Transcript Results of the Our Family experimental foster family placement activity Moscow, Russia Maria Ternovskaya, PhD, director & Olga Shalkouskaya, head of the foster care.

Results of the Our Family experimental foster family
placement activity
Moscow, Russia
Maria Ternovskaya, PhD, director
& Olga Shalkouskaya, head of the foster care service
The Orphanage No 19 “The Foster Care Centre”
The Our Family Charitable Foundation
Moscow
[email protected]
(499)-267-74-19
www.pro-mama.ru
Basic Facts for The Orphanage No 19 “The
Foster Care Centre”
• Founded in 1994 ( full operation from 1996)
• As an orphanage boarding-out project operating as a
family-placement and family support service in addition
to a rehabilitation and preparation for family placement
residential unit
• From 2000 – operates also as a first-stop unit for street
children and children in need
• Since 2001 has developed agreements with local
authorities child protection and family placements which
allowed to exercise duties as a family placement service
• A new budgeting scheme was developed which allowed
to pay foster carers as guardians but from the budget of
the restructured orphanage
• Since 2007г – was moved under the responsibility of the
Moscow Department for family and youth policy
The history of foster care in Russia
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Catherine the II
XIX century
After-revolution period
Governmental decree of 1943г
1996г. – started again in Moscow
2008г. 42 regions involved
Federal Law №48 has identified foster care as a form of guardianship which
should be defined by the regional laws
•
Foster care (Patronat) = 2 different types of activities
-
Fostering a child
Family preservation activity
If to compare with what is Foster care in the world:
•
From antiquity to now-days
Main principals used at the Our
Family foster care project
• Case management and care planning.
• Child-centered and multidimensional
approach – identifying and providing for all
needs that child has (physical, intellectual, social
and emotional)
• Multidisciplinary approach: all professionals
are in place and they coordinate their work with
the child and family in order to achieve better
results for the child
The Orphanage No 19 Foster Care Centre
structure
Директор
Консилиум
Административный отдел
Служба подготовки и
оценки семей
Отделение для подростков и
постинтернатного сопровождения
Реабилитационная
служба
Социальный патронат
Соцзащита и мониторинг
Семейные группы
Маленькая мама
Консультация для
замещающих семей
Методический центр
Main case management processes used at the
Our Family orphanage No 19 Foster care project
+ a continuous intervention - care planning and on-going reviewing of cases
+ multidisciplinary team works with all kinds of children’s needs
+ the developed and well maintained contact of the family and this team (the
family communicates with the same professionals of the same service at all
the times)
In-take
Assess
ments
Monitoring
Family
Family
support
change
and progress
Temporal
Afterpermanent
Removals and
placement
returning (long-term)
Temporal
Support
home
Foster
Foster
and
placements
placements
supervision
Child- centered approach
4 family residential units in the orphanage itself
First –stop unit; Rehabilitation and preparation unit,
Adolescents Unit
«Young mothers unit»
Child social workers
Case management
Support
Monitoring
Foster families
Guardians
Adoptive families
Foster care team
Recruitment
Training
Assessment
Of foster and adoptive
families
All specialists – child psychologists,
Educational specialists,
Medical doctors, neurologists
- An on-going supervision and support
Birth family team
Working with natural parents
Contact, reunification, etc
Rehabilitation team (all specialists and social workers)
“Track” the case for as long as child and family need
1
Rehabil.
team
Birth
Family
team
Child
Social
workers
Fostering
team
residential
workers
Case management
Main work principals
•
•
•
•
To find a family for a child
Priority of birth family preservation
Raising of an orphan child is a job
Quality of contact between the family and the service
– division of responsibilities among professionals with
well organized internal communication
• An on-going foster family support
• From “Permanency” to “Continuity” and
“Resilience”
Some questions answered
• Differences between foster care in our sense and other forms of
family placements defined in the Russian Family Code?
• Legal aspects – the legal status of the child, of the service, of the
local authority agencies?
• Which agreement is being signed?
• Who keeps a custody for a child or are these responsibilities
shared?
• What is the division of rights and duties between the orphanage and
the local authority agency.
• What does the Moscow law regulates and what should be approved
at the federal level
• What about a professionalization for foster carers – how far is the
Labor Code used here?
