CHILDREN in care will be given rights to stay with foster parents until they are 21 in a government move to improve their prospects as adults. Foster parents will be paid salaries to professionalise their role.

The measures are in a Green Paper aimed at improving the lives of the 60,000 children in care, who are more likely to be unqualified, unemployed, homeless or in prison than those brought up by parents.

Many are, in effect, thrown out of the system at 16 and left to fend for themselves.

Children raised by their parents on average stay at home until they are 24 and then move out gradually, with financial and emotional support continuing long after.

But “looked-after children” will face mandatory drug testing, a move that ministers say reflects the risk of substance abuse in the care system.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, who narrowly avoided care at 12 when his mother died, said that children in care were “failed by the system”.

“The state needs to start acting like a traditional loving family,” said Mr Johnson. “It must raise its ambitions for these children and transform their life chances through better emotional, practical and financial support at home and in the classroom.”

An independent report published last month by the Centre for Policy Studies revealed where the 6,000 children who leave the £2 billion care system each year end up.

A quarter of girls are pregnant when they leave, and half are single mothers within two years. Half of prisoners under 25 have been through the care system and one third of homeless were raised in care.

Ministers say that a lack of properly trained foster parents and staff in residential centres leads to difficult and often disturbed children being transferred between homes.

Only five per cent of foster parents has NVQ3 qualifications relevant to working with children and experts say that they often fail to support schooling as effectively as natural parents.

In care homes, 40 per cent of managers lack relevant qualifications and only five per cent can show that 80 per cent of staff have the relevant NVQ3. A “tiered framework” of qualifications and payments would ensure more and better foster parents were recruited and kept in the system, with the most money and training going to those with the most troubled or disabled children.

Mr Johnson said that there would be a considerable “dead-weight cost” in paying the 37,000 foster parents for a role they do free. But the move would benefit the children, he said. More than 70 per cent of children in care are with foster parents, with the rest in residential homes.

“There is a 8,000 shortage of foster parents and very high turnover,” he said. “If we professionalise their status hopefully there will not be this high turnover and the outcomes for the children will improve.

“By taking more trouble to get it right first time, we will avoid children being bounced from placement to placement.”

Charities and pressure groups welcomed the move, but said that the Government had to ensure funding.

Robert Tapsfield, the chief executive of the Fostering Network, said: “The plans outlined in the Green Paper could make a real difference in the lives of children in care. In particular, allowing teenagers to stay with their foster carers until the age of 21 would offer benefits for young people who are forced out before they are ready.

“But the implementation of these proposals will undoubtedly require significant funding. In order to translate well-meaning words into meaningful action, legislation must be backed up by real resources.”

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