Children in Care: How to Fix the Fostering Crisis (Louise Allen)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, before we get started, I need more of your radical questions for a man who is at the forefront of the movement to ban social media and smartphones for children.

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1:35Now, on to this week's episode.

1:45Hello, it's Amol here. Welcome to Radical. These are conversations about the trends changing our world and offering you some radical ideas for the future. Now, there's a lot that goes into the editorial choices we make, the reason that we choose particular subjects, particular guests one week or another. And sometimes it's just what we think is the most interesting. Sometimes it's what do we think is the most important. And today we've decided to put the focus on fostering. And we've done that because according to children's charities and the Fostering Network, there is a fostering crisis in England, which is putting huge pressure on private residential care homes.

2:23Did you know there are more children in care today in England than there have ever been? And at the same time, the number of fostering households is falling fast. And this is something that is front and centre of government thinking because there's in a couple of weeks, there's going to be a major government announcement on fostering and we thought we should try to get ahead of it. We're going to discuss the root causes of all of this, what can be done about it, what the government is planning to do, what it needs to do and offering them and you some radical ideas. And I should say that this is one of those episodes, one of those weeks, frankly, which has been a really exhilarating learning curve.

2:58There's a lot in this which I just didn't know and I wish I had known. Because the fact is, when it comes to foster care, which is related to but different from the issues around adoption, this country has a crisis on its hands, but a lot of people seem not to have realised it. One person who definitely has, who's experienced care herself, who had an extraordinarily traumatic childhood in many, many ways, as you'll discover, but who's now a foster carer and devoting her life to these issues is Louise Allen.

3:33Louise, how are you? I'm very good, thank you. I had no idea, not only that we know a few people in common, but that you are a massive reggae nut. I am. So I think we should spend the next hour talking about reggae. I would love that. Except that there's an urgent crisis. except there's a very urgent crisis in need of very radical solutions, which you know an awful lot about and have spent a lifetime doing. If it's okay with you, Louise, I just want to make a little kind of confession at the beginning of this, which is to say one of the reasons I wanted to talk about fostering and adoption and invite you in together with the team is that I'll be really honest.

4:08I feel like I didn't really know enough about it. I didn't give it the attention I should have done over the course of my journalistic time. and the more I've looked into it, the more I realise, wow, this is potentially a quite neglected subject. There is a massive, very urgent crisis affecting a very large number of children and things are kind of going in the wrong direction. And I'm going to be very honest about the things that I don't know and ask for some pretty basic definitions as we go along. But could I just ask you to spell out the beginning of this? And look, we're doing this podcast on this subject with you here because we think this is morally important.

4:44And I just wonder if you could spell out moral terms and practical terms. What is the crisis when it comes to fostering in Britain today? Well, fostering has always existed. Well, since the sort of Victorian times, it has a legacy. The legacy has changed dramatically. It changed in the 80s with a kind of the privatization of children's social care. Then it shifted. It was originally nice ladies, you know, put another potato in the pot, taking another wane into your home, often to release the load of the workers in the mill houses. So it has a legacy with industry, with business, with economics.

5:29then in the 80s it moved into a little bit of privatization which expanded rapidly when people realized that the growth the model of growth was just extraordinary and the sad thing is that model hasn't really changed life has changed dramatically from then to now children have changed dramatically the introduction of technology has changed children changed us changed their parents it's it's a very different landscape and we and right now we're having huge amounts of children coming into care I don't know because you'll never get your hands on the data how many are on hold that actually aren't coming into care that are in domestic crisis one of the biggest problems and for me personally one of the biggest solutions to the prevention of children coming in to care is to name housing as a form of child protection because a lot of the problems why children come into care is because of the domestic situation so it might be poverty housing and stabilized living um might be social services have intervened because there's a crisis yeah and absolutely they interview but it's not very easy to get a child in care you see and there's a whole myth around oh they're taking my kids away or a child has to come into care it can sometimes take years for a child to come into care which is why a lot of the children in care are averaging out at 11 years old if there is history of in the family then the the younger children can sort of be watched and then go into care it's a very very ad hoc difficult thing to be involved in and sometimes I think social workers find it overwhelming the families find it overwhelming because the circumstances they find themselves in like you know if you if you're in a domestic abuse situation or you're in you've lost your work you've lost your home you are overwhelmed social workers uh who work with local authorities have caseloads now of up to 40 children when i became a foster carer 14 15 years ago they were averaging out between like 12 and 15 wow so that those numbers actually let's just let me just put on the table the the shocking numbers.

