Chris Mills Child Protection Blog

And feeling the strain ...

2012-02-09T15:47:00.002Z

The consequences of the increase in the number of children coming into care (the subject of the previous post) are all too clearly noted by BASW, as Community Care reports. Sue Kent, from BASW, is reported as describing services as crumbling under the pressure.

In the past I have heard ministers (not the present ones) and civil servants complain of front-line staff exaggerating their difficulties with caseloads. In this case there is ample objective evidence of the pressures. This is a great opportunity for Government to show its commitment to supporting the front-line by acknowledging the unprecedented increase in demand and putting some real additional resources behind child protection services.

Continued rise in number of children coming into care

2012-02-09T06:11:00.001Z

The chief executive of CAFCASS (the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service), Anthony Douglas is quoted by the BBC as calling for more resources to meet the needs of the ever increasing number of children coming into care.

There has been an unabated rise in the number of children coming into care since news of the Baby Peter tragedy broke in 2008. According to Douglas, the average monthly figure this year is 840, compared with 747 last year.

I find it disturbing that we do not seem to hear from either ministers or opposition spokespeople on this issue. We cannot have a situation - at a time of public spending restraints - in which pressure from increased demand is just allowed to grow and grow. Either substantially increased resources are required to meet the needs of these children or policies that will stem the increase in care proceedings are required. But, as we all know, preventative measures do not come cheap. So either way more money is required.

Mixed messages from research?

2012-01-23T13:56:00.000Z

There is a real danger of seriously mixed messages circulating in media discussions of the Action for Children / University of Stirling report on neglect published today. The situation is not helped by Action for Children’s headline – “Social workers feel powerless to intervene in child neglect cases”.

It is important to realise that what is NOT required are more powers for social workers, the police or other officials. Present powers deal adequately with any situation in which there is a likelihood of significant harm occurring to a child.

In my view the message from this research is that neglect demands more resources and more resourceful ways of working. Money, ingenuity and creativity are required, not legislation.

New statistics on care proceedings

2012-01-23T11:02:00.000Z

New statistics from the UK's Ministry of Justice reveal that there were 7,700 children involved in public law court cases in the third quarter of 2011. This is a 28 per cent increase on the same period for 2010.

Clearly the effect of the Baby Peter tragedy continues with more and more children being subject to care proceedings. Sadly I see little evidence in government policy of any concerted strategic approach to this increase which continues to tax not only the Family Courts but also the limited resources of local authorities.

Forthcoming BBC Programme about Child Protection Social Work

2012-01-23T10:49:00.000Z

The BBC, in partnership with the Open University, has made a programme entitled Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t, about child protection social work. The first episode will be screened on BBC 2 at 9.00 pm on Monday 30th January.

It looks interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2012/05/protecting-our-children.html

Cost and Consequence

2012-01-18T15:19:00.000Z

There is news today of an English local authority facing a £1 million compensation settlement for failing to protect children from sexual abuse by their father. The case dates back to the 1990s. Significant errors appear to have been made in assessing the risk posed by the father, who had a previous conviction for sexual abuse. As a result the children were allowed access to him, during which time they were abused. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/18/01/2012/117934/council-pays-1m-damages-for-shocking-child-abuse-failings.htm

The costs of poor quality can be very high. The prospect that cases that have not been handled properly can result in costly litigation is one that all child protection agencies need to take very seriously.

But there is also news today that old habits die hard. The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) reports that employers are making it “impossible for social workers to practice ethically”, by insisting on “unrealistic and unmanageable” caseloads. In a survey of members 81% expressed concern at unmanageable caseloads and 56% said they were very concerned. http://www.basw.co.uk/news/employers-%E2%80%9Cmaking-it-impossible%E2%80%9D-for-social-workers-to-practice-ethically/

Saving money in the short-term is often counter-productive. And it can have catastrophic long-term consequences, not only for organisations that have to make huge compensation payouts, but more importantly for children who have to live with the consequences of abuse that could have been stopped.

The Definition of Neglect

2012-01-16T16:00:00.002Z

Last week saw three big children’s charities (Barnardo’s, The Children’s Society and the NSPCC) address the House of Commons Education Committee as part of its inquiry into child protection.

The session started with a discussion of neglect. While I very much agreed with the general tenor of the charities’ arguments, namely that neglect is a neglected issue that poses particular problems for child protection systems, the discussion seemed to me to rapidly become unhelpfully pedantic. At times, indeed, it seemed to resemble the discourse of medieval theologians on the issue of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

It was the NSPCC’s Phillip Noyes who introduced the subject of the definition of neglect. He was concerned about what he thought were discrepancies between various definitions. He called for a new definition, although he had to admit that he did not have a proposal for one.

In particular he seemed anxious that the definition of the criminal offence of neglect in Section 1 (2) a of the Children and Young Person’s Act 1933 , which speaks of causing injury to a child’s health as a result of a failure “… to provide adequate food, clothing, medical aid or lodging for (a child)”, was at variance with the Working Together definition:

“Neglect is the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development.”

Perhaps neither definition would win a prize in a competition for etymologists, but I struggle to see how they are incompatible or for that matter even problematic. The Working Together definition is a broader one, but then we would expect it to be, given that its purpose is to provide the context for intervention, not to delineate an imprisonable criminal offence. And perhaps the 1933 Act now sounds a bit archaic, but there seems to be no evidence that it has become unusable when it is necessary to pursue criminal charges against people who neglect their children.

Nor do I think that social workers find that their practice is inhibited by not having a better definition of neglect. Most know neglect when they see it. How to define it is just an academic quibble.

I think the real issue is that neglect, broadly defined, is difficult to respond to. There are three distinct problems:

The first is that neglect is often an incremental phenomenon. In many cases there is no one clear event or crisis. Rather there is an ongoing, progressive deterioration in the child’s circumstances and conditions. This can make knowing when to intervene difficult and sometimes social workers become ‘acclimatised’ because changes in the family’s circumstances are small, frequent, cumulative and difficult to detect.

The second problem is one of resources. Turning around a situation of neglect can require a long-term commitment of resources to a family. Sometimes it is hard for social workers to admit that these efforts have been in vain, so there is often an argument for just trying one more thing.

Thirdly some neglectful parents can inspire great sympathy and compassion. They may not be failing because they do not love their children or because they do not aspire to be good parents. They may be trying their best and still failing. Often deficits in their own histories explain their inability to give their children the care they need. So it can be painful for professionals to think in terms of care proceedings.

I remain puzzled about why Phillip Noyes thinks the issue of the definition of neglect is so important. And I think that his call for “a really serious think” involving a national review of both the civil and criminal law definitions of neglect is likely to result in an unhelpful distraction. I do not believe that we get more responsive child protection because we have clearer definitions, in law or in procedure. To believe that we do seems to be to revert to a pre-Munro view of child protection in which we move forward by following the manual, rather than understanding the child’s perspective and the issues surrounding the case. And better decisions are made not because national committees have produced the relevant guidance, or for that matter better definitions; they are made because professionals who know the child have carefully gathered the facts, considered the options and come to reasoned judgements.

You can watch the video of the Education Committee’s deliberations at:

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=9815

Raise the age of criminal responsibility

2012-01-16T10:50:00.000Z

The think tank set up by Tory minister Ian Duncan Smith, has joined in calls for the raising of the age of criminal responsibility. The centre's proposal to raise the age to 12 would bring England, Wales and Northern Ireland in line with Scotland. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087233/Children-face-court-ANY-crime-12.html

The Government should look at this proposal very seriously. There are calls from every quarter, including England's Children's Commissioner, to raise the age, which I believe should be 14.

