Despite the introduction of guidelines and procedures aimed at encouraging and supporting children and young people to complain about services which they feel dissatisfied with, children in care still face barriers to doing so in practice. This chapter explores the complaints procedure for children in care and discusses the experience for both children and professionals, how children can express their views about their care and also how this process is managed by professionals.

The field work for the research reported in this chapter was carried out in Local Authority Two. We conducted semi-structured interviews with children in care, SWs, SMs and IROs, and five distinct themes emerged:

• 1. Complaints by children in care are managed at the lowest possible level.

• 2. SMs have an overly optimistic view about children in care being informed of complaint procedures and being encouraged to do so.

• 3. Children in care are worried about complaining, which is recognised by professionals.

• 4. Children's voices are often not heard.

• 5. When issues are clearly defined, IROs have some degree of success in resolving complaints from children in care.

Children in care: a demographic

Most children in care have experienced trauma or maltreatment during their lifetime (Wade et al, 2011). It is therefore imperative that – as with all children – they are provided with stable and loving homes: homes where the rules and boundaries are fair and clear. Furthermore, children in care must feel a sense of belonging, an age-appropriate sense of empowerment, control over their own destiny and the deserved feelings of love and value (Pert et al, 2014)

The mental health of looked after children is significantly poorer than that of their peers; shockingly, almost half meet the criteria for a psychiatric disorder. To put this in perspective, only one in ten of nonlooked after children suffer from a diagnosed mental health disorder (Luke et al, 2014). In 2017, almost one in ten children in care surveyed by Ofsted reported that their foster carers, or professionals within children's residential homes, rarely or never comforted or assisted them when they were upset (Ofsted, 2017).