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A “parallel to the care system” for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, under which they would be accommodated by ministers, is to be be scrapped by the government.

The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill would also remove provisions that would see unaccompanied young people whose age was disputed treated as adults if they refused a “scientific” age assessment without reasonable grounds.

In addition, the bill would scrap powers for immigration officials to detain children, with their families, and unaccompanied young people before their 18th birthday, for 28 days without bail, pending their removal from the country.

Policies to tackle small-boat crossings

All these measures were included in the Conservatives’ Illegal Migration Act 2023, through none has been implemented, as is true of the act’s core measure: a duty on the home secretary to remove anyone entering the UK without the right to do so or to remain, and without having come directly from a country in which their life and liberty was threatened.

This would have applied to unaccompanied children who met the other conditions when they turned 18.

The 2023 act was designed to deter people from crossing the Channel on small boats to seek asylum in the UK, though it was reliant on a deal with Rwanda to remove people to the East African country, which was never implemented and then scrapped by Labour on its election last July.

The current government has similar aims for its Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which is designed to disrupt the work of organised gangs that arrange for people to cross into the UK. The bill was approved in principle by MPs in its first debate in the House of Commons this week.

‘Unlawful’ use of hotels to accommodate young people

The 2023 act was issued against the backdrop of a significant rise in the number of unaccompanied young people entering the country, with the number of them in the care system in England growing by 29% in 2022-23.

The inability of councils, particularly port authorities like Kent, to accommodate increasing numbers of asylum-seeking children led the Home Office to start housing them in hotels in July 2021, in what was designed to be a temporary measure.

In December 2021, it made its national transfer scheme (NTS) mandatory, requiring social services authorities with relatively few asylum-seeking children as a share of population to take in young people from areas with a higher share.

But despite a subsequent rise in the number of NTS transfers, the Home Office continued to use hotels until January 2024, a practice that sparked significant safeguarding concerns and whose routine use the High Court ruled unlawful in a judgment in July 2023.

Uncertainty over children’s rights

The 2023 act would have gotten round the unlawfulness of hotel placements by giving the home secretary the power to accommodate unaccompanied children, as well as the authority to direct councils to take children from such accommodation.

However, the government at the time said the home secretary would not be any child’s corporate parent and would therefore not have any duties to them under the Children Act 1989.

Instead, it would be for the council in whose area the accommodation was located to “consider its duties under the Children Act 1989”, though the then government did not specify whether such an authority would have such duties.

This created uncertainty over whether children in this position would have the right to provisions such as a care plan, an allocated social worker and an independent reviewing officer.

Charities welcome plan to scrap powers

Coram Children’s Legal Centre and anti-trafficking charity ECPAT UK welcomed Labour’s plan to repeal the provision, with the former saying this meant there would be “no parallel to the care system”.

Coram said that, by keeping unaccompanied children out of the care system, the power for the home secretary in the 2023 act would have “undermined the landmark Children Act 1989 and the care system that is there to protect all children”.

ECPAT UK, which mounted the successful High Court challenge to the Home Office’s use of hotels to accommodate unaccompanied children, said the practice “posed a grave risk to the safety and welfare of some of the most vulnerable children in our society, leading to hundreds of children going missing”.

Repeal of age assessment provisions 

The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill would also repeal provisions enabling ministers to make regulations that would result in unaccompanied young people who refused a ‘scientific’ age assessment without reasonable grounds being treated as adults.

Under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the government can specify scientific checks that may be used as part of age assessments. These have been set out in the Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2024, which authorises the use of X-rays of teeth and hand and wrist bones, and MRI scans of the collarbone and knee bones.

Under the 2022 act, a decision maker would be able to make a negative inference about a claimant’s credibility from a refusal to comply with a request to undergo a scientific age assessment, without good reason. This provision is now in force.

The 2023 act went significantly further by allowing the government to stipulate that such a refusal by an unaccompanied person who was in the UK illegally – under the terms of the legislation – would lead to them being treated as an adult.

Charity urges further action on age assessments

ECPAT UK welcomed the planned repeal of this provision, but urged the government to go further by also removing age assessment measures from the 2022 act, which, it said “erode the rights of children and young people and must be dismantled to ensure full protection under UK law”. ECPAT UK is opposed to scientific checks being carried out as part of age assessments.

It is not clear how far these are taking place. Home Office guidance, last updated in November 2024, states that the department itself is not commissioning such checks, through its National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), which carries out age determinations alongside local authorities.

However, councils are permitted to use them. The Home Office guidance states that, there is “no method, scientific or social worker-led, that can predict age with precision and therefore, care must be taken when assessing what weight is appropriate to attach to any scientific assessments”.

The youngest children are at increased risk of harm due to growth in the numbers of parents with mental health and substance misuse issues, research has found.

Directors linked the trends in parental needs to poverty, inadequate housing and the legacy of pandemic, and said they were leaving infants at risk of neglect and physical injury.

The findings were reported in the latest phase of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ (ADCS) Safeguarding Pressures research series, through which it has analysed demand for, and provision of, children’s social care since 2010.

Phase 9 of the series covered 2022-24 and was based on data from 124 local authorities, extrapolated to cover all 153 councils, survey responses from 86 authorities and interviews with 34 directors of children’s services.

Growth in parental mental ill-health and substance misuse

Department for Education (DfE) data has revealed growth in the numbers of children in need assessments which identified parental mental health or substance misuse problems between 2022 and 2024. According to the DfE’s children in need census:

• Parental mental health concerns were identified 165,480 times in 2023-24, up from 158,330 in 2021-22, a rise of 4.5%. This made it the most common factor identified following an assessment, replacing domestic abuse where a parent is the victim, for which there were 160,600 cases in 2023-24, a similar number to 2021-22.
• Parental alcohol misuse concerns were identified 72,410 times in 2023-24, up 3% on 2021-22 (70,310).
• Parental drug misuse concerns were identified 70,940 times in 2023-24, up 5.8% on 2021-22 (67,010).