It is important to remember that raising the age of criminal responsibility does not mean doing nothing about crimes committed by children. In many cases there will need to be intervention, either to protect the public or the child in question. The point is that the criminal courts are not the best place for this to happen.

Abuse by the state

2012-01-07T12:55:00.002Z

The Guardian reports on the Ay family's court case win against the British Government. It is said that a a six figure sum will be paid to the family in compensation.

This Kurdish family was detained under the UK's immigration laws in 2002 and the mother and her four children were kept in a single room in an immigration detention centre for 13 months. Not surprisingly the children sufferred trauma resulting in long-term ill-effects, apparently of such magnitude that they required specialist medical treatment when they were eventually removed to Germany, the country where they had originally claimed asylum.

Although the UK's immigration policies have now been changed to prohibit keeping children in detention for long periods, the story of this family clearly illustrates how the state can emotionally abuse children and cause them to suffer significant harm. In my view it is unacceptable to detain asylum seeking children even for short periods.

I strongly recommend reading the story in full - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/06/child-asylum-seekers-win-compensation

Decisions in the Irish Courts

2011-12-28T11:26:00.000Z

It is good to see reported in the Irish Times the decision of the Irish courts not to intervene in the case of an English couple who brought their children to Ireland to try to avoid care proceedings in England.

The Irish Courts ruled that the children should be returned to England under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction and rejected the parents’ claims that the Irish Constitution offered sanctuary from child protection regimes in other countries where adoption without parental consent was possible.

Mr Justice O’Donnell is reported as saying Irish and English adoption law are on the ‘same spectrum’.

It is gratifying to see the legal systems of the two countries working in harmony.

Shortage of Foster Parents

2011-12-20T11:44:00.001Z

It’s not that we did not know about it. It’s a long-standing problem that has been exacerbated by the growth in numbers of children coming into care since the Baby Peter tragedy became public knowledge. So the Fostering Network’s most recent warnings are in one sense ‘yesterday’s news’.

But these are warnings that must be heeded. They should have been heeded long ago. The Fostering Network tell us that 8,750 more families are required to provide fostering for the needs of the current population of children in care. That’s a huge mountain to climb and needs a serious policy initiative in support. And that means more than just appeals by government ministers for more people to come forward. It needs some innovative thinking, new resources and continued attention at every level. And it needs to be recognised that this is not a just passing difficulty, it is a real crisis that threatens the safety and welfare of thousands of vulnerable children.

The most dangerous types of crises are often not those that happen suddenly. They are the ones that creep-up, either unnoticed or unrecognised, with the situation becoming incrementally slightly worse everyday. The organisational behaviour theorist, Professor Charles Handy, (The Age of Unreason) had a powerful, if somewhat distressing, metaphor for this phenomenon. Apparently if a frog is placed in a beaker of cold water and then slowly heated, it adapts its body temperature gradually to that of the water until the water becomes so hot that it boils alive.

That’s what we are in danger of with the fostering crisis. Someone needs to get a grip.

Thresholds

2011-12-16T11:41:00.000Z

I sometimes wonder whether people like John Hemming MP are talking about the same child protection system that I know.

The BBC reports that Hemming told the House of Commons Education Select Committee that the threshold for taking children into care is too low.

It’s a good idea just to remind ourselves what the law in England says. The Children Act 1989, Section 31 (2) states:

A court may only make a care order or supervision order if it is satisfied—
(a) that the child concerned is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm; and (b) that the harm, or likelihood of harm, is attributable to—(i) the care given to the child, or likely to be given to him if the order were not made, not being what it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to him; or (ii) the child’s being beyond parental control.

Section 31 (9) of the Act defines ‘harm’ as ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development.

In many cases coming before the court the ‘significant harm’ will have already occurred and the question the court must address is whether or not it will reoccur if the child is allowed to remain with her or his parents. Where ‘significant harm’ has not already occurred the court may be faced with a more complex decision, but such cases usually occur where a parent has already harmed another child.

I am at a bit of a loss to see how this threshold could be raised. If it were it seems likely to result in situations in which some children, who are facing significant harm attributable to the care they receive from their parents, and which results in ill-treatment and the impairment of their health and development, are beyond the help of the courts. Surely John Hemming does not want that?

Child Detentions in England and Wales

2011-12-15T11:17:00.001Z

I do not believe that it is right that children and young people under the age of 16 should be detained in police cells in other than the most extreme of circumstances, so I was pleased to hear that the Howard League have recently spoken out against the practice.

What is even more shocking is that in 2008-9 nearly 12,000 children under 14 were detained in police cells. But the most worrying thing that the Howard League brings to our attention is that there are some children who are being held in police cells for child protection reasons. How many and in what particular circumstances is not made clear, but this is a practice which must stop. It can never be justifiable to imprison children, even for short periods, if they have done nothing other than being found to be in need of protection.

Bye, bye eCAF

2011-12-15T10:25:00.002Z

I was pleased to read in Children and Young People Now that the Government has decided to scrap the eCAF system – a national electronic database of so-called ‘common assessments’.

I was never convinced by the Common Assessment Framework, an approach to assessing children in need which meant more than 300,000 child care workers could complete a complex and bureaucratic form setting out concerns about a particular child.

Common assessment was designed by bureaucrats, politicians and by committees. If the same approach had been taken to designing a mobile phone it would weigh two kilograms and have a battery life of 10 minutes! And worst of all the truly dreadful form pushes those completing the assessment to make judgements that they may often not be in a position to make. So the quality of the assessments is likely to be highly variable.

I have never seen a scientifically conducted audit of the quality of common assessments. Nor have I ever seen persuasive evidence of their effectiveness, although the last government did not hold back from singing their praises, based on little or no evidence. I think that they are a poorly thought out idea that has had its day.

So I have no compunction at all in welcoming the abolition of the electronic database that was designed to hold the assessments. Not only does such a system risk widening access to sources of data that are far from being dependable, it actively risks breaches of security that might damage the interests of children and young people and their families.

Data anomalies?

2011-12-14T16:09:00.002Z

I can only flag this up at this stage, rather than provide any kind of explanation, but it certainly deserves a mention.

In my recent post about the research in The Lancet concerning levels of child abuse and neglect in six developed countries, I did not mention that one of those countries in which it is claimed there was no evidence of a decline in child maltreatment was the USA.

I now see on the CBS News website that another study, also conducted by eminent academics, appears to show a steady decline in levels of maltreatment in the USA.

I wonder what is going on here. To understand this apparent anomaly it is clearly necessary to look at both studies in more depth. And I would certainly welcome any suggestions on the usual email address (chris-mills-child-protection-blog@gmx.co.uk).

I’ll return to this topic once I have had time to study the two articles more fully. One more thing for my Christmas reading list!!

The Brain and the Age of Criminal Responsibility

2011-12-13T15:42:00.002Z

The Guardian and the Daily Mail both cover an interesting story today.

The Royal Society, no less, has published a report that examines the relevance of modern neuroscience for the legal system. One of the authors, Cambridge Emeritus Professor Nicholas Mackintosh FRS, argues that our brains do not develop fully until we are about twenty years old.

