The Calls the NSPCC Helpline have about babies
| The NSPCC has published a report looking at the main concerns people who call the NSPCC Helpline have about babies. Findings include: 851 people contacted the NSPCC Helpline with concerns about a baby; 74% of all calls led to a referral; and 60% of referrals involved either parental substance misuse, domestic abuse or concerns about a parent’s mental health. |
| Source: NSPCC Inform 12 December 2011 |
Government creates £170m fund to help older patients leave NHS hospitals
The government will announce a further £170m funding for councils on Monday, to help them improve care and support for elderly people coming out of hospital.
The boost comes after a healthcare thinktank warned that the NHS stood no chance of hitting its £20bn efficiency savings target unless steps were taken to curb a rise in elderly patients occupying hospital beds longer than necessary.
Local government leaders welcome the one-off payment, which is to be spent over the next three months, but warn that the social care funding system cannot go on being patched up without fundamental reform.
Of the £170m total, £150m will be divided among the 152 councils with social care responsibilities and will be allocated through NHS primary care trusts, which must agree how the money should best be spent to ease pressure on hospitals.
The remaining £20m will be used to top up local funding pots for the disabled facilities grant, a means-tested award administered by councils to help with the cost of adaptations to enable people to continue living at home.
All the cash is said to be coming from in-year savings in the Department of Health budget. The £20m extra for the disabled facilities grant is being passed to the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Paul Burstow, the care services minister, said: “It is absolutely crucial that the NHS and local authorities work together to help people leave hospital when they are ready. The benefits are on all sides – patients get to go home with the support they and their families need, and hospital beds are freed up.”
Latest official figures show that 4,200 people are taking up hospital beds when ready for discharge. With beds costing about £200 a night, the King’s Fund thinktank has warned that this will prevent the NHS achieving its target of 4% annual savings, amounting to £20bn by 2015.
According to the thinktank, more than 70% of hospital beds are occupied by patients admitted as emergencies and one in 10 of them, typically aged over 64, stay for longer than two weeks.
Peter Hay, president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, said the funding boost would be put to use within days. Equally welcome was the signal it sent that the government understood the need for the health, social care and housing systems to work as one.
However, Hay added: “Pleased as we are with this helpful initiative, directors are well aware that it is a small, valuable contribution to solving a problem which goes far deeper.”
Ministers are due to decide within the next two months whether to follow the recommendations of a commission led by the economist Andrew Dilnot, calling for radical reform of the funding of long-term care for elderly and disabled people.
The Treasury is known to be wary of the cost, which is an initial £1.7bn a year.
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said: “Savings have been made in the Department of Health’s budget which we are investing to help people leave hospital as quickly as they can, when they are ready, and to receive support at home.
“Older people often need particular support after a spell in hospital to settle back into their homes, recover their strength and regain their independence. This money will enable the NHS and social care to work better together for the benefit of patients.
“This additional investment for health and care services is the result of determination to deliver savings, maintain quality and invest in services that matter to patients and their families and carers during the critical winter season.”
The government and opposition are being urged to overhaul England’s “failing” social care system, which experts say is leaving 800,000 elderly people “lonely, isolated and at risk”.
In a letter published in the Telegraph a group of more than 60 government advisers, charity directors and independent experts said failure to meet the challenge of an ageing population was resulting in “terrible examples of abuse and neglect”.
The signatories, who include representatives from the British Medical Association, Age UK and the TUC, called for cross-party support to secure “urgent, fundamental and lasting reform”.
“The unavoidable challenge we face is how to support the increasing number of people who need care,” they wrote.
“It is currently a challenge which we are failing to meet – resulting in terrible examples of abuse and neglect in parts of the care system.
“This comes at a huge cost to the dignity and independence of older and disabled people, but also to our society, family life and the economy.
“An estimated 800,000 older people are being left without basic care – lonely, isolated and at risk.”
They said some people faced losing their homes and savings because of rising social care bills, while businesses were losing staff who were forced to give up work to care for relatives.
NHS hospitals were “paying the price” because of avoidable hospital admissions, they added.
The signatories backed proposals that no one should pay more than £35,000 for care bills during their lifetime.
According to the BBC, cross-party talks about the care given to the elderly and disabled will resume this month. A White Paper is due to be published in April.
