What Challenges Emerge from Cases Where Children Are Made Subject to a ‘Care Order at Home’?

A continued and unprecedented demand for England’s child protection services has coincided with increasing numbers of children being made subject to Care Orders within England’s Family Court. There is a growing understanding of the associated challenges—not least in terms of cost and placement availability. However, there has been limited discussion of the difficulties associated with children being made subject to a Care Order (and who are therefore, placed in ‘public care’), but who simultaneously remain living at home with their birth parents. This is problematic, as the use of the ‘Care Order at home’ has become an increasingly common safeguarding approach within the United Kingdom and has been a factor in several recently reported child death tragedies. The purpose of the study was to explore with frontline child protection practitioners what they considered to be the challenges posed by cases where the child is made subject to a ‘Care Order at home’ at the point of application to the Family Court.

The study adopted an iterative mixed method design, comprising of focus groups, online questionnaire, and interviews with 56 child protection practitioners. It also submitted Freedom of Information requests to the 57 local authorities comprising the Association of Directors of Children’s Services ‘Greater London’ and ‘Northwest’ regions, with the aim of exploring the prevalence of ‘Care Orders at home’ in different parts of the country.

The study identified three broad challenges associated with the phenomenon of ‘Care Orders at home’. Firstly, in regard to ‘managing child protection partners’ expectations’— with multi-agency colleagues said to adopt a more ‘relaxed’ and ‘hands-off’ approach to their safeguarding responsibilities, given that the child was now in public care (and was therefore ostensibly ‘more likely to be protected from harm’). Secondly, it led to ‘confusion and disempowerment of the child and family’—who often didn’t understand how a child could be in public, but simultaneously remain living at home. Thirdly, they engendered ‘an increased sense of risk’ amongst the social workers involved—especially because the social worker was given responsibility for the care of the child who continued to reside in an environment that they had been assessed as being harmful, but to whom they had limited access, given that the placement remained a private family residence.

Implications that emerge from the study are that a ‘Care Order at home’ might, in some circumstances, be considered as a ‘contradictory’ and therefore ‘confusing’ concept for different stakeholders (including the child and its family). Moreover, that they can offer less protection to a child than a care plan for ‘No Order’ running concurrently to a detailed child protection plan—where the responsibility for seeing and protecting the child within the family home remains the shared remit of the multi-agency core group. Finally, the study highlights the need for all the key stakeholders involved in the decision-making within the Family Courts, to be more cognisant of the challenges associated with a Care Order at home when deciding upon its suitability for the child’s care plan.