At ten years old, the age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, our brains are still developmentally immature and, according to Mackintosh, young adolescents cannot be regarded as being fully responsible individuals. The structure of the brain, at this age, means that young people are more inclined to risk-taking and irresponsible behaviour.

I am pleased to see this research. It provides scientific evidence that supports calls for the raising of the age of criminal responsibility. Back in May 2011 I wrote that Assistant Commissioner Ian McPherson, the Association of Chief Police Officer's lead spokesperson on children's and young people's issues, was quoted as saying:

"To say that at the age of 10 you suddenly become responsible as an individual seems to me a bit foolish."

Now it seems that it is not just foolish - it is also unscientific.

I do not believe it …!!

2011-12-12T21:03:00.004Z

There used to be a BBC TV comedy series starring Richard Wilson, called ‘One Foot in the Grave”. The unlikely hero was a man called Victor Meldrew (played by RW). His bizarre antics and predicaments cannot easily be explained here. If you haven’t seen it, I can certainly recommend it ….

My reason for mentioning Victor Meldrew is that his catch phrase was “I do not believe it…!!” And today I know just how he feels. I don’t believe it either, especially when it comes to the College of Social Work.

In previous posts I’ve mentioned the nascent college and some of the strange goings-on surrounding its launch. Well, today I read that, prior to recruiting a single member, the caretakers of this august body have advertised for a Chief Executive, with a complete person specification bulging at the seams with all the clichés and jargon that you would expect to find in the person specification for an advertising executive or even a director of children’s services.

Have they not thought that the membership might NOT want someone with experience of the “robust management of risk” or “customer care” or “business growth and leading change” or having the “flair and ability to understand and tackle the particular issues facing a business start up”? A business start-up, for goodness sake! I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they will be inviting Alan Sugar onto the board next!!

I know many people would prefer the chief executive of a body like this to be someone who really understands the issues? Perhaps someone who is a bruised old-battler who isn’t afraid of the children’s services establishment or government ministers or civil servants or the media? Perhaps someone who really cares whether service users get a square deal? To me that certainly sounds preferable to Ms Robust-Risk-Management or Mr. Customer-Care.

But there is an even better alternative. A really good administrator may be what is required. A company secretary type who will keep the organisation on the legal straight and narrow, make sure the books are kept up to date and that all the money is accounted for. Who will ensure that elections take place and that the decisions of meetings are properly recorded and executed. And who then keeps her or his own counsel and allows the members and their elected representatives to steer the organisation in the direction that they believe it should go. Old-fashioned I know, but it does work.

The way to manage an organisation like this one is not to start by bringing in ‘strategic managers’ who may regard the membership as just another ‘stakeholder group’ to be managed. At this stage the organisation needs interim management, sufficient to recruit a membership and to put in place some decision-making mechanisms. Then let the membership decide – what sort of management do they want, where do they want the organisation to go. There is far too much that is top-down in present arrangements. Let’s have more bottom-up and we might all learn a thing or two.

And another thing – while I’m still ranting on about this I subject: I noticed that the job was advertised without a salary being specified. "£competitive" is all it says in the Guardian. So I’m guessing that this is a big salary.

There are two things wrong here. At present, the college is spending public money, so it should be open about the salaries it is prepared to pay to senior staff. And in the future it will rely increasingly on members’ contributions – members who currently do not have a say and who have not been consulted about how much they want to pay a Chief Executive.

Stop Press (as they used to say when I first started reading newspapers): I have just learned that the salary is about £100,000 plus some benefits. I think there are a lot of people who will say - "I do not believe it"!

No evidence of a decline in levels of child maltreatment in England

2011-12-11T10:52:00.001Z

New research has recently been published in the medical journal, The Lancet, showing that there is NO evidence of a significant decrease in three indicators of child maltreatment in England.

Of six developed countries studied, decreases in the indicators were found only in Sweden and Manitoba (Canada).

The researchers are at pains to stress that just because there has been no significant decrease in the indicators does not necessarily mean that policies have been ineffective. The results could also be explained by a decrease in actual levels of maltreatment resulting from improvements in services, coupled with an increase in reporting as a result of increased awareness. But we simply do not know.

While these figures may not be a reason to despair, they are clearly no justification for complacency. There now needs to be much more research in countries like England to understand why, despite the high levels of public concern and a history of government initiatives, there seems to be no evidence of a reduction in the levels of child maltreatment.

Improvements at the Border?

2011-12-10T17:44:00.000Z

I was pleased to see reported in the Crawley and Horley Observer what seems to be a continued decrease in the number of children being detained at London’s Gatwick Airport.

I was also pleased to read in the same article that the Children’s Society, while welcoming the drop in numbers, continues to express concern about border detentions of children and to draw attention to occasions when the UK Border Agency (UKBA) falls short of the required standards.

Sadly there continue to be cases when children, requiring protection and welfare services, are held, albeit for a short time, in accommodation that is also used to hold adult immigration offenders. That is unacceptable.

Under no circumstances is it justifiable to treat trafficked children as if they are criminals. Not until that practice is completely eradicated at the UK border, can UKBA managers claim to be fulfilling the agency’s statutory duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.

Increased demand for services in Yorkshire

2011-12-10T11:08:00.001Z

The Yorkshire Post reports a substantial increase of 34% since 2009 in the number of children made subject to child protection plans in the region. Yorkshire’s biggest city, Leeds, saw a staggering rise of 157% and rural North Yorkshire also saw a big increase of more than 90%.

Professional associations and charities are quoted by the Yorkshire Post as calling for more resources to deal with these unprecedented increases. It seems clear to me that the bulge in child protection work that began following the Baby Peter case continues unchecked. And it is difficult to see how cash-strapped local authorities can continue to meet demand without substantial extra resources.

Sadly this type of situation is a bit like a pressure cooker without a safety valve. The pressure continues to build and build, seemingly without consequence, but it is only when the explosion actually occurs that people realise how dangerous the system actually is.

I think there is a need for careful research and analysis of how well local authorities are dealing with these types of increases. Are existing staff just having to cope or are more resources being deployed? What are the effects on staff morale and, most importantly, the quality of service?

In a sane and rational world I would expect the regulator, Ofsted, to be doing that. Silly me!

Critical Reflection?

2011-12-07T10:24:00.001Z

I have been thinking about what I should be trying to achieve with this blog and how to do it. Looking back at some of my recent posts I seem to have developed a rather ‘editorial’ style: note something in the news and make a comment. Inevitably that feels to be a bit like standing on the sidelines, watching the world go by: a commentator rather than a contributor.

I have therefore decided to try to include, from time to time, what I am provisionally titling ‘mini-articles’. These will draw on the academic literature, rather than the news, and will provide tighter arguments and hopefully even more persuasive conclusions!

Inevitably mini-articles will take more time to write, but they will be interspersed with the old style comment. So there should still be something here to meet a variety of tastes and needs.

I am currently working on the first mini-article, which I expect to complete over the Christmas period. So watch this space.

Mandatory Reporting

2011-12-07T08:58:00.000Z

The Irish Government is introducing laws to make not reporting child sexual abuse or other serious crimes against a child a criminal offence (http://www.independent.ie/national-news/shatter-warned-new-abuse-laws-could-overload-social-services-2939752.html). Someone withholding information could be fined or imprisoned for up to five years.