7:57Today, in England alone, there are over 100 ,000 children in care. That is the highest there has ever been. So in England today, I think the sixth biggest economy in the world, very rich country, there's a lot of very poor children, four and a half million people in poverty, four and a half million kids, I think it is in poverty, most of them in working families. There's more children in care today than there has ever been. Stat Stat number one. Stat number two, there is a shortage. And then we're going to go through what's causing these. There's a shortage of six and a half thousand foster families.

8:33Six and a half thousand foster families are needed. And then the other thing that I want people to really grasp is on the one hand, you've got this very sustained rise to a record level of children in care. And at the same time, obviously, you need more foster families to support that and to do something about that. At the same time, you have this drop in the number of foster carers. So last year, and this is just the stats for England alone, but last year there were 42 ,615 fostering households in England. That is a drop of about 10 % in four years. So can I just go through these three things and ask you why they're happening?

9:09Why have we got more children in care in England than ever before? Because of the world in which we find ourselves right now is unstable. table we have a crisis in what in parenting we have three generations of screen users and and this I say mostly from experience with the children that I look after the there is emotional neglect like I've never seen before you have parents who are simply not growing up who are not engaging with their children who people have been pulled into screen use and lost the efficacy of parenthood and life those skills have been lost for education through through narratives through through lifestyles and it's sometimes it's been very hard for me to figure out within the family dynamics of the children that I look after not always but a lot of the time who are actually the parents and I think this is a grave problem and something that I don't think people could have predicted and don't know how to talk about because it's uncomfortable let me just put out there for our listeners your own not credentials because it's not some sort of qualification but why you know about this I mean you tell me a little bit about your circumstances yeah well I was a I was in care before I was born my my father I talk about it so comfortably but if the listeners get uncomfortable please don't this is real life my father was a paedophile I am the result of his work my mother was 12 when he met her I was born when she was school age so I was an uncomfortable child for the local authorities who were deeply religious I understand at the time to have on their caseload they wanted to adopt me they wanted me adopted because I was only six weeks old when I was finally available for for the adoption it was a forced adoption um and I was adopted into a family that frankly didn't want me and it was a difficult situation um I was eventually adopted I was fostered then adopted at two years old I was put back into care a few times because my adopted mother um was unable emotionally and physically to look after me she was a very uh who had also been abused herself so you got this intergenerational stuff which I think again is something we need to talk about in terms of abuse but my back my qualifications is I left home at 15 ran away and had to build a life for myself so and then came back as a foster carer and I've been a foster carer for 14 years but you have spoken about it openly and so I just wonder if you could explain to our lovely listeners as briefly as you want but as openly as you want the experiences that you went through as a kid that made you think this is what you want to dedicate your life to?

12:11First of all, the abuse. Which is what? Well, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, economic abuse, everything. I experienced all the abuses. But I never for a moment, this is before I had the capacity to think about it, let it define me. this never defined me the neglect gave me space to think I am lucky I grew up in Oxford and I was roaming you could then round those university buildings I was bunking off school I didn't go to the precinct and smoke I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum the Natural History Museum Museum of Modern Art and the Ashmonian and learned about ancient cultures by learning about ancient this is when I was like 12 13 by learning about ancient cultures and I had all day to do it um no one bothered me they thought I was on a school trip so I was just roaming around Oxford I learned something really important and that is that people don't really we're not we're not that different and generationally the same problems keep coming up so why did you run away at 15?

13:25I ran away because they were pretty strange, the family, my adopted family. And they had, they didn't understand, I generally can say they didn't understand me at all. The fact is I was, I was sharp. I was bright. I was lively. I loved life. Their ambition for me was to look after them when they were elderly. I was also very arty and I was a punk. and I was always down the reggae club in Oxford and I was doing stuff perhaps that was beyond their world. And I remember coming in one night, I'd been working in a fruit and veg shop, saving some money. We had lots of things worked up to this. But I came in at half 10, 11.

