CAPACITY to meet the needs of children placed into care in Oxfordshire remains “an issue at times” more than eight years after the suicide of a 13-year-old. 

The matter was being discussed in the wake of a report on the death of ‘Child R’, an Oxfordshire girl who killed herself while placed in a residential home in Wrexham in 2013. 

The girl and her siblings had been known to authorities from birth due to concerns over “physical, sexual and emotional abuse”. 

READ MORE: Oxfordshire County Council: New rules set to “shape the behaviour” of service providers

She had alleged “regular sexual abuse” by a family member in 2010 but there was “insufficient evidence”, leaving her “severely distressed and suicidal”.

She was found dead in her room after 25 incidents of self harm or troubled behaviour with the suitability of the home and its risk assessments criticised. Bryn Melyn Care Limited, which ran the home, was fined £600,000 in November 2020.

Oxfordshire County Council’s People Overview & Scrutiny Committee was this week tasked with looking at how the authority’s children’s services had responded to the various recommendations that came out of the serious case review. 

Council bosses said earlier, sometimes preventative measures are now at record levels – around 3,000 per year with a target to get that number to 10,000 – while there is a more thorough process to ensure children get sent to suitable homes or foster carers but having enough places available is still a problem. 

Lara Patel, Oxfordshire’s deputy director of children’s services, said: “There is a huge amount of work currently happening around placement sufficiency, or you might want to call it insufficiency.

“We have flagged that at a national level but we are also undertaking a significant amount of work locally to boost our capacity to provide children with placements within Oxfordshire, both fostering and residential.”

It was later explained that more children’s homes have been factored into the council’s budget for 2022-23 and that the number of enquiries about becoming foster carers had tripled towards the end of 2021 having plummeted during the pandemic. 

However, while explaining how the new process works for assigning vulnerable children to the right care facilities, Lara Patel added: “It is important to say there is a caveat to that linked to sufficiency. There is a lack of choice, that can be an issue at times.” 

Deputy leader Councillor Liz Brighouse OBE (Lab, Churchill & Lye Valley) challenged councillors to “imagine that is your child, your grandchild, your niece” and said the case of Child R highlighted why children placed into care must remain within the county.

“We cannot sit here and believe that a bit of that, the bit that was actually most influential in her taking her own life was (not) the bit around where she was living away from her family, away from her local authority in a place that was not able to care for her, even though we had been paying a lot of money hoping that would be the case,” she said. 

“(She was) away from social workers who knew her but actually could not keep travelling backwards and forwards. The lives of some of our social workers with these children who are out-of-county boarding are horrendous and they do it day in, day out to try to keep some of our most vulnerable children safe. 

“We need to totally change the system that means children have to go to these places and in everything we do keep our children close by us, near the people who know and love them. That is the only way we can keep our children safe. 

“We can stand up and remember her but actually, what we need to do is be building our own in this county so these children never again have to go to Wales or elsewhere.”

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