The parent trap
IN 25 LOCAL AUTHORITIES, AN AVERAGE OF ONE CHILD in every 100 live births is taken from its parents in their first week of life, with few being reunited. There are currently more than 80,000 children under council care in England — up from 65,000 a decade ago. Strict secrecy rules covering the family courts mean the detail behind decisions to investigate and remove children rarely becomes public. However, The Critic has obtained disturbing documents that shed some light on how social workers decide if someone’s parenting is “good enough” to keep their children. The documents suggest low-income parents are held to standards that would test even relatively affluent middle-class families.
From the 1990s onwards many local authorities used a scoresheet called the Graded Care Profile (GCP) to assess neglect. In 2017 the NSPCC began selling an adapted version, dubbed GCP2. Councils spent £1,000-odd for a GCP2 licence and around £6,000 on training. Under the GCP2, parenting is scored on a scale from 1 (best parent: all child’s needs always met) through 3 (adequate: mild neglect) to 5 (worst: severe neglect).
Both the GCP and its successor are based on the concept of “instinctive parenting” — supposedly an evolutionary drive to ensure the survival of one’s progeny. “Looking at what a parent is actually doing to care for their child, and then differentiating how much parental investment has gone into providing that care can best assess this ‘instinctive parenting strength’,” says the NSPCC’s GCP2 Guidance Booklet.
Instinctive parenting strength supposedly then interacts with environmental factors and attributes of child and parent to produce “net care”, which the GCP2 attempts to quantify