14:12I'd been to see a reggae band. I don't remember who it was. It was Asward. Asward. in oxford off the cowley road in the in and i'd cycled home but i was mucking about and i was a bit late and she opened the door and my greeting was she being that my adopted mother you effing whore you this you that which i was called regularly a whore which is what a lot how a lot of girls are still spoken to um and then uh there was a lot of violence and I can't go into it because the other people are still alive and I can't talk about them but it was very violent I got kicked in the the ribs and I had my head smashed on the sink and I was on the floor and I was just thinking I can't get out of this and um I had some money from working in the bed shop because I used to spend all my money on albums you know that's where my money went and And I just packed a bag and quietly, I just in that moment thought, I am going.

15:16So I just packed my bag. I walked, I think it's five or six miles with this broken rib and bruising, which was going to be up to the Oxford station and just got on a train. And I ended up in Portsmouth and I've got a photograph, which is on my website somewhere, of me sitting with my Susie Sue hair and my sort of, you know, my little reggae bag with Mixer Cultures, staring at the Isle of Wight thinking, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? By the end of that day, I'd found myself a bedsit. I'd found coins in a phone box and an old newspaper and managed to phone in the days when you had room to let.

16:00I didn't even know where I was, but I I used to but you go into survival and this is what people don't understand about children in care which is why I get so frustrated that when they say oh they're not going to school they're going to fail they haven't got English and math I had none of that but what I did have was the ability to think on my feet to duck and dive and to make things happen which I think is entrepreneurial well and astonishing astonishing levels of courage and resilience so I found by that day I had um found a bed I blagged my way through because I didn't you know I wasn't legally anything I just blagged my way through got a bed sit in this house with speed freak heroin addicts alcoholics but it was my room I had enough money to buy a can of beans and I had enough money to buy a plate which was essential I didn't know I didn't want cold beans I had to have dignity and then I went to a shop and with the remaining money I was there was sort of some cutlery available and there was this beautiful enameled camping spoon you know it's white with black splodges on it and I bought that because that was the first decision I made my business decision and that was I can do more with that spoon I can use it I can use it as a fork and a knife I will get value for money I still have investment that was my investment and I still have it in my draw and I look at it occasionally and go everything is about money.

17:29And you've been a foster care now for 14 or 15 years how many children are in your care? Currently I have two foster children in our care I have my birth children alongside them I think we've looked over after sorry looked after over 20 children in that time now that doesn't mean that they've all lived with us permanently we've had respite children we've had short-term long-term we've had all sorts of. And I want to go into what that means. Okay, so this is a world you know a lot about. It's my life's work. It's your life's work. There is a record number of children today in care for lots of reasons.

18:05I'm very struck that you didn't mention, though I'm sure you think it's relevant, underlying economic material circumstances, which is that we have very specific conditions of poverty, quite a new-ish form of poverty in some ways in this country and in other industrialised nations, which is that, you know, it used to be that if you were poor there were certain, not compensations or consolations but certain avenues out. You had certain institutions that maybe looked after you which have disappeared to some extent. And we now have replaced the old working class with a precariat who are much more precarious in their conditions and say people who are poor 50, 60 years ago, not to diminish their experiences in any way.

18:42But you didn't talk about that. You talked about screens. Is your contention that the invasion of screens is leading to a massive degree of neglect and that's driving the care crisis in Britain? Yes, I do. because I live it daily. I live it daily. I have done for the last 10 years, definitely for the last 10 years, when the iPhone, can I say that? There are other phones available. You can talk about iPhones. Smartphones. Smartphones, just in the hands of children from such early ages. And you see, you've got parents who had access to screens who give their children smartphones as babies and they leave them there with the baby with the smartphones becoming the babysitter so you have you can tell when you work with children their their interpersonal skills their social skills are falling by the wayside there's no eye contact that you know that they they don't understand boundaries they don't understand they crave them but they don't understand them children are very different the children who generally come into care have had not have not had parents who said right time up phone away screens off off you go to bed children I look after many foster carers look after don't even know they're tired they think they're depressed because no one said to them right you're tired bed so you you you kind of the lack of parenting is prolific.

