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Notices are displayed in the Health Clinics and annually an
insertion made in the local press drawing attention to the duties
of foster parents regarding child life protection and of the public
regarding notification to the Welfare Authority on the placing
of a child for adoption.
It has become a practice of Registered Adoption Societies to
inform the Department of applications for adoption and to ask
for our observations as to suitability and when a child be placed
the Adoption Societies inform us and the Health Visitor's supervision
starts immediately.
The Curtis Committee proposed that notification by the foster
parent before placing should apply to the child placed for no
reward and to the child over nine years, as it does now to the
child under nine years placed for reward. These suggestions
would have valuable results as the unsatisfactory person, or home,
can legally at the present time evade supervision by taking no
"reward," while the value of supervision for a child well beyond
the tender age of nine years is obvious.
The Curtis Committee made reference also to the Birmingham
system by which the Local Authority guarantees payment to
approved foster parents receiving children by private arrangement
and recovers these payments all, or in part, from the responsible
parent. The scheme differs in no great particular from the
service given in Wembley except financially. In this regard
account must be taken of the very great differences between the
two populations, Birmingham and Wembley. So far as Wembley
mothers are concerned it was considered that there is little need
for such financial arrangements, but the Maternity and Child
Welfare Committee requests that the exceptional case always be
brought to its notice for special consideration.
The important pivotal officer in the care of children is the
officer who does the actual supervision of these children guided
and assisted, of course, by a more central and co-ordinating
technical administration. The number of children under each
individual officer should never be more than can receive the
officer's individual consideration and supervision. At the present
time there is no more appropriate officer for such individual
supervision of children deprived of a normal home than the Health
Visitor, with her special nursing and social training. Surely,
also, there is much value in this officer being the same person
who looks after the "other" children in the district (again the
Health Visitor), rather than that the deprived child be picked
out and receive supervision from some special officer, perhaps
making the child immediately conscious of being a different sort
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