I believe that government and professional guidance should be that anyone suspecting any form of child abuse and neglect should report it, but I do not think making failure to report a criminal offence is a good idea. There is a real danger that the threat of imprisonment will result in professionals reporting cases that do not meet accepted thresholds, just to be sure. That could overload children’s services and so deny some children the level of service they deserve and require.

I believe that the law is a blunt instrument for ensuring that cases of child abuse are appropriately reported. It is better, I think, to help all concerned to be better able to recognise child abuse and neglect and to be more aware of the consequences for the child of not taking action.

Board games

2011-12-05T10:23:00.000Z

I was sorry to see that a row has broken out in Wales about Local Safeguarding Children Boards (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-16027693). The Welsh government want six new boards to replace the twenty-two existing ones. Local authorities want eight or possibly nine. The government want the new boards to deal with safeguarding vulnerable adults as well. Local politicians argue that’s a mistake.

I think this sort of thing is a big distraction. The design and successful operation of the child protection service is what matters. Get that right and it ought to be clear what support structures are required.

Sadly there is a long tradition, not just in Wales, of messing with the structure and paying too little attention to the service. The Every Child Matters agenda and the Children Act 2004 brought in all kinds of duties and powers and introduced the Local Safeguarding Children Boards in England and Wales. But I don’t expect anyone could name a child who was safer as a result!!

More on the College of Social Work

2011-12-04T11:51:00.002Z

A little while ago I made an irritated post about the proposed College of Social Work. I was upset by the protracted negotiations; and by claims and counter claims about who was responsible for the delays in establishing this much needed body.

I am pleased to see that the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee has also expressed its frustrations. This committee has now forced some of the participants in the debacle to release various documents which do shed some light on what is happening.

However. I have to confess, having read these, that I am still not clear why all this is proving so difficult. If you have time, read the documents. May be you will have more luck? If you can see a way forward please share it. I'll publish any reasonable suggestions I receive (email me at chris-mills-child-protection-blog@gmx.co.uk).

This matter urgently needs to be resolved.

Statistical Indigestion

2011-12-01T09:46:00.002Z

It is a while since I looked at any British government statistics on child abuse and neglect. Today I was prompted by an article in Children and Young People Now to look up the Department for Education’s statistical release “Characteristics of Children in Need in England, 2010-11”.

Reading this document made me remember why I stopped reading this sort of stuff some years ago. To be fair to the document it is free of reports of the dire performance indicators that used to be so ubiquitous in the days of our last Government. But it is still packed with too much data, while any useful information is difficult to extract.

And trend information is completely absent. I cannot understand this omission. Surely what most people want to know is how many more or less children are being identified as being abused and neglected and where this is happening. And they want to know what the trend is over a considerable period (e.g. ten years). That way we would have some useful information for planning services and allocating resources. Perhaps that’s too much to hope for from a government department?

To me the most interesting statistic hidden in the pages of this report is the following:

“There were 382,400 children in need at 31 March 2011, which was a rate of 346.2 per 10,000 children. At a local authority level, the rate per 10,000 children varied from 171.3 children in need per 10,000 children in Wiltshire to 1272.4 in Haringey.” (page 2)

That puts identified need in the London Borough of Haringey ten times above the level in rural Wiltshire and nearly four times above the average for England. I wonder how far allocation of resources compensates for this disparity?

More on Data Protection

2011-11-24T12:55:00.000Z

There seems to be more than just one case of data protection lapses with child protection records. Here are a couple more cases: one in which data was posted on the internet and one in which minutes were posted to the wrong people.

Apparently this is all coming to light because of Freedom of Information Act requests to local authorities by the campaigning group, Big Brother Watch. Well done - this kind of thing needs to be made public.

Data Protection

2011-11-23T10:11:00.002Z

The BBC reports that an English local authority has been fined for breaches of the Data Protection Act concerning the loss of child protection information. Apparently the minutes of a child protection conference were among the items that were accidentally disclosed.

No filing system, of course, can be made 100% secure, but it must be deeply concerning to all, especially the children, that information of such a sensitive nature should have leaked into the wrong hands. It is hard to imagine a document more private and confidential than the minutes of a child protection conference, filled, as it is likely to be, with details of the minutiae of family life.

The council concerned is, of course, revising its procedures. But I think this episode should be a wake-up call to all local authorities to review the arrangements for keeping child protection information safe. Confidentiality and data security are preconditions for gaining the trust of children and their families. Without confidentiality and security no child protection system can function effectively.

Learning from experience in Hackney

2011-11-22T17:59:00.007Z

Reading the extract (published in the Guardian) from Steve Goodman’s and Isabelle Trowler’s new book on “reclaiming social work”, it is hard not to be impressed by the work that has been undertaken in Hackney. And it is hard not to agree with the ideas and principles under-pinning it.

In particular I like their analysis. They write of recent trends in children’s social work:

“With greater reliance on a procedural approach to professional practice, and ICT systems' solutions, a workforce often incapable of professional, creative and independent thinking had emerged.”

That is spot-on and neatly summarises the impact of policy over at least two decades.

The other thing that really interested me in this extract was the phrase they use – “slowing down to speed up”. By that they mean doing the job thoroughly in the first place, by using a range of professional skills. This is in contrast to just accepting the presenting problem and following the procedures. For example, instead of just accepting a difficult adolescent into care, skilled clinical practitioners are used, early in the intervention, to work with the child and her or his family with a view to achieving a solution. The result, claim Goodman and Trowler, is far fewer children coming into care.

It strikes me that this is very similar to the quality management maxim “get it right first time” and the views of the quality guru Philip Crosby that “quality is free”.

Crosby argues that the cost of poor quality can be very high, involving extensive rework or even replacement. Another major cost is the loss of confidence by customers or service-users. So spending more up-front to improve quality can reduce the subsequent costs of getting things wrong. And that can result in total costs actually falling over time.

I believe that a poor initial investigation of a child protection concern can have numerous costly consequences:

repeat inquiries, conferences and meetings
time spent in re-referring and receiving repeat referrals
injuries to a child, which may otherwise have been prevented, possibly requiring treatment and hospitalisation
criminal proceedings that might otherwise have been avoided
avoidable reception of a child into care and the cost of fostering
costs of civil court proceedings
costs of complaints or holding internal inquiries and Serious Case Reviews

That list should be a big incentive to us all to look at ways in which doing it right first time can be achieved.

To return to Goodman's and Trowler's approach, there is only one thing that worries me. What seems to me distinctive about 'reclaiming social work' is that the thinking and analysis was done in Hackney where the reforms were subsequently implemented. Rolling out the approach elsewhere might work, but there is a danger that because the analytic thinking has happened elsewhere, managers may be simply looking for a quick fix, like so many of the initiatives that governments have foisted onto child protection in Britain over the years. So often major quality improvement programmes in organisations fail because those implementing them only see the solutions not the problems. Let's hope this does not happen in this case.

Sally’s Story

2011-11-21T16:34:00.000Z

It is well worth listening to twelve year old Sally talking about how she came to be in care to Genevieve Tudor on BBC Radio Shropshire. The interview featured in BBC Radio 4’s “Pick of the Week” on 20th November 2011. You can hear it at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b017c9pk/Pick_of_the_Week_20_11_2011/

Scroll forward through the audio file to 18 minutes and 12 seconds to hear what Sally had to say.