Three-quarters of respondents to the ADCS survey said issues arising from a deterioration in parental mental health had increased pressures on their services over the past two years, while two-thirds said the same about parental substance misuse.

Increased numbers of infants at risk

Directors said this was leading to increasing numbers of infants being at risk of, or experiencing, serious harm, particularly neglect or physical injury, and they linked the rising levels of parental need to family levels, poverty and inadequate housing.

Most directors reported increasing demand for children’s services from poor quality housing, homelessness and families experiencing poverty as a result of welfare reforms.

They also linked increasing parental mental health issues to the legacy of the pandemic, new parents lacking experiences of “good enough parenting” from their own childhoods and cuts to other services, such as health visiting provision.

In response to the findings, sector what works body Foundations said they underlined “the need to provide effective mental health support for parents”, including through parenting support. Its deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy, said it would shortly produce guidance for councils on “proven interventions” in relation to parenting support for families in contact with children’s social care.

Rising numbers of initial contacts but referral numbers fall

Councils reported a rise in initial contacts regarding safeguarding concerns, continuing a trend dating back to 2007-8, with the number received in 2023-24 (3,001,339) 8% up on the 2021-22 total. Two-thirds of the 2023-24 contacts came from the police, health or education.

However, the DfE’s census has shown a decrease in the number of referrals to children’s social care, which fell from 650,270 in 2021-22 to 621,880 in 2023-24, as well as in the number of children in need plans and child protection plans from 2022-24.

The ADCS found that councils accepted 22% of contacts in 2023-24 as a children’s social care referral (compared with 24% in 2021-22). Fourteen per cent were passed to early help (down from 16% in 2021-22), 30% signposted to other services or resulting in the provision of information and advice (33% in 2021-22) and 23% resulted in no further action, up from 16% in 2021-22.

“This suggests that much of this demand is being managed through an increased early help offer and by local authorities acting as a central point for offering information, advice and signposting to other services on behalf of the local partnership,” the ADCS said.

Increased use of early help

Despite the drop in the proportion of contacts referred to early help from 2022-24, the ADCS said the number of such referrals had grown by 93% from 2015-16 to 2023-24, from about 224,000 to 431,000.

Two-thirds of survey respondents said they had increased their provision of early help and targeted family support services from 2022-24. This included the establishment of family hubs, which provide a range of support services to families in a single place and for which half of local authority areas have received funding since 2022.

The ADCS said family hubs were “viewed very positively” by directors, with three-quarters of survey respondents saying they had set up such services, including some who had not received government funding.

The association added that councils had also relied heavily on funding from the Supporting Families programme, under which families with multiple needs are provided with multi-agency support, co-ordinated by a lead practitioner, and for which councils have been provided with £695m from 2022-25.

Last November, in a move strongly welcomed by ADCS, the government scrapped the payment by results element of the scheme, under which most councils received some money up front with the rest delivered based on the outcomes achieved for families.

Rollout of family help

Looking ahead, the government has allocated £250m in 2025-26 to roll out the family help model, under which councils provide multidisciplinary support to families in need by merging existing targeted early help and child in need services and bringing in staff with expertise in areas such as domestic abuse.

The model is being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas, though ADCS found that some other councils were adopting a similar approach.

In relation to looked-after children, the ADCS report charted the significant rise in the number of unaccompanied children, which grew by 30% from 2022-24, from 5,680 to 7,380, according to DfE figures.

The ADCS also highlighted the changing composition of the group, with the proportion of boys rising from 90% to 96%, and the proportion of those aged 16 or 17 increasing from 86% to 89%, from 2020-24.

Concerns over care of unaccompanied children and care leavers

Despite the government’s National Transfer Scheme – which aims to ensure unaccompanied children are more evenly spread throughout the country – the ADCS found numbers were far higher in the South East, where the vast majority of young people arrive, than in other regions.

Directors said that the “absence of national planning and support to enable an effective and sustainable asylum system was a source of real concern”. They also reported struggling to provide young people with the trauma-informed care and support they needed.

The ADCS also highlighted the number of care leavers who were former unaccompanied children, which grew by 25%, from 11,640 to 14,560, from 2022-24, and warned that councils were being under-funded to support them.

‘Shortfall in care leaver funding leaving young people at risk’

It cited a report last year by East Midlands Councils, which said that Home Office funding covered just 59% of the costs of supporting former unaccompanied care leavers, with the region’s annual shortfall in cash rising from £5.2m to £7.5m from 2020-24.

“Respondents to both the survey and interviews described how a lack of access to education, employment and appropriate therapeutic support leaves young people in limbo, exacerbating
mental health difficulties, risk of exploitation and involvement in unlawful activity, such as modern slavery,” the ADCS said.

A growing workforce but concerns over experience and agency use

The Safeguarding Pressures report also referenced the fact that the number of social workers in post in local authority children’s services reached a record high – 33,119 full-time equivalents – in September 2023, up by 4.7% on the year before.

The ADCS said that the increased numbers were largely newly qualified staff, “which can create pressures on more experienced colleagues”.

The report also noted that the number of agency staff in post also reached a record high (7,174 full-time equivalents) in September 2023, representing 17.8% of the workforce.

The association said that, while the 10 authorities with the lowest rates of agency use were all rated outstanding or good by Ofsted, seven of the 10 with the highest rates were rated inadequate with another two graded as requires improvement.

“[Directors] report that a negative judgement following inspection by Ofsted generates increased staff churn and reliance on agency social workers,” the report said.