What to change in the Law
What we have
• 10 definitions for children in need
•
•
•
•
Parental rights cannot be shared
Only administrators of the
governments have the rights to do all
the family placement work
Types of family placements leave
parents alone to cope with the needs
of the children, after-placement
support does not have a legal
regulation
No legal regulation for forms of family
support
What we need
• A unified definition for categories of the
children looked after
• Parental rights should be shared
• Professional services are needed that
will have the rights to do the work for
family placements
• A new foster care should be approved
in order to fix the rights of the parents,
the rights of the services which should
provide support at all stages of
placement
•
Family support work should be legally
defined
5 basic parts of every family placement activity
Assessment
and
preparation
For foster
family
Matching
process
Child-family
Working with
Birth parents
Child
should be
prepared
for family
placement
Afterplacement
support by all
specialists and
social workers
Why do we need to prepare children for
a family placement?
50-70% of children experiences severe abuse or neglect and require an
extensive post-traumatic therapy:
- To cope with implications of child abuse
- To cope with a break of attachments or with an absence of attachments
How to prepare a child:
- To create a multidisciplinary team of specialists (psychologists, educators,
doctors, neurologists, etc)
- to use this multidisciplinary team which will make a thorough diagnostics and
then work with the child’s emotional conditions where she or he is:
-
-
At the rehabilitation units
At the special foster families who take such children in order to help with
diagnostics and primary rehabilitation
To work thoroughly with the birth parents in order to do what possible in
order to be sure if child could be returned back or not and then work with
child’s feelings about that before any family placements
How to work with Birth parents - general
Intake
Registering of the case
First assessments
Further assessment and Safety plan
Decisions
Follow-up assessments
Family change strategy developed
Provision of services and family dynamics
assessments
Final assessment/ closing
Local authority
Commission for child protectio
Why to prepare foster and adoptive
families
• Assessments
• Giving an information and elimination of myths
• Creating of a positive contact with the service –
as a basis for a success of the after-placements
assistance and supervision
• Identification and developing of competences
• Helping to make decisions
• Psychological support at the time of making a
decision about fostering or adoption
Foster Carer’s Journey
Receiving of an information
First contact on the telephone or in person
Group meeting
Personal interview(s)
Registration at training and psychological tests
Training, homework and family assessment
Approval
Selection of a family for a child
Waiting list
Meeting the child
Long-term fostering
Short-term fostering
After-placement support and further training, supervision
History of approaches to foster
carers assessments training
• Who are they as people (personality
assessment)
• What is their family (assessment of a
family system)
• What they can provide to a child
(competences)
Some statistics from Our Family 13-years long
experience
For Children:
•
Provided Family preservation for 187 children
•
305 placed with the orphanage project.
•
250 children were placed with 203 families
•
+ 100 children from other orphanages were placed with 85
families trained by the project
•
Only 6 % of children were not placed with a family and, at the age
of 18, they graduated from residential units
•
Moved to other institutions – 12 children (to other regions and
circus school), (3 children were in temporal families)
•
53 care leavers
•
55 returned home (12 children were in temporal families)
•
12 foster families arranged guardianship (6 after long-term
fostering)
•
25 foster parents adopted their foster children
•
6 intercountry adopted children
94% of children have been helped by the project activity
Foster children Legal background
• Parents are alcoholics – 40%, all birth family members have
alcoholism – 29%
• Were severely abused (18,3 %),
• Were sexually abused (28,2%)
8%
2%
6%
1%
13%
70%
сироты
ОБПР
подкидыши
оставленные
отказные
бомжи
The Age of children at the time of their foster
placement
Возраст помещения в семью
40
35
количество детей
35
31
30
29
26
25
26
21
20
25
24
19 19
15
15
10
23
Ряд1
15
11
9
6
5
2
4
3
2
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
возраст при помещении в семю
age
Selection process dynamics
interviews
training
(58 groups)
Fostered a child
183
Foster families Statistics
•
•
•
•
