CHILDREN and young people in care will benefit from a new system which encourages them to take more risks and make more decisions for themselves.

Over the next three years, 200 staff in the county council children’s homes will be retrained in a theory known as social pedagogy.

The practice is widely and sucessfully used in Denmark and Germany, where it has reduced teenage pregnancy, drug use and crime among young people leaving care. It has also improved levels of school achievement.

The Government is still running trial schemes elsewhere in the country, but Essex County Council has now decided to go ahead and adopt the scheme – the first county in the UK to do so.

The aim is to fundamentally change the culture in children’s homes, so young people get more choice and support to follow individual interests.

Nicola Boyce has worked in children’s homes in Essex for five years and is now researching the effects of the new system, on children.

She said: “It is about not assuming there is just one answer, but looking at what is right for every child.”

As part of the new system, young people will be allowed to take more risks as a way of helping them develop their judgement.

Ms Boyce added: “Increasingly, because there has been so much emphasis on trying to keep children safe in the care system, we have ended up wrapping them in cotton wool and making their experience quite different to children who grow up in families.”

One practical way the scheme could affect youngsters, might be to end the current practice of insisting on police background checks on parents, every time a child in care goes to stay at a schoolfriend’s house.

Instead, carers would be asked make judgements, based on meeting the parents involved, in the same way as ordinary parents would do.

The new approach also aims to give children a bigger say in decisions affecting their lives and futures, from what they eat, to where they go to school.