Agency social work rules

In October 2024, the government began implementing rules on councils’ use of agency social work, which will be fully in force by October 2025. These include:

• A bar on staff with less than three years’ experience in a permanent role in local authority children’s services from taking up an agency post.
• A three-month ban on councils engaging social workers as locums within three months of them leaving a permanent role in the same region.
• Regionally agreed caps on maximum hourly pay rates for agency staff.
• Ensuring councils have direct management of staff supplied through agency project teams.

The ADCS is very supportive of the rules, but have called on the government to go further, by banning project teams outright for case-holding social work.

While the government has not committed to this, it has pledged to strengthen the agency rules by putting them into legislation and to extend them to non-social work roles in children’s services.

Hampshire County Council’s two refugee teams were launched in February 2023 to meet the needs of an increasing number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum.

While the local authority supported 106 unaccompanied children and young people in March 2022, as of November 2024, it supports 293 unaccompanied children and 306 unaccompanied care leavers.

This has created increased need for foster carers, and also more opportunities for social workers to specialise.

This is what drew Harriet, a social worker in one of Hampshire’s refugee teams, to the outstanding-rated authority.

“I wanted to come and work in Hampshire because it enabled me to work in a specialist team, whereas other places I have worked in before didn’t offer that specialism,” says Harriet, who has also worked with adult refugees in Uganda.

The benefits of specialist teams

The advantages of having a dedicated team for unaccompanied children seeking asylum and care leavers are clear for Harriet. Children and young people benefit from having a team of practitioners focused on their care, with knowledge of the asylum process and legislative changes.

“What also helps is that within the teams, social workers work alongside family practitioners and personal advisers and this mix means there are opportunities to share ideas and ways of working,” says Harriet.

Debbie Dunne, who manages one of the two teams, agrees.

“We have practitioners who have the specialist knowledge base and understanding around culture, communication and languages,” she says.

The two teams each have around six social workers, two family practitioners and six care leaver personal advisers (PAs).

When children are assigned a PA, before they turn 18 and leave care, that practitioner follows them through the rest of their social care journey, promoting continuity of support and helping them feel safe and supported.

Practitioners aim to provide continuity and support to children and young people. Photo: Studio Romantic/AdobeStock

Wide range of skills

Within the teams, there is a mix of experience, with some members having language skills, one having completed a master’s degree in international development, others having skills teaching English as a foreign language and some having lived overseas.

There are also two trained foster carers in the team – one who is training to become a social worker and the other a PA.

“It seems that the teams attract people that want to do something different,” says Debbie.

Hampshire also gives its workforce five continuing professional development (CPD) days a year, which allows practitioners in other teams to come and see first-hand how the refugee teams work.

Debbie adds: “I’ve had one colleague from one of the frontline court holding teams (safeguarding), who heard about the team, spent a day with Harriet and met some of the children. She is now moving ahead with her application [to join the team].”

Understanding young people’s experiences

Young people who arrive in the UK are normally referred to the National Transfer Scheme, which is designed to ensure that responsibility for children and young people is shared between local authorities.

The young people supported by the teams range in age from about 12 to 25 years old, although younger children have been supported by them too, says Sarah Marston, area director for Hampshire south east.

Children are supported right from the point of referral, with practitioners conducting a detailed assessment that looks for indicators of trafficking and checks their health and welfare. The teams use strengths-based tools, including motivational interviewing, and trauma-informed strategies to promote communication.

“The aim is to focus on understanding the young person’s experiences and risks and establish whether they’ve got any contact with their family,” says Debbie.

Children are supported right from the point of referral. Photo: Africa Studio/ AdobeStock

Trauma-informed practice

Children are likely to have experienced some form of trauma along the journey to the UK and, over the first six weeks, practitioners are tasked with supporting the children to manage that.

“We recognise that the children have been working on adrenaline for a very long time in very difficult circumstances that they have lived through, in terms of street homelessness, [lack of] access to basic food and shelter – all those very critical things,” says Debbie. “So, it is a huge shock for them to come into the home of the foster family.

“Part of what we do is ask our children about sleep – if they are having nightmares or flashbacks. We offer them sleep packs, lavender, a night light and squidgy balls and we talk about getting into a good sleep routine because we know that at night when you’re still, that’s when everything catches up with you,” she adds.

Tools such as the trauma triangle, tree of life work and the distress screening tool are part of the range of approaches that practitioners use to support the young person to feel safe. They also help to build up trust between the practitioner and the young person, according to Harriet.

The tree of life work helps the young people to connect with their home country and is a way for social workers to learn more about their families in a way that limits secondary trauma.

“We get the young person to draw a tree trunk and work with them to reflect on the skills and interests they have, where they got them from, or who gave them the skills,” says Harriet. “The branches represent hopes and wishes, the leaves the important people in their life and the fruits represent the gifts that these people have given to them.”

Opportunities to deepen relationships

Hannah Leat, peripatetic district manager at Hampshire, suggests that engaging young people in conversations about their favourite foods from home and assisting them in preparing these dishes can be a valuable method for practitioners to help them process trauma.

She explains: “Engaging children’s senses can be a useful tool in trauma-informed practice. Not just preparing food, but any activity that supports children to revisit sensory experiences in a positive, support environment can help them process some of their trauma, while engaging with their social worker in something fun and enjoyable.”

Along with social activities, such as bowling, or things as simple as going for a drive, it also helps social workers forge relationships with young people.

There are also opportunities for young people to socialise with each other through organised events, such as football coaching sessions. These provide the opportunity for young people who were trafficked together, and then separated during the placement process, to reconnect.

Involving parents in care planning

Working with the young people’s families, if possible, is useful in improving outcomes for the child. “We want to have contact with parents, which helps us to have a better understanding of the children’s formative years and any history and information,” says Debbie.

Even in situations where the parents cannot be with their children, the team makes every effort to include them in their child’s progress, such as how they are developing in their education.

Hampshire has been able to achieve some family reunifications, with Harriet involved in one in which three children were reunited with their father and three other siblings.

