Part 6 - Permanence - Key Principles
Key Principles
- We have a duty of care towards all of the parties; children, parents and carers; whilst ensuring that the child’s welfare remains the paramount consideration.
- We must protect and promote the child’s welfare throughout their childhood and give proper consideration to the impact of childhood experience on their adult lives.
- All children have a right to a family life, where possible; having regard to their safety, health and wellbeing; with some or all of their own family.
- Children need known, trusted adults who can and will exercise responsibility for their care, upbringing and protection.
- Children who have suffered abuse or trauma have a right to help to recover. Removal from primary attachment figures necessarily entails such trauma, even in very young infants. Secure, sustainable care, provided by people with whom the child can build secure relationships and attachments is, for such children, a necessary prerequisite for such recovery and there should be no unnecessary delay in achieving this.
- Any person making decisions affecting a child has a duty to seek their views and wishes and to take them properly into account in making those decisions.
- Parents are ordinarily the people who are legally responsible for children’s welfare and for decisions affecting them; service providers have a responsibility to work in partnership with them, in a manner consistent with the requirement to ensure that the child’s welfare, throughout their childhood, is promoted and protected and remains the paramount consideration
- Any intervention by the state with a significant impact on the child’s rights and the rights and responsibilities of parents towards their children should be properly justified.
- All of these parties have a right to privacy and confidentiality, with information being shared on the basis of informed consent, appropriately authorised and recorded professional judgement or due process of law.
View next section Part 6.3 - Considerations, regarding permanence work, arising from key principles