Listen to thisIt’s a popular misconception that foster care workers are “substitute parents” performing a similar role to adopters. Yes, they passionately and tirelessly look after children and young people, but the foster care workers who take society’s most vulnerable into their homes are professional carers. They have considerable training (and in many cases qualifications), must be “registered” with a local authority or private fostering agency, are given an allowance and special tax arrangements to help cover the costs of looking after children in their homes, and are often paid fees for their work. They do not have legal authority over the children and, indeed, their role often involves helping build the relationship between biological parents and the children.
The secretary of state for education has appointed Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers to conduct a National Fostering Stocktake to make recommendations on how to improve the fostering system for England’s children and young people. The review will explore, among other things, “the status, role and function of foster carers in relation to other professionals as part of the team working with a child in care”. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which has been representing foster care workers throughout the UK since September last year, will be calling on Narey and Owers to consider their employment rights – or lack thereof.
Foster care workers do work that is set out for them in a written agreement, and they are highly supervised, yet they have no employment rights. And these rights couldn’t be more needed. In the past few months I have heard horror stories of foster care workers not being paid enough to cover basic essentials, of unfair “de-registrations”, and of poor treatment more generally, the scandal at Norfolk county council, where several children’s services workers were suspended amid accusations that it had wrongly removed children, being just one example. But perhaps most shockingly, in the past six years I have spent working with and representing low-paid workers in precarious employment, I have never come across a group more petrified of victimisation than foster care workers.
This fear is not borne of cowardice but rather a reflection of the state of play: foster care workers are all too often victimised for speaking out. Unsurprisingly, in a recent survey conducted by the Fostering Network, the UK’s leading fostering charity, only 4% of respondents stated they were happy with the status quo of being tied to one fostering service with no statutory employment rights.
The good news is that this is all starting to change. These workers are joining the union almost every day, we are challenging their employment status in a test case in Scotland, we’ve been gaining support from MPs and peers from across the political spectrum, confidence is growing, and fear is decreasing. But Narey and Owers need to recommend government action on two fronts in order to build on this positive trend. First, they should recommend that the responsibility for training, registering, and de-registering foster care workers should be taken out of the hands of local authorities and placed in those of a national, independent and government-accredited body. This will standardise procedures, allow foster care workers to foster for more than one local authority at a time, and reduce the propensity for unfair procedures and victimisation engendered by the current set-up.
Second, parliament should pass a foster care workers’ rights bill
that extends the statutory employment rights enjoyed by “workers” –
those self-employed people who carry out their work as part of someone
else’s business – to foster care workers. This would allow foster carers
trade union representation in disciplinary hearings, give them statutory
protection for whistleblowing, and guarantee paid holidays (currently
only given at the discretion of the fostering service).
Whenever
one discusses employment rights for foster care workers, inevitably
someone asks: “Well, surely these people should foster out of love – if
you give them rights and more pay won’t you just get a load of people
doing it for the money instead?” Putting aside for the moment the fact
that this question doesn’t get asked of other people who are motivated
by doing good but also make a living from their profession, such as
doctors or teachers, if people are concerned about the fair use of money
in fostering then I would suggest asking questions of those who are
actually getting that money, such as local authorities’ directors of
children services, some of whom earn more than £130,000 per year, or
private fostering agencies who make millions in profits.
The desire for working rights and decent pay should not be questioned for those who dedicate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to looking after children and young people in the most vulnerable of situations.
Jason Moyer-Lee
1 May 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/01/foster-care-vulnerable-children-rights-pay