Children seeking asylum are children first. Photo: Africa Studio/ AdobeStock

Children seeking asylum are children first

Such moments where children and parents, or children trafficked with friends, can be reunited are an important reminder that children seeking asylum are children first.

“The trauma they have experienced is similar in some respects to the trauma that the mainstream UK cohort of Hampshire children have experienced,” says Sarah.

“They have experienced sexual abuse, and violence, they are separated from their carers or family. I think sometimes the labels take us away from that – the fact that these are children that have been traumatised and have had adverse experiences.”

To learn more about the Hampshire Approach and how motivational interviewing is implemented at the authority, take a look at the following articles:

Celebrating a mindset, not a model of social work

Motivational interviewing: what is it and how can you use it in social work

And to find out more about working in Hampshire County Council, check out the authority’s Employer Profile.

The Home Office is being inspected on its use of age assessments of unaccompanied asylum seekers, it was announced this week.

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, said he was examining the “efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of age assessments” carried out by the department.

The probe covers age assessments conducted by social workers in the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), the arm of the Home Office set up by the previous government in 2022 to provide a centralised assessment service.

It will also encompass assessments by staff within the Asylum Intake Unit, where people register claims for sanctuary, and the Illegal Migration Intake Unit (IMIU), which registers people deemed to have entered the UK illegally. The IMIU also employs social workers to carry out age assessments.

What is the NAAB?

• The NAAB was set up under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (NBA) and consists primarily of social workers employed to carry out age assessments of age-disputed unaccompanied asylum seekers.
• These assessments take place where: there is reasonable doubt about their claims to be children; they claim to be adults but are suspected to be children; they are accepted as children but there are doubts about their age.
• The NAAB will generally undertake assessments of age-disputed unaccompanied asylum seekers on referral from a local authority or health and social care trust in Northern Ireland.
• However, the board may also carry out assessments in other cases specified in the legislation, including where the Home Office doubts a local authority’s conclusion as to the person’s age, or to inform Home Office decision making on the person’s immigration status.
• As with local authority social workers, NAAB assessors must carry out ‘Merton-compliant’ assessments, ie they should comply with the judgment in B v London Borough of Merton [2003]. This includes that the assessment is carried out by two social workers, where practicable, and that practitioners are trained and experienced in this area of practice.
• As of April 2024, it employed 42 social workers.

More information is available from the Home Office’s guidance on the NAAB.

Bolt said his inspection would cover guidance, training, and development, workforce planning, record keeping and data collection, quality assurance, risk management and safeguarding, and stakeholder engagement.

Call for evidence

In a call for evidence, the chief inspector said: “I am inviting anyone with knowledge or first-hand experience of an age assessment conducted by the Home Office to submit evidence to inform this inspection. I would like to hear about both what is working well and what could be improved.

“I would therefore welcome any case studies from those who have worked with individuals who have undergone a Home Office age assessment.”

However, he stressed he cannot investigate individual cases, though can assess them as examples of more systemic issues.

BASW seeks dismantling of assessment board

It is not clear what prompted the inspection, but the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) – a long-time opponent of the NAAB – said it hoped that it would lead to the end of the body.

BASW chief executive Ruth Allen said: “Former home secretaries have been prejudicial about age-disputed young people travelling to the UK through unsafe routes, and our fear was that these highly-charged political views would feed down into the daily work of social workers who feel pressured by their organisation to assess young people to deliver a particular outcome.

“There was never a need for the Home Office to be involved with age assessments, yet local authorities who are experiencing financial difficulties are referring to the National Age Assessment Board because they do not have the resources to do it themselves. The Home Office should instead have provided local authorities with the resources to be able to carry out the assessments fairly and timely.

BASW chief executive Ruth Allen (credit: BASW)

She added: “The launch of an investigation is welcome, and we hope that this is the start of the dismantling of the National Age Assessment Board and the move back towards local authorities being responsible for the conduct of age assessments.”

The call for evidence for the inspection will be open until 25 September 2024. To contribute, email the ICIBI.

Councils are being offered £15,000 to take unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Kent County Council to relieve pressures on the south coast authority.

The incentive, introduced by the Conservative government before it left office, is for any authority that takes a child from Kent into its care within two days of a notification to do so under the National Transfer Scheme (NTS).

The policy is in addition to an existing incentive for councils and Northern Irish health and social care trusts to receive £6,000 to take a child from Kent within five days. Both will be in place until the end of September this year.

The vast majority of unaccompanied children entering the UK arrive in Kent, making the authority responsible for accommodating them under section 20 of the Children Act 1989 in the first instance, pending the transfer of many elsewhere under the NTS.

Kent and Home Office found to have acted illegally

However, the council has repeatedly struggled to manage the number of children coming into the county over the past few years.

The High Court ruled last July that Kent had acted unlawfully from 2021-23 by agreeing with the Home Office to a cap on the number of arrivals it would accommodate (120) above the NTS threshold of 0.1% of the child population, which the Home Office facilitated by placing children in hotels.

The same judgment, the first of four delivered by Mr Justice Chamberlain as part of judicial review proceedings, ruled that the Home Office’s use of hotels as a routine source of accommodation for unaccompanied children was also unlawful.

The judge ordered Kent to take all possible steps to accommodate unaccompanied children arriving in the county by increasing its care capacity, saying its duties to them under section 20 applied irrespective of its resources.

Government funding to boost Kent’s capacity to care

However, in the last judgment, issued in June this year, the judge made clear that the home secretary needed to take action before Kent reached the point when it could not discharge its duties.

On the back of the litigation, the government agreed to provide capital funding to help Kent develop accommodation for unaccompanied children, along with about £50m in revenue funding to resource additional care placements for them in 2024-25.

The authority said it was in the process of “acquiring, refurbishing, and opening new government funded reception centres in the county with some additional capacity to care for these vulnerable children”.