The care services minister Paul Burstow told the Telegraph the government was “taking leadership on this issue”.
He said the coalition agreed the reform of social care was an “urgent priority”, adding: “We have put an extra £7.2bn for social care over the course of this parliament.”
The Scottish Catholic Church has argued against equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, saying “exceptionally hazardous” gay relationships lead to shorter life expectancies, relying on a study which was discredited by its own authors for this purpose ten years ago and a paper authored by the founder of the Family Research Institute, which is designated a “hate group” in the US.
Source: Pink Paper News
The government is to overhaul the way people in England are checked to see if they are suitable to adopt children.
It has set up a new panel which will work with its adoption adviser, Martin Narey, to draw up plans.
Ministers say the process is “painfully slow” and that many are put off, while others are turned away unnecessarily for being overweight or ex-smokers.
The government has pledged to speed up the adoption system and says it wants more children adopted.
It says children wait an average of two years and seven months to be adopted, while it can take a year for a couple or individual to be approved to adopt.
‘Common-sense approach’
Earlier this year ministers highlighted figures which showed that of the 3,660 children under the age of one who were in care in England last year, only 60 were adopted.
They say they want a “common-sense” approach.
Children’s minister Tim Loughton said: “The assessment process for people wanting to adopt is painfully slow, repetitive and ineffective. Dedicated social workers are spending too long filling out forms instead of making sound, common-sense judgements about someone’s suitability to adopt.
“Children are waiting too long because we are losing many potentially suitable adoptive parents to a system which doesn’t welcome them and often turns them away at the door.
“We cannot afford to sit back and lose potential adoptive parents when there are children who could benefit hugely from the loving home they can provide.”
The new panel will include representatives from the British Association of Adoption and Fostering, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Adoption UK and the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies.
They have been asked to suggest ways to improve the way would-be adoptive parents are recruited, assessed and trained and to “remove bureaucracy and over-prescription” in information collected about them.
Source: BBC NEWS Website
Communicating and engaging with young people follows employer feedback asking for support in this area. The guide, created by the Children’s Workforce Developemnt Fund (CWDC), builds on key learning outcomes from projects funded through our Participation Fund, and includes tips on how best to help staff and volunteers improve their skills in this area
Source: CWDC
The proposed change is part of a review by Sunita Mason, the government’s independent adviser on criminality information. The Home Office is currently reviewing her recommendation to widen the existing definition of ‘criminal record’ for vetting and barring checks.
At the moment, the system only takes into account convictions for imprisonable offences. This means penalties with large fines, including cruelty to animals, are ignored.
In future, Ms Mason wants employers to consider cautions, reprimands, non-imprisonable offences, and police warnings when deciding on a person’s suitability to work with children. However, penalty notices for disorder or restorative justice and community resolutions would not be included.
This is the second review Ms Mason has carried out into criminal records and vetting and barring checks. Many recommendations in her first review, including stopping checks on under-16s and allowing applicants to review and dispute police information held on them, have been made law.
At least 8,750 new foster families need to be found across the UK in the next 12 months to avoid a crisis in the care system, the Fostering Network has claimed.
According to the charity, the number of children in need of a foster home has risen for five years in a row and around 14 per cent of the foster care work force retire or leave each year.
The average age of foster carer was 46 in 2000 rising to 53 in 2009 and the number of children living with foster carers rose from 49,700 in 2005 to 59,000 in 2011.
The Fostering Network says an extra 7,100 foster carers are needed in England, 1,000 in Scotland, 550 in Wales and 100 in Northern Ireland.
All children in care need a family they can grow up with who can love them, be ambitious for them and help them achieve their potential. For a growing number, foster care is the best option.
“By becoming a foster carer people can help the children they welcome into their homes to have the best possible opportunity of a positive future, do well at school and be successful in later life.”
Staff in the secure estate experienced an unprecedented influx of young people following the summer riots, which proved a significant challenge to safeguarding, the prison’s inspectorate has reported
An inspection of Feltham Young Offender’s Institution (YOI), following the disturbances in August, found a lack of information about new arrivals made it difficult to carry out initial assessments to keep young people safe, and the huge increase of movement across the whole of the under-18 secure estate impacted on both new arrivals and the settled population.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons also found that young people held on remand had inadvertently been exposed to gangs, with young people on different units forming into gangs, including those who had not been involved in gangs before.
