SPECIAL GUARDIANSHIP ORDERS

Special Guardianship Orders



Special Guardianship Orders: Challenges faced by social worker when seeking permanency for children in care

Introduction

Special Guardianship is a legal order that gives the Special Guardian shared parental responsibility for the child in their care. Parental responsibility is defined as all the rights and responsibilities a birth parent would normally have for their child. The birth parent does not lose their parental responsibility; however the Special Guardian has overarching parental responsibility, which means he or she can make day to day decisions on behalf of the child and a birth parent can only challenge these decisions with the permission of the court. Special Guardianship Orders can be granted to connected person (extended family members, family friends of the child or foster carers) (Biehal, 2010, 12).

Literature review

Increasing the scale and range of permanent placements for children unable to live with their birth parents has been a policy priority of Government from the late 1990s. Since the introduction of the Children Act 1989, the main options for permanence with relatives, family friends or strangers have included residence orders, adoption or long-term fostering. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 introduced, from December 2005, a further permanence option for children in the form of special guardianship. A special guardianship order provides legal permanence for those children for whom adoption is not appropriate, and gives a special guardian clear responsibility for all aspects of caring for the child and for taking decisions to do with his or her upbringing (Hall, 2008, 358).

Although the order does not legally sever the child's relationship with his or her birth parent(s), the special guardian may exercise parental responsibility to the exclusion of all others with parental responsibility (apart from another special guardian). Children formerly looked after cease to be so and local authorities cease to have direct powers of intervention, other than those arising from their broader safeguarding duties. Local authorities do, however, have a duty to make provision for a range of services to support people affected by special guardianship. While the order cannot be challenged without leave of the court, there are no restrictions on parents or other relatives applying for contact, prohibited-steps or specific-issues orders, unless their right to do so is restricted by the court (Schofield, 2003, pp. 3). In these respects, those obtaining special guardianship orders have a more limited legal relationship with the child and less protection against further litigation than do those who adopt.

Pathways to special guardianship

The appropriateness of a family placement will depend on the quality of assessment undertaken and the safeguards that exist to quality assure these decisions. In these respects, the findings were mixed. Carers placed high priority on the provision of reliable advice, information and guidance (Padbury and Priestman, 2007). This was frequently in short supply, in part due to the newness of the legislation. Where social workers lacked information, heavy reliance was placed on solicitors and the courts. There was widespread concern amongst practitioners about the relatively short timescales ...