The council and the Home Office have also developed a protocol designed to ensure action is taken to prevent Kent from breaching its capacity.

Record high numbers of children arriving in Kent

However, the authority said the number of arrivals was at a “record high”, with 1,165 unaccompanied children referred to Kent in the first six months of 2024, compared with 624 in the same period in 2023.

Council leader Roger Gough said that the £15,000 incentive was “a welcome initiative” but that it was “still far from enough to guarantee an efficient and effective national transfer scheme (NTS) to ensure that Kent’s children’s services are never overwhelmed again”.

Transfers of children out of the county were still not keeping up with arrivals into Kent and the authority was “far too frequently at the point of reaching our full capacity”.

Authority ‘expected to shoulder disproportionate burden’

“For far too long [Kent] has been expected to shoulder this large and disproportionate burden to accommodate and care for every [unaccompanied] child (even on a temporary basis) by itself, simply because of its location on the shortest crossing from Europe,” he said.

“This has meant that [Kent] has effectively been required to find solutions for a national problem, dictated by global migration patterns, within the very limited resources and tools available to a county council.”

He said he had invited new home secretary Yvette Cooper and education secretary Bridget Phillipson to visit the county to see the work the authority was doing to safeguard the welfare of unaccompanied children.

“We have an opportunity now to make positive and long-lasting changes, particularly to get the NTS working, and it is my hope that this can be done outside of court processes that we have had to resort to most recently,” he added.

The Home Office has more than doubled the number of social workers it employs in its asylum age assessment service in the past year, a minister has revealed.

Victims and safeguarding minister Laura Farris told the House of Commons last week that “42 expert social workers” were now employed by the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB).

This is up from 16 as of April 2023, just after the board launched, when the Home Office was struggling to recruit social workers to the service.

The Home Office had sought to recruit 40 social workers to the board in spring 2022, but a year later had just 40% of practitioners in post. When it launched, in March 2023, it started working in London and the West Midlands, with its main role being undertaking assessments on referral from local authorities in these regions.

BASW call for social workers to boycott board

This was just after the British Association of Social Workers had urged social workers not to work with the NAAB lest their professional judgment be undermined by the Home Office’s political agenda on asylum.

This was a reference to government rhetoric about single adult male asylum seekers exploiting the system and posing safeguarding risks by claiming to be unaccompanied children.

More recently, BASW called for the NAAB to be scrapped, in its manifesto for the general election.

Increase in social worker numbers

Minister for victims and safeguarding Laura Farris (credit: HM Government)

However, the figures revealed by Farris show that the board now has just over the number of social workers in post that it originally intended to recruit.

“As well as conducting assessments for local authorities, the board supports them with training and best-practice advice,” she told MPs last week, in a debate on age-disputed asylum cases.

Despite its higher social worker numbers, the board is still only working with a select number of local authorities.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We take the safety and welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children extremely seriously, which is why the National Age Assessment Board’s experts conduct full age assessments to increase expertise in the asylum system.

“The board is also increasing the number of authorities who are able to refer assessments over the coming months, offering training across the UK, and providing local authorities with a national advice and support helpline.”

‘Scientific’ age assessments yet to be introduced

Farris also revealed that the government was yet to introduce the use of so-called scientific methods for assessing the age of unaccompanied claimants, alongside a social worker assessment.

While such assessments were previously prohibited, the NBA enables the Home Office to make regulations specifying methods that may be used, once it has deemed these appropriate after taking advice from a committee of expert advisers: the age estimation science advisory committee (AESAC).

Such regulations – the Immigration (Age Assessment) Regulations 2024 – came into force earlier this year. These authorise the use of X-rays of teeth and hand and wrist bones, and MRI scans of the collarbone and knee bones, as part of age assessments.

“The full plans for integrating scientific age assessments into the existing process will be set out very shortly,” Farris told the Commons.

Opposition to ‘unethical’ policy

The policy is vigorously opposed by health and social care professional bodies including BASW, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the British Dental Association. This is on the grounds that it is unethical to expose people to radiation for a non-medical purpose and that any assessments based on scans would be inaccurate, and also because of serious concerns around consent.

Under the NBA, scientific methods may only be used with the consent of the young person or, where they lack capacity to do so, a specified person on their behalf. However, where there is a refusal to consent without “reasonable grounds”, the decision maker must take such a refusal as damaging to the person’s credibility.

This appears to run contrary to advice from the interim AESAC, in a report last year, which said “no automatic assumptions or consequences should result from refusal to consent”.

Impact of Illegal Migration Act and Rwanda law

Despite this advice, the government has gone even further in its Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA), by allowing ministers to make regulations that would result in claimants who refused a scientific assessment without reasonable grounds being treated as adults.

This would apply specifically to asylum seekers deemed to have come to the UK illegally – without permission to enter or remain and without having come directly from the country they were fleeing – but this accounts for the majority of claimants.

Farris told the Commons that this power would not be used “unless—and until—the home secretary determines that the science and analysis is sufficiently accurate to support providing for an automatic assumption of adulthood”.

However, the IMA also includes measures preventing relevant unaccompanied asylum seekers from appealing to the immigration tribunal against a decision to assess them as an adult, or from delaying their deportation by lodging a judicial review claim. These are not yet in force.

Now that the government’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 has become law, an unaccompanied asylum seeker covered by the IMA and assessed as an adult could be deported to the east African state to have their claim processed.

Kent council is “extremely close” to its capacity to care for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and needs more to be transferred to other authorities “immediately”.

It has also accused the Home Office of failing to use new powers that Kent claimed would “immediately solve” the “unfair and unsustainable” pressures on the authority, resulting from increasing numbers of young people arriving on its coast to claim asylum.

Though there is no specific data on unaccompanied arrivals, the number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats to claim asylum this year up to 21 March 2024 (4,306) was 17% up on the same period in 2023, according to Home Office figures.