The distance young people were held from home and the lack of contact with their families and youth offending teams was also highlighted as a consequence of for those moved to the north of England.
During and immediately after the riots the report states that “Feltham received in a week the number of new arrivals it would normally expect in a month: 60 young people”.
According to the report: “Staff said that while there had been good communication between establishments, there was a need for a National Offender Management Service (Noms) and Youth Justice Board strategy to help address the broader issues.”
Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said, children sent to jail after the disturbances were put at risk, “stretching the prison system to its limit”.
“It is shocking that there was no coherent strategy from central government for dealing with the massive influx of children sent into custody,” she said.
“Staff were forced to make it up as they went along. As a result the number of children on suicide risk went up a whopping 200 per cent.
“We had phone calls on our crisis line from children in prisons who had been advised to walk around in pairs so they were not on the landing on their own.”
Penelope Gibbs, director of the Prison Reform Trust’s Out of Trouble programme, said: “The system did cope just about but the report begs the question as to whether so many under 18 year olds needed to be locked up on remand in the wake of the riots.”
The report conducted prior to the riots found that the YOI continues to operate fairly well, but progress had halted and in some areas regressed.
Safeguarding arrangements had improved, incidents of self-harm had reduced and work was going on to address gang issues.
But the quality of activity provision had deteriorated and attendance in education and standards of discipline were poor, with many young people returned to their cells because of disruptive behaviour.
Chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick said: “This establishment continues to operate reasonably well, working with often volatile young people in a challenging environment. This does not, however, negate the fact that the progress and improvement we have previously described has stopped, and in significant areas regressed.
“There is a clear need to refocus the prison’s work on equality with a diverse population, basic standards of cleanliness require improvement and there is a need to re-energise elements of the resettlement strategy. Most importantly, there must be access to good quality activity and education which will engage young people and equip them for the future.”
Michael Spurr, chief executive of the Noms, said: “Feltham has a very challenging population and I am pleased that the work being undertaken to address gang issues has been recognised.
“At the time of the inspection Feltham was adapting to cope with a higher sentenced population of young people than previously. The governor will use the chief inspector’s report to develop the regime to match the young people’s needs and improve activity provision.
By Neil Puffett Tuesday, 20 December 2011
By Janaki Mahadevan Tuesday, 20 December 2011
The government has recognised the importance of play in children’s learning in its response to the consultation on the Early Years Foundation Stage.
n her review of the framework for under-fives, Dame Clare Tickell recommended that the EYFS be slimmed down to focus on three prime areas of learning and to reduce the number of early learning goals from 69 to 17.
While there was broad support for the recommendations to simplify the assessment for children at age five, a “significant minority” of respondents questioned the emphasis on school readiness.
In its response to the consultation, the government states: “We understand that there may be some anxiety that the EYFS should be valued as an important phase in its own right, and that there may be a concern about too strong a focus on formal education too soon.
“The government considers that this anxiety is unwarranted because school readiness should be understood in a broad sense. In their first few years, through exploration and play, children learn to walk and run, to talk and understand, and learn to relate to others, as well as beginning to read and write and use numbers.
“The EYFS framework accordingly recognises the central importance of play in children’s learning. It also recognises that children need to be introduced to formal learning in their foundation years in a way and at a time appropriate to their individual level of development.”
Many respondents also felt there was a need for additional information to support practitioners deliver the reformed EYFS. The government said it is working with organisations in the early years sector to ensure appropriate material is produced to underpin the new statutory framework.
Sue Robb, head of early years at charity 4Children, said: “We particularly welcome the new proposals that extend early learning beyond formal approaches to include play and child initiated learning. Introducing stronger definitions of play and making access to outdoor learning a requirement for all children every day can ensure fun and enjoyment are at the heart of their learning and development.
“Simplifying the bands of development and producing a clearer, broader definition of school readiness will make the delivery of the EYFS less bureaucratic and ensure that practitioners spend more time interacting with children to give them a rounded and enjoyable early education.”
The government is continuing to consult on the early learning goals and will publish the final revised EYFS framework in Spring 2012, ready for its implementation in September.