In brief: Jersey’s Children’s Minister has admitted that missed opportunities for early intervention are pushing more children into the care system, with numbers expected to peak in 2028. Some children are only coming to the attention of services through the criminal justice system, which Richard Vibert described as “far too late.” A previous fall in care numbers was, he acknowledged, wrongly treated as a success.
Too Little, Too Late
Jersey’s Children’s Minister Richard Vibert has made a candid admission to the Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel: the island’s children’s services missed the boat on early intervention for a cohort of vulnerable young people, and the bill for that failure is now coming due.
“The sad fact is that one or two of them are introduced to us through the criminal justice system, which is, in effect, far too late,” Mr Vibert told the panel, according to Bailiwick Express. “If you go back through the history, intervention should have taken place some years before. And that is a very sad thing to admit.”
He described “a cohort of children we’re aware of, where that intervention didn’t take place and we come in late,” and warned the panel in a prior letter that demand for children’s social care and residential provision would grow over the next few years. The number of children in care is expected to reach a peak in 2028.
Falling Numbers Were Not the Good News They Seemed
Perhaps the most striking admission from the minister was that a decline in care numbers, which had previously been celebrated within the department, was in fact a warning sign dressed up as a win.
“Dare I say that if we wound back probably sort of five years ago when I was first an assistant minister, falling numbers were seen as a very positive thing,” Mr Vibert said. “That was, I think, a misguided view. In fact, what was actually happening was we weren’t capturing those children that were in need at the time.”
In other words, the system was not getting better at helping children. It was getting better at not noticing them. That is a significant distinction, and one that raises uncomfortable questions about how performance in public services is measured and reported.
A Department Under Overhaul
Children’s Services director Donna Marriott, who previously inspected Jersey’s services externally before taking up her current role, was equally frank. She told the panel that “practice wasn’t proactive enough” during that earlier period, and that the service would now become “more proactive.”
Ms Marriott highlighted the particular challenge of adolescent cases. “A lot of our children, when we first started the plan, were coming in as late adolescents, really late adolescents, 15,” she said. “That is a trajectory that would be unusual, because when you come in so late, it’s going to be really hard to change the trajectories for those young people.”
She also noted that current numbers are “quite low” and that children are still not entering care early enough, a problem compounded by a shortage of foster homes on the island. Both she and Mr Vibert confirmed the 2028 peak forecast as those with previously unmet needs work their way through the system.
The department is currently implementing its improvement plan, titled “Building a Brighter Future: Our Vision for Children’s Services Improvement.” Mr Vibert said progress was being made in recruiting social workers and in intervening earlier, though the scale of the challenge ahead is now clearly on the record.
Source: Bailiwick Express