As the port of entry, Kent is responsible for accommodating unaccompanied asylum-seeking children under section 20 of the Children Act 1989 in the first instance, pending many being moved to other authorities under the government’s National Transfer Scheme (NTS).

Kent and Home Office found to have acted unlawfully

The High Court ruled last July that Kent had acted unlawfully since 2021 by agreeing with the Home Office to a cap on the number of arrivals it would accommodate (120) above the NTS threshold of 0.1% of the child population, which the Home Office facilitated by placing children in hotels.

The same judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Chamberlain, ruled that the Home Office’s use of hotels as a routine source of accommodation for unaccompanied children was also unlawful.

The judge ordered Kent to take all possible steps to accommodate unaccompanied children arriving in the county by increasing its care capacity.

In a follow-up judgment in November 2023, Mr Justice Chamberlain praised the authority and the Home Office for significantly cutting the numbers in hotels by increasing Kent’s capacity to care for unaccompanied children, backed by £9.75m in short-term government funding.

Council’s care capacity ‘insufficient’ 

However, in a paper published the following month, Kent said its existing capacity was “insufficient to meet the council’s duties to the large numbers of [unaccompanied asylum-seeking] children expected to arrive”, pending their transfer under the NTS.

At the time, it estimated it would need to accommodate an additional 280 to 550 children per month – above the 0.1% population threshold set by the NTS – from July to December this year.

The council said it was in discussions with the Home Office and Department for Education about funding and that the departments had agreed to provide £10.4m, with a further £16.8m agreed in principle, to develop properties for use as accommodation. The council estimated it also needed an additional £50m-£60m in revenue funding from the departments in 2024-25.

Kent has funding in place but voices concerns over transfer scheme

In a statement this week, Kent leader Roger Gough said that the council “now has funding in place that it desperately needed to build increased capacity”.

However, he said that the High Court had recognised that bolstering Kent’s capacity to care for unaccompanied children “could not be the sole answer to resolving the dire situation faced by these vulnerable children”, in a reference to the effectiveness of the NTS.

In his November 2023 judgment, Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that the home secretary’s decision making in relation to the NTS had been unlawful from December 2021 to July 2023 because she had continued to use hotels instead of acting to tackle delays in authorities receiving children from Kent.

The average time for a child to be transferred from Kent under the NTS was just under 14 working days from November 2021 to September 2023, compared with a Home Office target of 10, though transfer times had improved during 2023.

Judge’s instruction to home secretary over NTS

The judge said that the home secretary needed to formulate a rational plan for the operation of the NTS to permanently eliminate the use of hotels.

There are currently no unaccompanied children in hotels, and the Home Office has sought to incentivise authorities to take children from Kent by offering £6,000 per child to councils that do so within five days of a transfer request.

This was originally due to expire at the end of this month, but the department has now extended the incentive to September 2024.

Kent ‘extremely close to capacity’

But Kent council leader Roger Gough said the NTS was not working to relieve pressures on the authority.

“We are now extremely close to our current capacity for caring for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and urgently need more to be transferred to other UK local authorities immediately.

“For many years, we have asserted the need for an efficient and timely National Transfer Scheme (NTS). It is the only viable solution to the unfair and unsustainable burden on Kent children’s services and residents from increasing arrivals of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children on Kent’s shores.”

Failure to implement Illegal Migration Act measures

Gough also questioned why the Home Office had not implemented sections 16-19 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which would permit the home secretary to provide accommodation directly unaccompanied children and to direct councils to take children from such accommodation.

This would get round an issue identified in Mr Justice Chamberlain’s first judgment, that the home secretary has no power to accommodate children and may only do so in an emergency and on a short-term basis. It would also give the home secretary stronger powers to direct a local authority to accept a child than is provided for under the NTS.

Referencing these provisions, Gough said: “The Home Office has a range of new powers available to them to immediately solve this issue but have so far without explanation refused to make use of them.”

In response, a Home Office spokesperson said: “We take the safety and welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children extremely seriously and providing care placements for them is a national issue that requires participation from local authorities across the UK.

“We are continuing to work with local authorities across the UK, including Kent County Council, to support them to fulfil their statutory duties to accommodate unaccompanied children nationwide.”

In this episode of the Social Work Community podcast, we speak to Omaid Badar, overall winner at the Social Worker of the Year Awards 2023.

Omaid, who was also named children’s social worker of the year, tells his incredible story of coming to England as a teenage refugee. He recalls the night he spent in a police station and what happened the next morning when he met a social worker.

He explains why he became a social worker and how his own experiences affect his practice. Omaid speaks about the importance of restorative practice and building relationships with families and young people.

What made his colleagues at Kirklees Council nominate him? And what drives him to be the empathetic and compassionate social worker he is?

He also offers advice on how social workers can support unaccompanied asylum seeking children.

Listen now:
Listen to “The refugee who became social worker of the year” on Spreaker.

This podcast can also be accessed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms, just search ‘social work community‘.

You can read an interview with Omaid here.

The transcription for this episode is available here.

Have you joined the Social Work Community?

Listen to other podcast episodes here:

• Should social workers be on social media?
• Racism in social work
• The pros and cons of being a young social worker
• What is the impact of negative media coverage on social workers?

At last year’s Social Worker of the Year Awards, Omaid Badar won both the children’s practitioner and overall winner’s prizes, with one judge describing him as “everything the profession is about when it’s at its best”.

The 29-year-old Kirklees Council social worker has overcome more than most on route to those accolades.

Omaid was born in Afghanistan, then ravaged by civil war, became a refugee and, aged 14, made a perilous journey to England, enduring extreme hardship in pursuit of a safe haven.

In an interview with Community Care, he opened up about his journey from being a young boy in Afghanistan to a social worker in England, his approach to working with children and how he handles those difficult days.