4000 telephone calls
867 interviewed
460 families were trained (58 groups)
435 families completed assessments
process
• 280 families became foster families
• 72,5% fostered children from orphanage
No19
• 27,5% fostered children elsewhere
Foster families statistics
• 250 children were fostered by 203 families
• 183 (90%) were successful fpster parents and kept the
job
That is 21,2% of all those who passed the interview и 710% of those who telephoned the project
• 94 foster parents are working now
• 27 foster parents have left because children reached the
age of 18
• 28 became guardians and adoptive parents
• 12 foster families work as professional short-term carers
• 34 foster parents were successful short-term carers in
addition to their long-tern fostering ( at least once)
More foster families statistics
• Average age – 43,6 years old, and 42,9 years
old for those who are successful carers
• 58,3% have full families with 2 parents, 66% of
all successful carers are married couples
• 44,8% have children of their own, 45,9% - is the
proportion for successful carers
• 12% lost their birth children
• 16 семей = 26% of all childless children (due to
medical reasons) gave birth to their kids after
they fostered a child
Family structure
Состав семьи
Single women without children
146; 31%
120; 25%
2-parents family with children
полных с детьми
полных без детей
неполных с детьми
неполных без детей
Single mothers with children
56; 12%
152; 32%
2 –parents family without children
Numbers of foster children in a foster families
Число приемных детей в семье
4 2%
5 children 3 1%
4 children 6 3%
17 8%
1 child
3 children
1 ребенок
2 детей
37 17%
3 детей
2 children
4 детей
5 детей
6-11 детей
149 69%
Why are the after-placement support and supervision
needed?
The aim: prevention of removals, of child abuse and support the adaptation
A unified system of assessment and after-placement support is needed
For the child it gives: an on-going process of diagnostics, prognosis and planning, as
well as support and control based on a good communication
For the family it provides
•
A direct in home help
•
Legal support and social assistance
•
Professional consultation and group or personal therapy
•
after placement training
•
Meeting other carers
Who is involved in the after-placement work:
•
Child social worker
•
Psychologist
•
Medical doctor
•
Educational specialists
•
Fostering social workers
•
Birth family social workers
Dynamics of child adaptation in a new family
Leaving care crisis
Puberty
2 crisis:
1 year (family adaptation and boundaries)
1 crisis
1-3 months
(honeymoon breackdown)
Orphanage No 19 data, for 10 years of observation
Results:
Child development progress
Распределение по совокупности показателей
Число детей
30
25
20
Пост
15
Наст
10
5
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Сумма баллов
At admission – low score – severe retardation
At present – normal development
Results
for Economics – 37% of savings for budgets
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
Стоим ость сод ержания
2000
реб енк а в д ет д ом е
1000
реб енк а в патр семье
ая
фка
Умс ск
То ар я
ам ка
С мс г
ер ур
П нб
ре д
О ро
го л
ов Э
Н ий
эр ск
М ан
рг я
Ку ли
ре нг
Ка н и р
ли м и
Ка ди
ла
В
А
0
Стоим ость сод ержания
лт
ск
ай
Область
General results of Foster Care
practice
• 95% of children in the orphanage are placed with
families
• Good practice of family preservation
• Stable and safe placements with new foster families
• After-placement support has is legally protected (is a
part of placement agreements)
• A working model to restructure of an orphanage into a
system of social services for children
• So it is a working model for deinstitualization
• Ready to be duplicated anywhere in the contry
What do we want?
For a child:
• All children should be brought up in the families:
- in their biological families
- or in the new families
We also seek a quality for children:
• Their developmental needs should be met in the best possible way
-
•
•
health
attachments and emotional development
identity
Education and intellectual development
Behavioral development
Social adaptation
Stability of placements
Efficacy and resilience in the future
How to do it?
Why was our experience so
effective?
Main results
Resume No1
• A continuous child protection and
placement process should be introduced
• Family preservation and family placements
should be two parts of one unified
decision-making process
Resume 2: Conditions for a successful child and
family adaptation:
1. Quality of attachments and child-family
relations
2. Quality of partnership between the family
and the service
3. The rights and duties of the service (as
well as of the local authority) are legally
defined
Resume 3: Why is the present official system
not so effective?