20:13And being a foster carer today is not like I would imagine being a foster carer was 30, 40 years ago. It's a very different place. But can I ask you the extent to which in what you're saying there, you're, let me just put really explicitly what was implicit in what you're saying. Can I ask you the extent to which you're having a go at those parents? Because you know, and every parent listening to this and indeed every young person who has a parent listening to this knows that a lot of parents use screens because they just they've got pretty hard lives and frankly they need a break and screens which can be educational sadly mostly are not um for young people but yeah some parents come to rely on the screens because they've got really tough lives and that's the problem isn't it and and if you are going to your computer to to to find solutions for your lives we've got a real problem because our communities are crumbling um we don't know how to communicate i mean years ago when i was a child the the children's services offices the welfare offices were in the community and they were uh within those spaces were you know women and some men who were there that you knew you could go and see and to receive support from now if you are struggling and you have to be able to identify that you're struggling and what you are going through isn't your intergenerational norm and that is a complicated thing to unravel because a lot of us don't know we're struggling until we are told we think it's normal okay so that's those are some of the factors driving this record number of people in care i also said that there's a shortage of six and a half thousand foster families and there's been a drop around about 10 so last year there was 42 ,615 fostering households in England that's down from 45 ,370 in 2021 that's a drop yeah around about 10 in the last four years i.e a big drop in four years why why is there this reduction in the number of fostering households because fostering um hasn't grown it is stuck it hasn't met the needs of the economy because don't forget if you are on the whole of your foster carer usually one of the foster carers comes away from their paid work to look after children and that is a precarious income because you only get and it's a small allowance whilst you have children in your home I think the working conditions for foster carers, there aren't any.

22:55Foster care is that one corner of modern civilisation where feminism drove straight paths because it's predominantly women's work and women doing it. it's that one corner where if they shine a light on the lack of protection for people doing prolifically and sometimes dangerous work for averaging one pound 10p an hour if they shine light on it then that will expose so many other issues and unless you shine a light on it you're never going to shift it and and the reason that the numbers have gone down is that a lot of foster carers have just walked away and when you walk away from fostering I mean I nearly did it a while ago because it was so you you're so unsupported it's so tough you're wondering why you're doing it you and it's not the child and I need to make this clear to everybody it's not the children we talk you know I talk about screens I talk about this they're not the problem really when you're a foster carer what is the problem is a lack of support and a broken system navigating very um tired um overworked social workers it's crumbling and foster carers are walking away sometimes leaving children that they love dearly because they have to make a choice us or them and no one should be put in that position and the reason they're not recruiting is because you know quite frankly the marketing of foster care now doesn't even touch the reality of what foster care is so it's a kind of um it doesn't reflect what foster care is foster care is complex emotional labor it's not and when they constant as well constant 24 7 no respite never 365 days a year it can be exhausting and the only way you can fix it is to address two fundamental things one retain the ones you've got look after them give them employment rights give them rights give them pensions give them sick pay give them holidays give them respite give them a break why do people who foster foster i think on the whole uh most people a variety of reasons um there is a kind of idea that a foster carer is a husband and a wife they're in their 50s you know they live in a semi they well but that's that's not what all children need or want what we need is a much broader range of foster care so we need intellectually educated intellectually professional people because which i know will terrify most social workers but you can see round corners and you you have the capabilities to self-learn and research naturally and and a A lot of the work we do is because we learn ourselves.

26:10We dive into information that we think we can use to benefit the children we work with. And every single child that comes through our door will require a different learning twist. Why are you saying that it would terrify social workers to have intellectual professionals saying that they want to do fostering? Because I've heard verbatim that social workers like compliant foster carers that they can kind of control. And if you are smart, if you are a professional, you tend to bring with you. When you're a foster carer, you bring yourself. That's what you bring to the table. You bring yourself and you might have extraordinary life experience or an extraordinary life experience.

26:55Both are valuable. Both can offer the right thing. But when you bring with you a kind of professional background, you can scare and threaten social workers and that whole kind of system because you will bring with you questioning, critical questioning and critical thinking. cognitive confidence to say why should it have to be this way yeah this is i mean i say this respectfully and this is your world not mine but wouldn't social workers some of whom will be listening to you right now say sorry hang on a second i do a hellish job i get paid sod all all i'm trying to do is to put children with in the best possible circumstances that's what social workers would say wouldn't they but you got all different sorts of social workers doing different roles you see you got um you got child protection social workers you who are the front line and they're they're the ones who bring in the children into safety and they have particular training and headstep more the headset and then you have fostering social workers who and adoption social workers yeah and they have a different role and then you have placing children yeah they're about placing children and and into families and and then you have a supervising social worker Now, their brief is to supervise the foster carers and also maintain a really good working relationship.