Talking to Children – some useful tools

2011-11-18T16:23:00.002Z

A good introduction to some techniques for communicating with children and young people is provided in Community Care by Professor David Shemmings and colleagues. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/static-pages/articles/Social-work-tools-for-talking-to-children/

I think there is a real dearth of solid practical guidance on child protection and, probably, far too much procedure, theory and policy. So it is really good to see something like this which is intensely practical and very useful.

I have often thought that it would be very useful to have a practical guide to ‘knocking on doors’ – i.e. what are good ways to explain to angry or frightened parents that you are visiting them to undertake a child protection inquiry.

Another area where much more practical help is required is in observation and recording. It seems to be just assumed that it is relatively easy to conduct a fraught interview, drive back to the office, deal with some telephone calls and then write down what happened in a way that is both accurate and helpful to whoever has to read the record. Believe me it isn’t.

A ‘Scary’ Story from the Front-line

2011-11-18T09:04:00.000Z

Community Care reports on a conference speech by a service manager. He is reported as saying that some child protection social workers are finding the new approach to assessment, as proposed by the Munro Review, “scary” and “a challenge”. He is quoted as saying that some social workers are “reluctant to analyse information or provide their judgment or opinions”.

This is indeed a scary story. I am struggling to understand what must have been happening before the new way of working was implemented. Surely nobody actually relied on the Initial and Core Assessment forms to make decisions for them? I know that these forms purport to support decision-making (not very well in my opinion) but I cannot believe that anybody ever believed they made it unnecessary!

Perhaps this story is indicative of just how steep the learning curve required to deliver the Munro reforms is. Quite clearly the necessary changes will not be brought about by training courses based around changes in the design of forms and other paperwork. What is required is a fundamental shift in the culture of organisations.

The Importance of Babies

2011-11-14T15:12:00.003Z

The NSPCC research study, All Babies Count, is to be welcomed for reminding us that nearly half of serious case reviews concern babies under the age of one year and that babies are eight times more likely to be killed by their carers than older children.

The report also highlights the ‘toxic trio’ of parental mental illness, substance abuse and domestic violence as being important risk factors. The authors estimate that nearly 200,000 babies in the UK are at high risk in this way.

Also to be welcomed is the NSPCC’s response to the research, which will involve education programmes, derived from Australian and US models, with the aim of reaching parents of 80,000 newly born babies over a two year period.

From the perspective of child protection practice, rather than preventative campaigns, the research seems to me to imply an ever-stronger focus on babies. It is all too easy to operate with an optimistic assumption that a parent will improve her or his parenting abilities over time, or that the causes of an early abusive event can be successfully addressed or the consequences mitigated, but the sad truth is that the fragility of very young children means that during the first two years of life there is often little or no room for manoeurve . And a child who experiences abuse and neglect at this age will suffer long-term damage that is often difficult to repair.

I believe child protection social workers need to be experts in the health and welfare of babies. And I believe that child protection services need to be designed differently to meet the needs of different groups. Babies and older children require quite different approaches. But a one-size-fits-all approach has been reinforced by the widespread adoption of standardising procedures that restrict the social worker’s ability to tailor services to the needs of a particular child. That can mean that the special needs of babies are often marginalised or neglected, especially where there are older children in the same family.

The Future of the NSPCC

2011-11-12T16:28:00.007Z

The NSPCC (The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) has been in the news this week. The Guardian has an interview with the Society’s Chief Executive and also reports on the publication of new All Babies Count research.

Andrew Flanagan, the former TV executive who now heads the NSPCC, explains his new strategy for the Society. Instead of spreading its resources thinly by providing a range of services, he believes that in future the emphasis should be on selectively testing out new ways of working and developing new policies on child protection, with the aim of persuading government and the children’s services establishment to adopt them if they prove successful. Flanagan speaks of the NSPCC aiming to become “an incubator for social polices”.

This is not an entirely new approach - I can remember people talking about it at the NSPCC in the early naughties – and clearly it has some merits. But it is not without its difficulties. A significant one is that it will take a great deal of ingenuity to persuade the public that they should contribute money to a ‘think tank’ rather than to a good old fashioned provider of services. Being able to say “we helped x thousand children last year” has a reassuringly tangible ring to it. Saying “we tested some experimental services which didn’t work very well” is probably not a donation winner. However, some medical research charities have been very successful in Britain and perhaps there are models there that the NSPCC can emulate. But I suspect that the public have greater faith in medical research than in social ‘science’. And the demonstrable benefits of new drugs and treatments are a lot easier to understand and communicate than the all-too-often ephemeral outcomes of social experimentation.

Another difficulty that this new approach faces is that some of the services provided by the NSPCC are not suitable for absorption into state provision. On-line or telephone counselling services for children, such as ChildLine, need to be able to give assurances of confidentiality which, even if they were forthcoming from statutory services, would be unlikely to be trusted by children and young people. In similar vein, one of the really valuable things about the counselling services that the NSPCC has provided in schools is that these are services that are not part of the school establishment. Children know they will be treated differently by a voluntary sector service provider and welcome the opportunity to share their concerns and anxieties outside the formal bureaucracy of the school.

But perhaps the most important difficulty with the 'think tank' model is that there has never been a shortage of people in Britain ready to propose new ways of working in child protection. In the 1970s and 1980s researchers identified different forms of abuse and ways in which it can occur. Experts and civil servants proposed new procedures to deal with these challenges. Then, in the 1990s inspectors suggested that services needed to be refocused to take more account of children's needs. To ensure that this happened various frameworks and checklists were developed. In the early 2000s the Government and the children's services establishment became preoccupied with information sharing and the potential contribution of IT. Procedures and checklists were brought together to create IT systems which did not work.

Arguably the cumulative effect of many of these changes has been that child protection services in Britain have become ever less professional and more stressed. Children are in danger of being processed rather than helped. Depressingly, child deaths and critical service failures persist. And those people who deliver the services remain as confused as ever about what they should be doing and why.

The problem here is one of 'top-down' rather than 'bottom-up'. It is so tempting to allocate service development to a technocratic elite, working in ideal laboratory conditions, and to allocate service provision to a much larger group of 'doers', working in the real world. But the effect of this division of labour is seldom as productive as it first promises to be. The demonstration models developed by the technocrats often do not resonate with the humble service deliverers. Resentment and complaints of blue-skies thinking fill the air. Reforms and new ways of working are formally adopted, only to be subverted and remodeled into traditional practices at the earliest opportunity. Organisations do not learn; members of staff learn to see off innovations and to subvert change.

Andrew Flanagan tells the Guardian that he wants the NSPCC "... to become a nimble, instinctive risk-taking champion for children: defying the government and the charity establishment when required, rather than always seeking to join hands with it." I have no problem with the NSPCC being more willing to challenge Government and to be more assertive, but I do not believe that what we require is an ivory tower think tank. The real challenge of achieving high quality in child protection services will not, in my view, be met in this way. Rather what is required are ways of creating the conditions in which those actually doing the work are enabled and involved daily in taking responsibility for service improvement, resulting in continuous developments based on first hand knowledge of where the service fails its users.

Inspection and the Costs of Poor Quallity

2011-11-12T11:06:00.004Z

The Yorkshire Post reports a record volume of child protection cases in Doncaster, said to be an increase of 330%. The main reason for this appears to be the reactivation of a large number of forgotten cases that were discovered during the turnaround of Doncaster’s children’s services department, which has now emerged from the special measures that were imposed by Ofsted. Sadly it seems that a consequence of doing the job properly is a whacking overspend of £2.6 million.

