Child Protection Guidance 2021

Part 4: Specific support needs and concerns 179 National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021 Version 1.0 September 2021 4.278 The best protection is preventative support. Thorough assessment of carers and of children’s needs, alongside planning and support of placements, are key to ensuring that placements can meet children’s needs for safety and nurture. Once in placement, trust and physical and emotional safety evolve through routine experiences of nurture, empathy, nourishment, sleep, daily achievement, understanding, play, choice and hope. 4.279 A key outcome of child protection and work with looked after children should be the development of a child’s sense of stability and safety, achieved through the building of trusting and nurturing relationships with their adult care givers. This refers to exploring, promoting and sustaining relationships of enduring and protective significance. This includes relationships with brothers and sisters. “Where living with their family is not possible, children must stay with their brothers and sisters where safe to do so and belong to a loving home, staying there for as long as needed” (Independent Care Review, 2020). 4.280 When children are placed quickly , in response to a crisis, any initial discussion between those seeking and providing services must be thorough, to ensure the risks are recognised and can be sufficiently supported. This includes risk assessment about co-placement of children whose behaviour could pose risk to others. 4.281 Growth of relationship, trust and recovery is likely to depend on appreciation of the impact of trauma, neglect and disrupted attachment for each child. This requires attention to what each child is communicating, not only by what they say, but what they do and how they present. 4.282 Sustaining care. It is to be expected that looked after children who have had to leave the care of their parents will usually experience complex emotions and distressed, disrupting behaviours. Many will have experienced separation and loss in their early years, and will have been emotionally and physically neglected or abused. Layers of trauma are likely to result in deep-rooted fearfulness, anxiety, lack of trust and confusion. A constant need for reassurance and for soothing can occur when there is underlying confusion, fear and emotional distress. This can be bewildering and exhausting for carers. 4.283 Carers and their families need guidance and support to enable them to offer trauma- informed care, appropriate to the developmental needs and known life history of each child. The Independent Care Review has underlined the need for preventative support for kinship Carers, foster carers and adopters. (“Whatever the mode of arrangement, Scotland must ensure that children living in kinship care get the support they need to thrive.” Independent Care Review, 2020). 4.284 When looked after children are moving between placements and between authorities, transitional arrangements must be negotiated and planned in order to avert what may otherwise emerge as child protection concerns. Sufficient transitional support when children move on from placements may likewise reduce crises that could be anticipated. The Independent Care Review has emphasised that, however urgent the situation, “… children and their carers must have access to information about their rights and entitlements at any point in their journey of care.” 4.285 Safer caring. A co-produced family agreement, involving everyone living in the house, helps to ensure that each resident child and adult, and visitor, knows how to behave to keep everyone in the house feeling safe (including pets). This is advised for registered foster carers to ensure that everyone who lives in the household, and those who visit, know how family rules and boundaries work.