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9. Medical examination of child before adoption and a health
fitness certificate of the adopters.
10. Boarding-out should not function except through the
appointed children's officer.
There are many other recommendations affecting institutional
and residential communities, approved schools, remand
homes, handicapped children, emigration, etc., regarding which
the Curtis Committee had some critical comments "... that in
the majority of public assistance institutions the general care
of children was of a poor standard."
The "deprived child" comes under many categories, but
this Welfare Authority's duties concern adoptions pending, and
boarded-out children with foster-parents. For many years our
policy has been that the child is placed with suitable fosterparents
with the insistence on one child a foster-mother, unless
related children were to be fostered. This checked the past
evil of baby farming.
In 1945 we attempted to secure uniformity of supervision
of all deprived children through the deliberations of an informal
committee of all agencies in the Borough, and thus to promote
co-ordination of supervision. The effort did not, however,
achieve complete voluntary co-ordination amongst the agencies
concerned.
The Curtis Report stresses the formation of a special committee
with the appointment of a special officer possessing
academic qualifications. I feel, in the light of past experience,
that such appointments tend on visitation to single out the
child from the family. The health visitor has all the attributes
Qualifications and experience befitting her for child life protection
duties, and through the functions of the Welfare Committer
she would apply the principles of preventive medicine
thus ensuring against the risk of tendencies to treat the deprived
child otherwise than as a unit of family life. Any supervision
which tends to stigmatise the deprived child during its years
of nurture is to be guarded against, as much as its welfare is to
be safeguarded. In Bromley, I believe, we have achieved this
desirable result in a marked degree.