This is a good example of why inspection is such a blunt tool in the quest for improved quality in children’s services. Yes, Ofsted identified a failing service in Doncaster and yes, it has now been turned around, but in the course of these events hundreds of children have not received the service they needed and deserved and the taxpayers of Doncaster have been left with an unexpected bill.

The quality guru, W.E.Deming, always maintained that reliance on inspection in manufacturing processes was actually a cause of poor quality. The idea that quality defects may, at some later point in the process, be uncovered and rectified means that those who are producing components of the product are less likely to give attention to quality issues. That results in waste, when the defects are eventually discovered, and, of course, some of the substandard product may eventually slip through the inspection process to find its way into the hands of soon-to-be dissatisfied customers.

Services, which unlike goods are produced and consumed simultaneously, are more difficult to inspect than manufacturing processes. That is because the defect is only apparent to an inspector once the service has been delivered to the end-user. A defective television set can be taken out of circulation and recycled before it reaches the store, but by the time a child protection enquiry is recognised as being defective it is usually too late: the harm is already done.

I am not arguing for the immediate abolition of inspection of child protection services, but we do need to get away from the idea that inspection will ever deliver the kind of quality required in services that are safety critical. Rather than focusing on passing Ofsted inspections, managers need to become focused on creating the conditions in which everyone is constantly striving to achieve ever higher quality. That is the only way towards achieving more effective and safer services.

Overworked in Wales?

2011-11-04T11:38:00.000Z

Wales Online gives an account of conditions in an Intake and Assessment team dealing with child protection in Cardiff.

High caseloads, stress, low morale and unfilled vacancies are mentioned as being important factors. One social worker is said to have a caseload of 49.

I think we need some solid national data on what is happening in child protection teams. We know that since Baby Peter the number of care orders made has increased dramatically, but we don’t have a clear picture of the impact of this on the workforce. Central government could fund a quick independent research study. That would not be expensive and it would be a solid base for a more strategic approach, which at present is sadly lacking.

The College of Social Work

2011-11-03T14:32:00.002Z

I have always believed that in Britain we need a college of social work, if for no other reason than that all the other caring professions have their colleges and royal colleges which take a leading role in professional standards and development. If surgeons have a royal college, why not social workers?

A college of social work would, I am sure, be good for child protection social work. Having a national membership body with a remit for developing practice and practitioners would surely result in a better standard of service to abused and neglected children and their families. And the college could form a focal point for independent research and the development of new ways of working. Not only that, it would be supportive to practitioners and enhance their professional self-esteem. In short it is a good idea.

Why then is the present project to establish the College of Social Work running into such serious difficulties? Accusations of various sorts are flying back and forth between the Interim Board of the College and the British Association of Social Workers. A trades union, Unison, appears to have become party to the proceedings (for reasons which I do not understand) and the Government seems to be sitting on the sidelines just waiting for the next dramatic impasse. Not a pretty sight.

Without being privy to the contents of late night discussions in what used to be called 'smoke-filled rooms', it seems to me that it is impossible to say who is right and who is wrong. But it is possible to say that the whole spat is a complete disgrace which is doing the profession and the cause of higher practice standards no good at all. So some-one needs to bang some heads together quickly.

The Interim Board of the College appears to have acted in ways which to me seem strange. Rather than concentrating on what needs to be done in the short-term to create a suitable governance structure and to attract the maximum number of members, they seem to have broadened their activities into all sorts of consultation and policy areas.

And I personally felt patronised to receive an email asking me to participate in a key word exercise about the nature of social work. This is the kind of thing I used to get my students to do on day one of their courses when I taught in a university - and which they used to complain about as being infantilising! I would have much preferred to have been treated as a grown-up and simply asked to give my opinions about what the college should do, how it should be governed and how it should develop.

Delays in the Family Courts

2011-11-03T09:40:00.002Z

I was impressed with Sanchia Berg’s article on David Norgrove’s call for a six-month deadline for care proceedings in the family courts (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15562498).

According to Berg, judges defend lengthy proceedings on the grounds that they need to scrutinise the work of social workers. Judges told her about many cases where the local authority had not handled cases well, requiring the court to intervene. Thus delays, although undesirable, are inevitable.

Norgrove, she says, hopes that the Munro reforms will result in higher standards of social work, which will give judges more confidence. The detail of case planning can then be left to social workers, with judges left free to concentrate on the issue of whether the children should be made subject to a care order.

This account neatly encapsulates the ‘chicken and egg’ nature of this problem. And it sits well with what we know about the long-standing problems of child protection services in Britain: staff and skills shortages and social workers overburdened with bureaucracy. Paradoxically under-resourcing local authority children’s services, and deskilling social workers, results in work being displaced to the courts where it is processed at much greater cost.

I am very worried about David Norgrove’s recommendation for a six month time limit on care proceedings. Unless this is phased with real and measurable progress on implementing Munro’s reforms, the likelihood is that uncertainties, which are currently being resolved at length in the family courts, will be simply re-exported to unprepared children’s services departments where they will receive even less satisfactory attention. Inevitably children will suffer.

More on Transracial Adoption

2011-11-02T09:49:00.000Z

Ben Douglas, a black person who was adopted by white parents, writes passionately in today’s Daily Mail in favour of transracial adoption. I think it is difficult to argue with his conclusion that “…what children need above all is a loving home rather than an ethnic match”.

However recent research reveals a complex picture of the disadvantages faced by black and ethnic minority children in the adoption process. It is important to ensure that reforms achieve the best possible outcomes for all children, regardless of their race and ethnicity.

And I disagree with Ben’s criticism of remarks by Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton, which Ben says dash his hopes for reform. On the contrary the Daily Mail reports Tim telling the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that “… although having an ethnic match may be desirable, it is a bonus and not a deal breaker”. That seems to me to be a reasonable starting point for reform.

Speeding up adoption

2011-10-31T16:35:00.002Z

The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/31/councils-face-adoptions-ultimatum) and the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15492467) both run top stories today on the Prime Minister’s pledge to take action against local authorities that are slow in completing adoptions. Councils that perform badly in this regard are threatened with the prospect of their adoption services being taken over.

Everyone welcomes more children finding secure and happy long term placements and adoption is certainly a very favourable outcome for many children who have been abused and neglected. But simply setting targets and waving the big stick will not deliver the desired results. And a seriously unwelcome consequence would be if targets got in the way of quality, resulting in inappropriate placements being made because unsuitable couples have been approved to adopt. So any changes must be closely monitored and controlled with a clear focus on the best interests of children.

There also needs to be a very clear understanding that simplistic performance indicators must be avoided. It is very easy to process adoptions quickly if you restrict your efforts only to relatively straightforward cases. So the speed at which adoptions takes place also needs to be seen in the context of the proportion of children coming into care who are placed for adoption.

To improve the speed at which adoptions take place requires an analysis of the relevant professional, legal and business processes. On the ‘supply side’ local authorities have to recruit, vet, approve and prepare prospective adoptive parents. On the ‘demand side’ they have to select and prepare children who also have to be ‘freed’ for adoption via a legal process. The two sides are brought together in a matching process, which hopefully results in a placement. In successful cases the process ends with the court making an adoption order.

Each of these stages of the adoption process can be resolved further into component activities, each of which needs to be understood. It is then possible to gather data relevant to the issue of how quickly each stage in the process can be completed.

