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Putting the UK child protection journey
in contextJo Fox10 August 2011
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.”
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Victoria Climbe02/11/91 – 25/02/2000
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.
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Peter Connelly 01/03/06 – 03/09/07
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 reportThere 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; andstrengthens accountabilities and promotes learning.
Four themes arising from Munro1. Valuing professional expertise2. Sharing responsibility for the provision of
early help3. Developing Social Work expertise and
supporting effective practice4. 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 issuesfor the child through:– assessment– planning– intervention– review
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The Chil
d
CHILDSafeguardin
g & promoting
welfare
Common Conceptual Framework through-out the System
Health
Education
Identity
Family & SocialRelationships
Social Presentation
Emotional &Behavioural Development
Selfcare Skills
CH
ILD
’S D
EVELO
PM
EN
TAL N
EED
SPAR
EN
TIN
G C
APACIT
Y
FAMILY & ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Basic Care
Emotional Warmth
Stimulation
Guidance & Boundaries
Ensuring Safety
Stability
Wid
er Fam
ily
Hou
sin
g
Em
ploym
ent
Incom
e
Fam
ily’s
Social
Integ
ration
Fam
ily History
& F
unction
ing
Com
munity
Resou
rces
Unintended consequencesShift 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 changeSocial Work Reform Board created the
“Professional Capabilities Framework”College of Social workPrinciple child and family social workersA Chief Social Worker
The Integrated Children’s System
ICS – the intentionTo provide a robust framework to carry out
the social work tasks of AssessmentPlanning Intervention andreview;Through the systematic collection, testing and
analysis of information using a child centred, holistic lens.
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Put Practice before I.T.
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“Lessons learnt, boxes ticked, families ignored” Munro, 16/11/2008
The unintended consequencesWorkers feeling de-skilledUp to 80% of time spent in front of computerComplex workflow blocking professional
judgement and dictating responsesTime limited assessment periods impacting on
quality of service delivery to childrenFlattening 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
audit;Serious case reviewsinspectionsKey performance
indicatorsSupervision
This added up to a regulated approach to interrogating information which focused on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’
An ‘us and them’ environment where people did what they were checked up on.
A focus on understanding activity rather than understanding outcomes
The KOLBCycle
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 indicatorsCan 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
TimelinessWorking within the child and families frameUnderstanding the impact of decisions on
child developmentPlanning for the emerging adultUsing the systems to plan interventions that
matter to the child and family
Discussion
Jo Fox BA BSWConsultant Social Worker
Child Centred Practice Ltd12 Beech LaneCockermouth
Cumbria CA13 9HQUnited Kingdom
Tel: +44 7881 524 068
