Meeting with Department for Education went well
Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE led a meeting between Rob Macpherson MBE, the lead for children looked after, and ACRCG on 26 February 2019 to follow up the work done by participants at the Seminar at the House of Lords.
The DfE agreed in principle to the concept of Standards to mark a threshold of quality of services for all adult care leavers who ask to see their case records and they will support work we do to devise these. The Department’s remit is for care leavers up to 25 years and they agreed to support us in making links with other relevant government departments to achieve across government support for standards.
The DfE is due to revisit the Transition to Adulthood statutory guidance [which includes the guidance on access to records] and will see how to strengthen this and to improve links between the Ofsted inspection process of LA services and the guidance, particularly looking at the quality of the process to support care leavers now and the quality of care records for future care leavers.
This will link to the work the DfE is doing on the Care Leavers’ Covenant and the new duty on local authorities to set out their offer of services available to care leavers. We believe this was a successful recognition of the work done by participants in November and we are now working on draft standards to circulate for consideration.
- Published in General
MIRRA – Memory- Identity – Rights in Records – Access
n 2017 we teamed up with University College London who are carrying out a 2 year research project properly funded into the accessing of records with particular emphasis on care records and care leavers experiences.
MIRRA is a research project that aims to support the rights of care leavers by exploring how child social care records have been created, kept and used in public and voluntary organisations in England from the mid-20th century to the present day. The acronym stands for Memory – Identity – Rights in Records – Access. It is a participatory action research project co-produced with care leavers in partnership with the Care Leavers Association. Ultimately it aims to make positive changes to social care record keeping and through those changes improve the care leavers’ experiences.
A history of the research can be seen on the MIRRA Blog here
- Published in Research
MIRRA Research and lack of “love” in record keeping
We have been very fortunate as a group to have had the support of the MIRRA project, which appears in more detail in the Research Section of the site, where there is a fuller explanation of the 2 year research project being carried out by the University of Central London in close co-operation with several organisations such as the Care Leavers Association and ACRCG.
In this latest blog, Victoria Hoyle describes how she has discovered the issue that children in care feel unloved owing the bureaucratic process of record keeping, the form filling needed to obtain, for example, pocket money, and feeling that they are a statistic rather than a real human being.
To read the blog, click here