We need to understand where the delays are occurring, so very slow components of the process need to be examined to determine how, if possible, they can be speeded up. However the whole process will run at the speed of the slowest ‘bottleneck’ so there is often no point in increasing the speed of all the processes; indeed to do so may result in wasted effort and resources.

Service-processes often generate queues of people waiting between some or all of the stages. These queues are equivalent to in-process inventory (work in process) in manufacturing processes. Speeding up the downstream business stages can sometimes reduce the size of these queues or, where possible, the process can be redesigned so that some stages run in parallel rather than in sequence. Managing queues usually requires resources (for example children waiting for adoption require foster placements or residential care) so eliminating queues often liberates resources that can then be applied to making stages in the process quicker or more efficient.

Sadly there is no one simple answer to this type of redesign question. The specific facts underlying a particular process need to be investigated and understood. Various reconfigurations need to be tried out and tested.

I was impressed by the developments at Harrow Council that are described by the BBC’s Sarah Bell (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15449253). The key to this approach, apparently developed by Harrow’s partner orgnaisation Corum, is a system called ‘concurrent planning’. Children are fostered with people hoping to adopt while the birth parents undergo assessment. If a decision is made that a child is not to return to the birth family, the fosterers become the prospective adopters. An important benefit claimed for this approach is that the child is kept in one placement throughout.

This is an example of paralleling various stages to speed the process. It appears to be an exciting and important development that many local authorities may wish to investigate. There does, however, need to be a recognition that one size may not fit all. Opting for a solution before understanding the problem is never a good idea. So I would urge local authorities to carry out careful analysis in order to fully understand where the delays are occurring in their own adoption operations before deciding how to move forward.

One thing that can be said for certain is that delays in matching prospective adopters with children that are due to arbitrary considerations should be purged from the system without mercy. Without research it is difficult to know just how much delay in adoption results from ‘silly’ considerations surrounding ethnicity. The BBC’s article quotes an example of a Finnish/Greek couple, with the implication that they found it difficult to adopt because of the shortage of children who had both Finnish and Greek heritage. I find it difficult to believe that that sort of literalism is widespread, although clearly there are isolated cases of it. And these may get more attention than they deserve in the media. The most important issue to address, however, is why black and ethnic minority children appear to have such greatly reduced prospects in the adoption system. While race and ethnicity are factors that must be considered in every adoption, the absence of prospective adopted parents of the ‘right’ ethic mix should never be an obstacle to a child having access to adoption by the best family available at the time.

Is Ofsted learning from Serious Case Reviews? Are pigs flying?

2011-10-26T22:32:00.004+01:00

As someone who has, on more than one occasion, exhorted Ofsted to do more thematic research, I should be pleased to see what is described as a “… thematic report of Ofsted’s evaluation of serious case reviews from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2011”. I know I should be pleased, but the report left me feeling sad … or was it angry?

Why? My first disappointment was only to be expected. To ‘learn lessons’ from Serious Case Reviews requires an analytic and enquiring approach which is largely absent from this report. All too often the authors simply gainsay their findings to form a recommendation: pre-birth assessments were sometimes undertaken late, so “ensure that pre-birth assessments are undertaken in a timely manner”; fathers were sometimes marginalized, so “both parents need to be supported. The father is as important as the mother and they need support to help them to become good parents”.

That’s just like saying that the plane flew into the side of the mountain so pilots should take care not to fly too close to high ground: true but blindingly obvious! And it doesn’t explain anything. What we want to know is why the assessments were undertaken late or why fathers were marginalized.

The authors of this report also appear to show no awareness of an important methodological shortcoming with their approach to this research. Simply listing all the things that weren’t done ‘properly’ in a case that went badly wrong does not provide a causal explanation of what went wrong; at best it only provides a description. And, most importantly, we don’t know if in all the other cases, that didn’t go badly wrong, many of those same things were not done ‘properly’ as well.

This is not just a philosophical debating point, but a vitally important consideration, because we may end up spending vital time and resources addressing things that are not done properly but which don’t result in tragedy. So we might spend money on training to improve the quality of assessments or put time and effort into developing procedures to speed their production only to find that children continue to die just as before.

That sounds to me pretty much what has been happening ever since Maria Colwell. As the Welsh inspectorate CCSIW once wisely observed: "Time and again serious case reviews identify the same issues as contributing to not protecting children, yet still the problems keep recurring" (see http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/serious-case-reviews-poor-tool-for.html).

So I’m afraid that this report from Ofsted, in the words of Shania Twain, “don’t’ impress me much”. It makes little attempt to get behind the obvious facts and to ask questions about why things happen, or don't as the case may be. And some of the recommendations are really quite insulting, for example: "Assessments of pregnant teenagers must take into account their family background". I think most people would struggle to conceive what kind of assessment could be made that didn't!

On the positive side there does seem to be anecdotal evidence that Oftsed is trying to improve its approach to inspecting child protection services. I was please to read in Community Care that in future they intend to send inspectors out with social workers on home visits. But, if this report is anything to go by, they still have a long way to go before they begin to deliver the goods.

A Warm Welcome to Guardian Select

2011-10-26T12:39:00.000+01:00

I am very pleased to announce that this blog has now become a part of the Guardian Select Social Care Network (www.guardian.co.uk/select).

With its long history of high quality journalism in social issues in general, and social care in particular, I believe that the Guardian is an ideal partner for a blog which is devoted to promoting learning and improvement in child protection.

The (expected to be small) amount of money earned from advertising will be used to further the objectives of the blog and may be sufficient to support some research and investigative journalism in the future.

Towards a new "Working Together"

2011-10-24T10:15:00.004+01:00

Civil servant, Jeanette Pugh, who is director of the Department for Education’s safeguarding group, is quoted by Children and Young People Now as saying that it will be difficult to meet the July 2012 deadline for publication of the revised Working Together document which contains the British Government’s guidance on responding to child abuse and neglect.

The brief for the Department is to produce a shorter, simpler document. I would like to suggest that the best way forward is to begin by making a much clearer distinction than is currently made between ‘regulations’ (“rule(s) or directive(s) made and maintained by an authority” – Oxford English Dictionary) and ‘guidance’ (“advice or information aimed at resolving a problem or difficulty, especially as given by someone in authority” – Oxford English Dictionary). I believe that the core of Working Together should be the regulations. Additional guidance should only be provided in this document if it is absolutely necessary.

The first task is to work through the existing four hundred page document to identify the regulations or rules which everyone dealing with child abuse must obey. The remaining guidance (advice and information) should be classified into four categories: (1) information or advice that is essential in order to understand or implement the rules; (2) information or advice that can be helpfully located in the same document and which does not detract from the essential rules; (3) information or advice that should be located in other documents; (4) information or advice which should not be provided.

Using this framework should result in a much shorter document. I would suggest that following a short (one or two page) summary of current policy, the document should move directly to key definitions (currently not encountered until page 34). I would also include here a much shorter version of Chapter 6 (“Supplementary Guidance”) to make abundantly clear at the outset the nature of child abuse and neglect and the scope of the required response. Chapter 2 (Roles and Responsibilities) should be reduced from its current 46 pages to no more than a series of brief paragraphs each stating the key responsibilities of each agency. All of this should occupy no more one short chapter in the new document

I would then move to a shortened version of the present Chapter 5 (Managing Individual Cases), believing that Chapter 3 (on Local Safeguarding Children Boards) should appear later in the revised document. Chapter 4 (on staff training and development) could either be relegated to another document or be greatly shortened, perhaps being included as an appendix.