You made a very daunting journey at age 14 from Pakistan to England. What was your experience like of being a refugee?

You first need to understand that I was born in 1994 in Afghanistan, a war-torn country. I was a month old when we lost our dad. I don’t even know if he held me because, as a one-month-old, what could you possibly remember?

That situation forces you to leave your homeland, become a refugee. We travelled to Pakistan, where we lived in refugee camps and areas that were so dangerous the police were not allowed in.

It got to a point where my mum was really worried for my safety [and decided to send me away]. At the time, I had lost many people and I didn’t want to lose her too. I was going out, seeking a safe haven, but was I going to see my mum again? Was I going to be able to hug her again?

And it wasn’t a pleasant journey. Most of the time we weren’t told where we were going. We would be stuffed in cars, inflatable boats and vans, sometimes 80 people, squeezed in together, one on top of the other. There was no room to breathe.

At times, we would be walking at night so the border police wouldn’t see us, because they would shoot at us. It’s not an easy journey, you have to accept that you might not make it to the next day.

There were days when we had no food and survived just on water. And when they did bring food for us, it would be stale bread that would be so hard to crack we would dip it in yoghurt to break it.

I travelled that way to Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France, and eventually reached Bradford, England.

I had been told to seek a police officer the moment I arrived, but I can’t say my first encounter was a good one. They did speak to an interpreter and understood why I was here, but then they put me in a cell.

It was so cold. My shoes and clothes were all ripped and the only thing they gave me was a blanket full of holes that didn’t keep me warm. But in the morning, a social worker came in.

I still remember her name, Lucy. As soon as she saw me, she hugged me. I think that was the first time I felt emotional warmth and I just cried.

She took me to social services and then shopping at ASDA for clothes. She quickly found a temporary placement for me and then I moved to a children’s home and my schooling was arranged.

What was your time in care like? How has it informed your practice?

My experience in care had its ups and downs. I faced bullying and discrimination but also received support and care from some staff members. These experiences shaped my approach to social work – respecting cultures and being honest and committed to the children I work with.

Lucy wasn’t my social worker for long. After her, there were a few temporary ones for a few months and then I didn’t have a social worker for a long time, probably because I wasn’t creating problems.

But, at the same time, I realise now that you’re supposed to see your children once every six weeks.

I do that for the children that I work with. And if they need to see me more, I will make time and go visit them again because they need that.

I never got the answer why a social worker never came to see me. I am grateful to Bradford, but I would advise social workers to be committed to their children, to be open and honest with them.

Tell them if there’s something you can’t do, tell them that you’ll go and see if you can find alternative ways, but don’t promise them because children hold you to those promises. And then if you can’t fulfil that promise, they won’t trust you.

What inspired you to become a social worker?

My key worker, Jerry Phillips. He’d always find me and speak to me when he was on a shift, bring me books to read, come to my school meetings and review meetings.

He was patient with me, made me understand that nothing should be taken for granted. ‘Today you have support, tomorrow you won’t, so make sure you learn how to be independent,’ he’d say.

He taught me how to cook and was my go-to person. He always used to talk about school, education, standing up for your rights. But if you do anything wrong, put your hand up and say that. There’s always a way out.

When he asked me why I wanted to be a social worker I said, ‘What you did for me, I want to do for every kid out there, because you changed my life’.

He made me believe in myself, had faith in me, was committed to me. He was open and honest with me. I want to be that role model for the children out there. To this day, I still see him. He came to my graduation and he was proud.

What is your approach to social work?

I have just completed my fifth year as a children’s social worker and I’m loving it. I come to work and I’m always in a good mood because I know I’m here to help change families’ lives.

My approach is to always explain what my role is – because there are misconceptions about what a social worker does – and have an open mind.

On paper, a person can look like a monster, but when you visit them, you realise they might have never been given a chance. And change doesn’t happen overnight, it takes us [social workers] being committed.

As a social worker, my values are to be committed to the people I’m working with, to be honest and open with them and to create an environment where they feel comfortable talking to me, they feel listened to and not judged.

I think clarifying that you are not here to take the children helps; [I] explain which plan they’re going to be on and whether it’s consent-based.

I say to them: ‘There’s nothing we cannot work on. But we need to communicate and work around it. If I can’t do anything in my power, there will be other services that can come on board and help you. I’m here to support you and help you get to where you need to be because you don’t want social workers to be involved in your life all the time.’

They’ll naturally be worrying about what’s going to happen. You need to reassure them so they feel that you’re working together – involve them in decision-making and ensure you’re doing things with their consent, not without.

I think because I’ve been through it, I can also relate to the children more. I can understand what is happening to them, provide them with what they need from me and work with them using a restorative approach.

How do you handle difficult days?

After a difficult day, I always take a step back and reflect.

If I’ve tried everything and it didn’t work, let’s get another fresh pair of eyes to see if there are other ways to deal with the situation.

For me, supervision is like therapy. Whenever we miss a [meeting], I will put on another date straight away. You have to be accountable, you can’t just leave everything to your manager.

There, you can challenge your hypotheses, make informed decisions, identify other forms of support. There are things that you might not know that your manager might know and give you advice. Peer supervision with your peers, formulation meetings and multi-agency meetings [also] help.

What also helps me is that when I go home, I’ll start cooking. Cooking is therapy for me. I’ll cook my favourite dish or go to the gym and just try to switch off because, even when I’m going on holiday, sometimes I keep thinking, ‘Oh will that child be safe?’.

My team also helps a lot. If someone is struggling with a case, we share responsibilities to take some pressure off.

Working this way means we don’t have many people going on sick leave or stressing over caseloads. I’ve been in practice for five years and haven’t taken a sick day.

I even come in on Eid, choosing to give that time to my children rather than celebrating.

What is your ambition as a social worker?

