Q&A with Polly Curtis
Author and journalist Polly Curtis on how Britain's care system is failing children and their families
Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ll be sharing new writing and exclusive insights from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.
We are delighted to bring you our first interview, with the author and journalist Polly Curtis, the author of Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Families Up - and How to Mend Them, a finalist for this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Writing. In the book, Curtis investigates how a broken children’s care system is failing families and leading to further societal problems, foregrounding the stories of those at the heart of the issues. We asked her about the ongoing crisis in children’s social care - and what she would like to see done to tackle it.
Why has the English system removed so many children from their parents, and yet been such an appalling substitute parent itself?
It's complicated and it took me three years of listening to the children, parents, social workers and legal professionals embroiled in this system to begin to understand. We have now removed more children into the care system than ever before, children who go into care have terrible life chances - and we are still missing some children who most desperately need the state's help because their parents are cruel, neglectful or simply not coping. Children are still dying at the hands of their parents even though we have taken so many into care. What I found was a system too weak to support families to be better and too slow and imprecise to save the children who desperately need saving. The failure is in a system that no longer has the time, resources or focus to support families early enough to stop problems getting worse, or to identify when things have gone too far. It's a breathtaking double failure that results in a bloated, struggling care system - and some children still suffering in the worst ways.
As a journalist I always try to find out who is responsible when things go wrong. But I found very few true villains in this story. There are parents who do their best and fail; social workers who go into it with hopes and dreams but aren't supported by the system to realise them; and heroic foster carers, adoptees, kinship carers and of course the children themselves, who are just trying to make their lives a little bit better. Writing this book allowed me to explore how systems go wrong, rather than blaming individuals.
What did you make of the recent Josh MacAlister review? And the government’s response? (Led by Josh McAlister, a former teacher and founder of the social care charity Frontline, the ‘Independent review of children’s social care’ was published in may this year.)
I agreed with Josh MacAlister's analysis of the problem: that the system is geared to remove children but not to support families to be better. I think it's welcome that he is calling for more early intervention and the time and resources to support families to prevent problems developing. It's the right thing to do for families, and the right thing to do economically. We are currently spending scandalously vast amounts on a failing care system - much of which ends up in the pockets of private providers - when the early interventions families desperately need would be both more cost effective and more humane. The report has been shrouded in cynicism and I'm sorry that's happened. I think it quite bravely calls out the elephant in the room: Love. That's what children need and the state should make it their business to ensure that children are loved.
What more would you do to support families where parenting really isn't an option?
I would put much more money into the system to support families that can love and care for their children better, and I would put much more money into social work to keep the most experienced social workers on the frontline. You need that experience to judge the difference between a struggling parent and a dangerous, deceitful parent. The system forces social workers to spend their time on paperwork and away from time with children and their families. The money matters, but you can't put a price on what's at stake here.
You've been a senior journalist at the Guardian, editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK and an editor and partner at Tortoise media. You've also been director of media at the British Red Cross and now interim CEO at the thinktank Demos. How do you see the relationship between those two worlds? Where did your interest in the care system, in particular, start?
My work on the care system started at Tortoise Media, the slow news start-up, where the editors gave me generous amounts of time to spend reporting this story - which subsequently formed the basis of my book. After a career spent in fast-paced newsrooms, it was a huge privilege to be given that time and space.
But through all my journalistic jobs I have sought out ways to move beyond the churn of daily news and to really listen to the experts in a story – most often the people who live the stories. At Tortoise we built a network of people who cared about this story and contributed to it by sharing their stories, experience and knowledge. It made the telling of the story more nuanced, more complex, and I think ultimately more true. At Demos, which is a cross-party thinktank, we care about building a new collaborative democracy which better engages people through more everyday forms of democratic involvement and creates policy in partnership with the people who really know a system: it’s users. We talk about humble policy making, and champion a more relational form of public services, which I also see as part of the solution to our problems with child protection.
What can detailed, evidence-based journalism do to achieve change, when policy makers and the public increasingly get their news from entirely different sources?
We must keep striving to get to the complicated, grey areas in the stories we tell. The public debate is so often black and white, framed as definitively right or wrong. The truer version of events so often exists in the messy, complicated grey areas of a story, and that’s not something you can really do on TikTok or Twitter, which are great for building communities but struggle with nuance.
Polly Curtis is an author and journalist dedicated to reporting on social justice. Having worked at Tortoise, HuffPost, the British Red Cross and for sixteen years at the Guardian, she was a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute and was most recently Managing Director of PA Media. Born in Camden, she still lives there, with her husband and two children.