• No child protection case management (not-coordinated and broken
child protection and family placements process)
• Administering of forms of family placements and not working with
the child’s needs
• Local authority dies not have any parental responsibility for a child
after a placement is done and so they simply do not have duties to
support
• Existed forms of family placements (guardianship and adoption) do
not have any legal basis for any after-placement support as it is only
the parents who become responsible for children and none else
• Absence of professional family placement services
• Myths in adoption
A New Model
Should contain a professional service (which
rights and duties for family placements
should be defined)
A New system structure
Child protection and family
Placements governmental body
Local authority body
Local authority body
Organizations that are authorized to exercise duties
to place children with foster families or to do family preservation
A new model approach
Families in crisis
intake
Local authority child
protection
Families who want to
foster
Family reunification
A professional service
assessments
Family preservation
Rehab.
Residential
unit
Temporal
Foster placements
Permanent foster
placements.
Children not placed with families
Regional data base for children who need placement
orphanages
Intercountry adoptions
Leaving care
An old model approach
intake
Families in crisis
Family reunification
Local authority child protection
(staff: few administrators)
.
Families who want to foster
Family placements
Child protection work
Regional data base for children
who need placements
Intercontry adoptions
orphanages
orphanages
orphanages
Families who want to adopt or
become guardians
Adoptee’s journey in an old model
ДД
ООП2
»
ПМСЦ1
ООП 1
ПМСЦ2
Суд
РБД
Adoptee’s journey in a new model
ООП
Центр
Семейного
устройства
A Model for a Region
LA
Dissemination centre
A working placement
service
Remaining
orphanages
Professional
placement
Services- centres
support
La
Other services
One of the services could become a dissemination centre which could help
The other services and provides a supervision
Selection Criteria for the orphanages
which to restructure
•
•
•
•
•
Motivation of the manager
Values and beliefs
Changes Readiness
An ability of staff to be retrained
An experience in placing children for
adoption and guardianship
• A good access for general public
• …. And more…
How to restructure? A process of a real
transformation of an orphanage into a placement
Released budget is used
service
to pay for new foster
carers and new staff
Orphanage budget
2 nd
group
1st
group
Find and
train
families
2 social
workers +
1
psychologist
8 foster
carers
To be given
additionally
Children are
placed with
families
Developed materials
1. The operation of the local authority
agency for child protection
2. The regulations :
1. For the LA child protection agency
2. For the professional service (a reformed
orphanage)
3. For various professional teams operation at
the professional service
3. For foster care finance
4. For foster carers competencies concepts
5. For staff of the services competencies
Methods of work developed
• For assessment of child's developmental
needs
• For a preparation of the child for family
placement
• For family preservation
• For family placement service operation
• For after-placement support and
supervision
• For the orphanage restructuring process
Theory and programmes devreloped
• 4 stages of child adaptation process
theory
• Factors and conditions for a good family
adaptation
• Foster care as s new profession and job
regulations
More developments:
• A Model for the regional law
• Regulations for the placements services
and reformed orphanages
• Assessment and monitoring forms and
methods
• Birth family assessment forms
Programmes development
• Training programme for foster and
adoptive families
• After-placement training programmes
• Staff re-training programme
• The training programme has been
approved by the Ministry of Education
expert council in 2004
The evaluation system and assessment
criteria for the services
1. Qualitative criteria
2. Quantitative criteria
-
For the child
For the family
For the service
For the local authority
Model calculations: the fall of numbers of children in
`
orphanages with and without Foster services
Число детей в детских домах
число детей
300000
Without
Foster services)
Без патроната
200000
100000
0
-100000 1
3
5
7
9 11 13 15 17 19 21
Патронат при
заданных
параметрах
-200000
годы
Коэффициенты устраиваемости детей в семью :
дети в возрасте 0-3 года устраиваются на 100%,
дети 4-11 лет – на 70%,
дети 12-15 лет – на 30%,
подростки в возрасте 16-18 лет не устраиваются в семью и остаются в учреждениях
(коэффициент = 0%).
With foster
services
What’s next?
How is this approach used in Russia at
present
and what are the perspectives for the
future?
Thank you!
Maria Ternovskaya, PhD, director
& Olga Shalkouskaya, head of foster care service
The Orphanage No 19 “The Foster Care Centre”
The Our family Charitable Foundation
Moscow
[email protected]
(499)-267-74-19
www.pro-mama.ru