samples from these same populations, interviews with children, and representatives from outside of the formal CHS system. Results: The introduction of financial aid and corresponding increase in the legal presence in the CHS has produced mixed results. While respondents were careful not to over-generalise regarding the performance of lawyers/solicitors, there were concerns regarding: the introduction of an adversarial style; a change in emphasis away from the best interests of the child and towards the rights of the parent(s); the introduction of delay into proceedings; a lack of understanding of child development, communication and attachment; and disruption of social workers’ relationships with the family. Conclusion: Legal representation in lay-tribunals such as the CHS can present challenges. Training of solicitors in child development and other topics, the introduction of a compulsory scheme of pre-registration training, and ongoing inter-agency training to facilitate all parties’ understandings of different roles could be helpful

What can quality improvement methods do for you?

[no abstract available

Detecting Protostellar Jets with the Goddard Fabry-Perot Coronagraph, and Modification for Adaptive Optics

The Goddard Fabry-Perot has been used at the Apache Point Observatory 3.5-m telescope to diagnose jets from young Herbig Ae (HD163296) and T Tauri stars (DL Tau and CW Tau), detected by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope. The additional spectral discrimination of the Fabry-Perot allows these faint jets to be detected from the ground, to obtain velocities and densities, and to find further extensions. In order to plan what measurements require space coronagraphs, we need to explore the extent to which coronagraphic detections can be made from the ground, including using adaptive optics. Modifications to the Fabry-Perot tunable narrow band coronagraph for possible use with the AEOS 3.65-m telescope will be described