Jo Fox 10 August 2011

Putting the UK child protection journey in context

Holding the child in mind

Media coverage of social work

          Climbie social worker guilty A social worker in the Victoria Climbie abuse case is found guilty of deliberately not attending a public inquiry into the girl's death.

Council blunder halts Climbie inquiry Climbie official had 'psychotic illness' NSPCC 'delayed action' over Climbie Climbie council 'left children at risk' Council boss apologises to Climbie inquiry Victoria's relative 'warned social services‘ Taken from BBC coverage of Climbe Guardian coverage of Shoesmith Community care coverage of social work image in media

Laming 2001 - 2003

“…I was persuaded because the range of services involved meant that the whole system had been in some way in touch with Victoria and yet it didn’t protect her. So the thing that persuaded me to do it was the possibility of making recommendations to improve the safeguarding of children so this kind of thing can’t happen again.” Victoria Climbe 02/11/91 – 25/02/2000 4

Laming review 2009

“ It has been put to me that it is inevitable that some adults, for whatever reason, will deliberately harm children. That may well be so. Nevertheless, it cannot be beyond our wit to put in place the means of securing their safety and proper development.”

Lord Laming, March 2009, pg 10, The protection of children in England – a progress report.

Peter Connelly 01/03/06 – 03/09/07 5

The Munro report

“I want to be clear from the start that there are no simple quick-fix solutions to improving the child protection system. A key question for the review is why the well intentioned reforms of the past haven’t worked. Piecemeal changes have resulted in a system where social workers are more focused on complying with procedures. This is taking them away from spending time with children and families and limiting their ability to make informed judgements”.

“Professionals should rightly take responsibility when things go wrong but they need more freedom to make decisions, more support and understanding, and less prescription and censure. Too often social workers are either criticised for breaking up families or for missing a case of abuse. But the system they work in is built around predicting a parent’s ability to look after their child, which is never certain”.

Government response to Munro report

There is now a significant opportunity to build a child centred system that:  values professional expertise;  shares responsibility for the provision of early help;  develops social work expertise and supports effective social work practice; and  strengthens accountabilities and promotes learning.

Four themes arising from Munro

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2.

3.

4.

Valuing professional expertise Sharing responsibility for the provision of early help Developing Social Work expertise and supporting effective practice Strengthening accountabilities and creating a learning system

A continuum of needs and services

Supporting the workforce

 Social work necessarily ‘messy’  Not easily defined or contained  Many interactive and unpredictable factors  Managing uncertainty on a daily basis

Framing practice

• By supporting the practitioners to understand the issues for the child through: – assessment – – – planning intervention review Evaluating & reviewing progress Intervening, service delivery and/or further assessment Gathering relevant information The Child Analysing information & Reaching professional judgements Making decisions & planning interventions 11

Common Conceptual Framework through-out the System

Health Education Emotional & Behavioural Development Identity Family & Social Relationships Social Presentation Selfcare Skills

CHILD Safeguarding & promoting welfare

Basic Care Ensuring Safety Emotional Warmth

FAMILY & ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

Stimulation Guidance & Boundaries Stability

Unintended consequences

 Shift from case worker to case manager with less emphasis on relational work and more on the administrative and organisational functions of working with people to organise others to do the ‘therapeutic interventions’  Social workers feeling more like administrators and behaving in that way  Managers overseeing process and procedure rather than practice and relational inter-action

The recommendations for change

 Social Work Reform Board created the “Professional Capabilities Framework”  College of Social work  Principle child and family social workers  A Chief Social Worker

The Integrated Children’s System

ICS – the intention

      To provide a robust framework to carry out the social work tasks of Assessment Planning Intervention and review; Through the systematic collection, testing and analysis of information using a child centred, holistic lens.

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Put Practice before I.T.

“Lessons learnt, boxes ticked, families ignored”

Munro, 16/11/2008

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The unintended consequences

 Workers feeling de-skilled  Up to 80% of time spent in front of computer  Complex workflow blocking professional judgement and dictating responses  Time limited assessment periods impacting on quality of service delivery to children  Flattening out of the framework for assessment into a tick box recording system

How did organisations understand service delivery?

 Through the development of a managerial structure that included  This added up to a regulated approach to interrogating information which focused on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’  audit;    Serious case reviews inspections Key performance indicators  An ‘us and them’ environment where people did what they were checked up on.

 Supervision  A focus on understanding activity rather than understanding outcomes

The KOLB Cycle

Relationship breakdown

Break down in the relationship between the main parties led to an environment where no-one was able to ‘trust’ each other to do the job properly

Making relationships count

The child’s journey from needing to receiving help

It’s this

Knowledge and skills

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“Not everything worth counting can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts”

Munro on the current audit regime

• A central tenet of managerialism is that workers are self-seeking and, in absence of the profit motive, this suggests that artificial incentives must be created to drive up attainment. Targets, performance indicators and assessments have therefore been constructed to motivate the workforce, failing to appreciate that, for most who work in the helping professions, altruism is a strong motive •

The Child Protection Workforce – a case for Change

(2011, p9) noted that there were ‘high levels of commitment in the workforce • Data should not be seen as an unambigious measure of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but taken in an overall context

Key performance indicators

 Can these be usefully re framed as:  “is what does this organisation do each day making a good difference to the lives of children and their families?”  “How do I contribute to that?”  How do I make sense of the stories that children and families tell me about their experiences?

   “Doing less of the wrong thing is not the same as doing the right thing” The challenge is how to use measures to help in understanding and improving the work that is done with children and families.

Reflection in action and on action – learning as we go

Timeliness

 Working within the child and families frame  Understanding the impact of decisions on child development  Planning for the emerging adult  Using the systems to plan interventions that matter to the child and family

Discussion

Jo Fox BA BSW Consultant Social Worker Child Centred Practice Ltd 12 Beech Lane Cockermouth Cumbria CA13 9HQ United Kingdom [email protected]

www.childcentredpractice.co.uk

Tel: +44 7881 524 068