28:17There you see the dynamics of the social workers change because a social worker tends to lean towards the role they are doing. But I have noticed, and you can talk to any experienced foster carer, most social workers bring with them their child protection hat. so they're always thinking about safeguarding sure which is important but also when you've been through the form f which we would go on to be then faced with lots of safeguarding concerns after you've been uh considered and approved safe for safety is you so you err on the side of making sure that you're not going to get a horror story and we've we've had you know in this country and people remember the baby pea story which i know is very very different with specific circumstances But people will know that if you work in that world, social care, local authorities, there is a culture quite understandably because of the legal risk, because of the reputational risk of erring on the side of safety.

29:15We talked about this extraordinary statistic of 71 percent of people who start the process don't complete it because it's so onerous and burdensome. And I just want to ask you a specific thing, which is what is Form F? Form F is a scrutiny process which is largely bureaucratic. It can take six months to a year. It is where you, when you express an interest in fostering, they usually grab you, take you in immediately. And then you start the Form F process. Now, the Form F process is one social worker who is designated to do this particular task, who I might say has only perhaps done a day's training.

29:59might be wrong but I think that's true um will come into your life and scrutinize you and they will ask you uh you know they look around your house see if you've got a safe house uh they talk to you the rest of your family they'll want to see all your finances which you can understand because you you know most foster care is supplement foster care I mean we pay for the holidays we pay for the trainers we pay for all those things because the fostering allowance wouldn't cover it but you then it goes a bit weird and it goes a bit too far and sometimes it's been more invasive and deeper than perhaps becoming an MI6 agent and every time you move you have to do it again I've done it four times my family has done it four times and it when they ask you about your ex-relationships now um for example my husband put his foot down on the last one because we were at number four he said i'm not contacting my ex-wife again i don't want my ex-wife to constantly be bothered and to constantly know what i'm doing well in that one it sounds like they should have known from the previous time you've done it three times who your husband's ex-wife was but again i just you can see why social services who are so worried about the implications of something going wrong want to do belt and braces and cover all odds and they want to be able to say you know i know this is a slight legalistic culture i know this is maybe a little bit overly bureaucratic but i'm just thinking i'm just trying to i know you don't have it in for all of them but i'm just trying to think of social workers here would say well if i didn't do that work and some x turned up uh and you know turns out to be a user and that caused terrible problems and it's you know i'm my job's on the line my reputation's online so i'm not justifying the fourth form that you filled out but you can see why form f maybe er's on the side of i do and i understand that the sector is risk averse and after cases like baby p and many others i totally get that but by being risk averse you also open up to more risk in some ways um and the risk of losing 71 % of people who could be really good foster carers.

32:19In a time of crisis. So what's the difference between foster care and residential care? And just to be clear, if you've got an eight-year-old who, a terrible accident, parents, users, social services intervene, they don't get put up for adoption. They might get put up for fostering. But if they can't find a foster family, they go into residential care, which is what? Well, it's a home. They look very different and they use different models. But basically, it is a physical building that might be rented or it might be owned. There are key workers in the building. They're usually on 12 or 24 hour shifts.

33:01Each house has a manager and within a house, and I know that a lot of residential homes are very homely. They try and make them as homely as possible. um there are maybe three or four children and sometimes i know there's only one child and three members of staff depends entirely on the needs of the child um but residential i think should be a last resort and we're using residential more and more because they're reducing numbers of foster carers and and if they got the form f right and we do have a solution for that it could change significantly. It's very expensive. You know, I was looking at the National Audit Office latest statistics is that to put a child into numbers, into child into residential is 318 ,400 a year.

33:54So we need foster carers. We need more foster carers. What an economic investment in an era of tight money. Never mind the moral investment, which is the primary thing in that individual and supporting the foster care, but the economic savings that are bound. So just to really spell out for people, again, who are learning as we go along, the tips of residential care and foster care. So residential care, you're living in care homes, foster care, you're with a family. Residential care, you've got trained care staff, foster care, it's individual foster carers, or as it were, foster parents. With residential care, you might get children with quite complex needs, more likely to be there with trained staff.