I plan to go into the United Nations and be an ambassador for children. A lot is happening in the world and, as a social worker, I cannot just stay quiet, because my job is safeguarding. It hurts me to see children in the world at risk. It hurts me because I’ve been through it.

I’ve been blessed to have an opportunity to grow and I want to be a voice for the children and families that I work with because their lived experience is all that matters.

All the children out there deserve to live peacefully, to have an opportunity to live in an environment that is free from emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, criminal abuse. Such traumatic events stay with you for a lifetime.

My traumatic events have stayed with me, but I’m fortunate enough to have found resilience in that and have people that I can speak to. But children out there are going through hardship and difficulties without shelter, education, food or financial stability. It’s hard.

I want to be able to do something so they can be where I am.

The requirement that only social workers carry out age assessments of unaccompanied asylum seekers in disputed cases should end, a sector leader has said.

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president John Pearce said other professionals were capable of carrying out the checks and the current situation was putting pressure on councils’ social work capacity.

A series of legal judgments, starting with R (B) v London Borough of Merton [2003], have set out the courts’ requirements for lawful age assessments, including that they are carried out by properly trained and experienced social workers.

Concerns over impact on social work capacity

Pearce told Community Care that the Merton age assessment process was now 20 years old and a new procedure for conducting the checks needed to be established.

“We need something up to date and fit for purpose, [setting out] what it involves and who should be involved. Why are social workers the people undertaking those assessments? There are a whole range of professionals that could be doing that without the impact on social work capacity.”

Age assessments are generally the responsibility of the local authority in which the claimant first presents (known as a “spontaneous arrival”), or where they have been moved to under the government’s National Transfer Scheme (NTS), which is designed to relieve pressure on ports of entry, such as Kent.

Pearce has previously criticised the Home Office’s practice of treating unaccompanied young people it accommodated in hotels as spontaneous arrivals in the area that the hotel was based, making that local authority responsible for any age assessment.

The number of age-disputed cases almost doubled from 2021-22, from 2,539 to 4,675, though has fallen back since, to 1,614 in the first nine months of 2023 (equivalent to about 2,150 over the year), according to Home Office data.

There has also been a reduction in the number of young people placed in hotels, with 19 accommodated as of 10 October 2023, according to a recent court ruling on the NTS, down from 218 in July of this year.

Social work recruitment struggles

The Home Office has set up a National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), which it intends to take responsibility for the majority of age assessments in future.

However, it has struggled to recruit practitioners to the NAAB meaning that the board only started work in two regions – London and the West Midlands – earlier this year, rather than the full country, as planned.

The British Association of Social Workers has urged practitioners not to apply for jobs with the body, lest their decision making be compromised by the Home Office’s political agenda.

Besides creating the NAAB, the Home Office has also legislated for so-called scientific checks to be carried out as part of the age assessment process, in the face of widespread opposition from charities, social work groups and parliamentarians.

‘Scientific’ age checks approved

Last week, Parliament approved regulations permitting the use of dental, hand and wrist x-rays and scans of the collarbone and knee bones for this purpose. The government had put these forward on the basis of advice from its age estimation science advisory committee (AESAC), set up to guide ministers’ decisions on the issue.

In a House of Commons debate on the regulations last month, immigration minister Robert Jenrick said scientific checks would be “one piece of evidence” used within a “holistic, social worker-led assessment”.

“The decision will be made by a social worker,” he said. “If that social worker believes, despite the scientific age-assessment evidence, that an individual is a minor, it will ultimately be up to them to make the final decision.”

Under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the person must consent – or appropriate consent must be given on their behalf if they lack capacity – for an x-ray or scan to go ahead.

Concerns over consent process for checks

However, social workers and other decision makers must take refusal to consent to the scientific method without reasonable grounds as a damaging the person’s credibility, or that of the person refusing on their behalf.

In its Illegal Migration Act 2023, the government has gone further in respect of unaccompanied asylum seekers deemed to have entered the country illegally.

That legislation enables the home secretary to make regulations deeming those who refuse consent without reasonable grounds to be treated as adults.

BASW attacked the measure as “coercion” last week in a joint statement with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the British Dental Association (BDA) that heavily criticised the scientific checks plan.

Policy ‘in line with scientific advice’

The Illegal Migration Act measure is also directly contrary to the position taken by the government’s own advisers – the interim AESAC – in a report this year, in which it said “no automatic assumptions or consequences should result from refusal to consent”.

The Home Office has no current plans to implement the measure in the Illegal Migration Act. It has also defended the provision in the Nationality and Borders Act as consistent with the AESAC’s opposition to automatic assumptions being made from a refusal to consent without reasonable grounds.

Jenrick told the Commons last month that this “would not automatically preclude the individual’s being considered a child”.

“That refusal would still need to be taken into account alongside other relevant evidence as part of the comprehensive age-assessment process undertaken by social workers,” he added.

However, despite approving the regulations following a debate last week, the House of Lords passed a motion calling for the government to withdraw them, including on the grounds that it was unclear whether people could freely consent.

The motion also said that the government had failed to produce an impact assessment or costings for the scientific methods policy for Parliament to scrutinise.

‘No evidence’ scientific methods improve certainty on age

BASW chief executive Ruth Allen said: “There is no evidence provided that biological methods deliver greater certainty on age determination than the currently used Merton process.

“We are also conscious that the government has not explained what shortfalls have been identified in the Merton process to warrant a change nor how it could be improved.”

The RCPCH said it was not ethical for people to be exposed to radiation – through x-ray – for non-medical purposes, while the BDA said the proposed checks “[failed] basic tests on ethics and accuracy”.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Scientific methods of age assessments enable us to make better informed and more consistent decisions on age and to identify adults trying to exploit the system. Adults who knowingly pose as children and refuse to be scientifically age assessed without good reason, must face consequences.”