What is a corporate parent?
'Corporate parenting means the formal and local partnerships needed between all local authority departments and services, and associated agencies, who are responsible for working together to meet the needs of looked after children and young people, and care leavers.'
Looked After Children and Young People: We Can and Must Do Better,
Scottish Executive
Corporate parenting operates at the strategic, operational and individual level.
The three key elements are:
- The statutory duty on all parts of a local authority to co-operate in promoting the welfare of children and young people who are looked after by them, and a duty on other agencies to co-operate with councils in fulfilling that duty.
- Co-ordinating the activities of the many different professionals and carers who are involved in a child or young person’s life, and taking a strategic, child-centred approach to service delivery.
- Shifting the emphasis from 'corporate' to 'parenting' defined by Jackson et al in 2003 as 'the performance of all actions necessary to promote and support the physical, emotional, social and cognitive development of a child from infancy to adulthood'. The local authority delegates this function to those providing day-to-day care for the child or young person.
Corporate parenting is not only a responsibility but also a real opportunity to improve the futures of looked after children and young people; recognising that all parts of the system have a contribution to make is critical to success.
The concept of corporate parenting is inherently paradoxical: good parenting demands continuity and organisations by their nature are continuously changing. Staff move on, elected members change, structures change, procedures change. One challenge of being a good corporate parent is to manage these changes while giving each individual child or young person a sense of stability.
Being a good corporate parent means we should:
- accept responsibility for the council’s looked after children and young people
- make their needs a priority
- seek the same outcomes for them as any good parent would want for their own children.
Acting collectively
There are several reasons why the community planning partnership needs to act collectively:
- It is important for vulnerable children and young people, who may have been separated from their families, to know that they are still important in their own communities, and that extra special planning is going into their care.
- Children and young people, like all of us, need to feel that services are 'joined up' and that the people who are providing their services are working effectively together to protect, support and encourage them.
- It has the backing of the law - the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 says health, housing and education must work with social work to look after the children and young people in their care. In effect, they are all members of the corporate family.
Good parents
Good parents make sure their children are well looked after, making progress at school, healthy, have clear boundaries for their own and others’ safety and wellbeing and are enjoying activities and interests. As they grow older, they encourage them to become independent, and support them if they need it, and encourage them to become part of the local community and to access further or higher education, training or work.
Corporate parents must do the same, albeit that many more individual people will be involved in the corporate family than in most ordinary families. Every family is different and lifestyles across Scotland are becoming more and more diverse. Corporate parenting needs to be 'the same but different' across different communities, while delivering the essential components that children need throughout childhood and young adulthood.