34:29With foster care, that's less likely to be the case, children who can adapt more easily to family life. and with residential care it's managed it's a home often three or four children sometimes more managed by local authorities it has like 380 000 pounds a year with foster cares you're kind of supervised by agencies and local authorities but it's the family that raise them you mentioned something earlier called the foster allowance and one thing that i hope this podcast might do is just really crystallize some of the decisions for people who are thinking about foster caring what is the foster allowance fostering allowance you have okay so if you per week if per child now you get a different allowance you see it means tested pardon is it means tested no no not at all um so it doesn't matter how much money you have or haven't got the allowance is the same so uh you could have a sibling group where you and i need to also state that it seems to me that of every local authority and every provider offers a different allowance so you it's a postcode lottery yeah yeah totally totally and um you can everything about this system is a postcode lottery everything and you you can you know you can go you know you get you tend to get more in a independent fostering agency than a local authority which is ironic because the local Authorities pay more to use the independent fostering agency.

35:56But you will average between£400 and maybe£700, depending on the needs per child. But that will go down if you have siblings. You actually get paid less if you have a sibling group. It's not a huge amount. And that money also, you know, you think of the rising cost of living. Now, you've got three, you know, you might have two birth children in your home. You have, then you have sibling group. And this has happened to us. we've had like three sibling groups, two or three, your food bills go through the roof. And you have children who might not eat what you eat and it all gets so complicated. They've got food issues.

36:36They've got food issues. They've got issues. And your food bill and the amount of time you spend travelling to supermarkets and trying to source the right food can be outrageous. And you can't all sit down at the same time because it's different kids with different ages. of different ages yeah it can be really hectic just around food so and then you factor in that you also half that money is the foster carer's allowance so myself and my husband because we are one of the traditional fostering couples we are husband and wife and we're in our 50s is that you um you split that between you so that's one pound ten per hour 24 seven split between two people right so it doesn't really go anywhere and then you end up you got all their clothes to buy now i i again ask yourself this have you tried dressing a teenager or a child you know you're talking hundreds of pounds we get a 40 pounds a month allowance to buy their clothes what can you buy for so what and also in this when you are a foster care you've also got your mind set on child protection and child protection and safeguarding in terms of gangs and county lines grooming so you also need to present your child though they don't look like they're in foster care which is why we we fund you know every foster child i have has top-notch gear because that is a form of protection for them that's so interesting but we fund it can i ask you something which is you and your husband are both foster carers do you you're a successful author and illustrator do you for these this other classic fostering couple if there's foster parents you know it's a very full-time job raising a child do you guys have other sources of income and do parents who do this as a sort of you know the two parents and take people do they have to live off the fostering allowance or do most people who do this fostering also have to have one or many jobs on the side Right.

38:40Well, when you start your Form F, one of the things you learn is they tell you that don't rely on your fostering allowance. It's precarious because you only get an allowance while you have that child in your home. And if for some other reason that child goes, maybe they're going back home or there's a place of breakdown or something. I don't know. You lose your income and you might have to wait a very long time until you get another child in your home. if there have been allegations or anything else or, you know, the social worker feels like you need a rest. You know, you cannot have an income.

39:13So most foster carers I know work, both of them, because to meet the economic needs of today's living. For us, both of us, my husband's a graphic designer, both of us tend to work from home, which is handy because we have a child that will not go to school. So, you know, there are these factors as well. Of course.

39:42I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with the remarkable Louise Allen. If you are, please do us a tiny favour and subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. And if you want to be really, really helpful, which I would be so grateful for, go on, give us a little five star review and say nice things about us. And crucially, that will help us bring the work that we're so proud of to lots more people.

40:14And that would be a cool thing to do. Thank you so much for all your time, but particularly that. And now back to Louise Allen. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:07Let's turn to some solutions, right? Because I know you've got, there's an awful lot at the Department of Education. This is a very live subject for people who are interested in this field. There's new proposals that are being released basically this month. And by the end of the month, there'll be a kind of formal thing which will be submitted to Parliament. That's being led by a minister called Josh McAllister, who I know is listening to this now. he's based in the Department of Education let's have your top three or four priorities things that Louise Allen if you were the minister would introduce today and then I want to discuss what the government's doing so what would you do?

41:39I would kind of stop trying to recruit foster carers for a little bit I would put all my energy into retaining who you got because the people who recruit foster carers are foster carers so I would So interesting, yeah. They're your best advocates. They're your best advocates. And if the system is broken, the message they will be giving to probably the right people who become foster carers is that the system is broken. Don't do it. You can't control that. So what you can control is ensuring that the message they give people is genuine and reflects a system that is working or at this stage, transforming.