Chapter 7 (Child Death Review Process) and Chapter 8 (Serious Case Reviews) should be combined with the rules set out in Chapter 3 (Local Safeguarding Children Boards) into a single short chapter. Chapters 9 to 11 are pure guidance but may contain some information that needs to occur along with definitions and statements of scope towards the beginning of a revised document. The remaining information is probably best relegated to a separate document.

I would expect that applying the following suggestions would result in a document well short of 100 pages in length and hopefully nearer to 50. Before publication it should be subjected to a rigorous critique by someone who is expert in writing plain English. Perhaps then we would have a document with which people would become familiar, rather than a document that most people have no option other than to skim.

Starting at the beginning

2011-10-20T13:00:00.002+01:00

Naomi Eisenstadt, who among other things used to be the Director of Sure Start, is quoted in Children and Young People Now as saying that Sure Start failed to reach the under-twos. She says that Sure Start was originally a minus nine months to plus four years programme but "we lost the babies”.

I can’t help thinking that this shows just how loose some of the thinking behind ‘early intervention’ is. There is substantial evidence to demonstrate that the first two years of a child’s life are crucially important in terms of development and future functioning. Huge changes in the brain during this period can be adversely influenced by early experience of abuse and neglect, resulting in long-term damage. Not only that but we know that pre-verbal infants and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to abuse and neglect and particularly to some of the more extreme forms. A large proportion of child abuse deaths concern this age-group.

So, if I were developing an early intervention programme I would work from minus 9 months forward, rather than from five years down. Why policy makers did not get hold of this simple message baffles me. Perhaps it is the same kind of thinking which allowed the number of health visitors in Britain to decline to an all time low under the last government?

A Culture of Fear?

2011-10-19T15:50:00.001+01:00

What was most interesting to me about Martin Narey’s article in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-care-network/2011/oct/19/martin-narey-social-workers-benefit-adoption-changes?newsfeed=true) was not his views on adoption but the aside he makes about social workers who have written to him in his role as a government adviser.

He writes:

“Troublingly, those (social workers) who did (write) either wrote anonymously or pleaded with me not to identify them or indicate where they work. And this despite the reality that in almost all cases they were simply expressing their frustration with a safeguarding system which makes it so difficult for them to protect children.”

These are chilling words. In my view there can be no excuse for employers who suppress the legitimate views of professional employees. Unless social workers are free to say what they find wrong with the child protection system it will continue to be difficult for them to protect children because the system will continue to be dysfunctional. A frightened employee is seldom an effective employee. And an employer who cannot listen to reasoned criticism is always a bad employer.

Creating learning organisations can only be achieved if the people who do the work, who understand the issues and the difficulties, are actually encouraged to speak out about their frustrations and anxieties. Having that type of information in the public domain allows us all to engage in building improved services and meeting the needs of abused and neglected children better.

But a culture of silence based on fear fosters the growth of organisations which do not deliver the goods. That results in less safe services, because senior managers only hear what they want to hear, not what they should hear.

Thanks should go to Martin Narey for speaking openly about this problem which urgently needs to be addressed. Perhaps he can mention it to ministers next time he is in Whitehall.

Publish and be damned!

2011-10-14T18:13:00.002+01:00

I recently wanted a copy of the Executive Summary of a Serious Case Review report. I knew it was available because I could read all about it in the Daily Mail and in the Guardian. However, when I looked on the Local Safeguarding Children Board’s website (I won’t say which one) I couldn’t find a copy to download. An email inquiry received the response that it hadn’t yet been published yet and I would just have to wait. Well it may not have been 'published' but mainstream journalists clearly had been given copies.

I don’t think that is right. I can’t help wondering who is more important - the press or the British public? By the time ordinary people are able to see the report the 'red tops' will already have created their 'official' version of it and it will be yesterday's news. So much for transparency, openness, accountability and the democratic process.

To merge or not to merge

2011-10-14T12:14:00.001+01:00

Having recently congratulated three London boroughs for intending to merge their child protection services (http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/response-to-staff-shortages-try-merging.html) I now - with some embarrassment - read that child protection is specifically excluded from plans to merge services provided by the boroughs of Westminster, Kensington-and-Chelsea and Hammersmith-and-Fulham (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/sep/27/andrew-christie-london-councils-join-forces?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487).

I am also disappointed by Andrew Christie's (who will be director of children's services for the three boroughs) reasoning behind this decision. The Guardian reports him as saying that councillors did not want major change in that area, on the grounds of risk. And he believes politicians are right to be very cautious about child protection.

But there is every reason to suppose that there is more risk in inaction than in change. I believe that in most places we need to make much more efficient and effective use of the child protection work force. Merger between councils is one way in which this can quickly be achieved. I urge the three boroughs to think again on this issue.

The Integrated Children’s System – stop messing about!!

2011-10-14T10:47:00.000+01:00

The Integrated Children’s System (ICS) is an approach to computerising ‘children’s social care’ (children in need, child protection, children in care etc.) developed by the last British Government. Our present government has not said much about it, but Professor Eileen Munro’s recent report on child protection (http://www.education.gov.uk/munroreview/) had some suitably harsh words for a system which by common consent is manifestly unfit for purpose.

Munro helpfully prescribes three things that are required of any children’s social care IT:

• It should meet the critical need to maintain a systemic family narrative

• It should be able to adapt easily to changes in local child protection system needs

• It should be based on a human-centred analysis of what is required by frontline workers

ICS provides none of these. The approach followed until 2010 was driven by an elaborate and increasingly bizarre collection of ‘exemplars’ many of which were adapted from the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need (http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4003256). In concentrating on this framework the ‘architects’ (I use the word with reservations) of ICS seem to have forgotten that providing services to children in need involves much more than repeatedly assessing them. And they seem to have forgotten that it is of central importance to have a record which explains what has happened, what has been done and why.

Why such a completely unrealistic approach was taken to computerising children’s social care records cannot easily be explained. Systems were probably designed by committees of bureaucrats and by social work academics who had little understanding of how effective IT systems are created. The result – as is widely acknowledged - is a disaster in waiting.

What is even more frustrating is the fact that civil servants do not seem to be offering any sensible advice to local authorities in the light of what seems to be yet another Government inspired IT mess.

Look up ICS on the Department for Education’s website (http://www.education.gov.uk/childrenandyoungpeople/safeguarding/socialworkreform/b0071081/integrated-childrens-system-ics-improvement).

There you will find only a brief acknowledgement that Munro’s general approach is correct, followed by pages and pages of guidance, all dated pre-March 2010, which is steeped in the worst fallacies and silly assumptions of the ICS project as originally envisaged, and expressed in the excruciatingly toe-curling gobbledegook which seems to have been de rigueur for those who drafted it.

The Department of Education needs to get a hold on this situation. It should stop trying to square circles with such weasel words as:

“The guidance developed by the expert panel continues to be relevant to the modification of existing electronic recording systems in accordance with the principles (Munro's) set out above.”

Come off it. The guidance is not only not relevant, it often does not make any sense and even when it does it is not wise. It serves no good purpose but to mislead and distract. It should be taken down. All you have to do to assure yourself that this is true is to follow the link on page 2 of the guidance and to look at an “ics recording formats deconstruction table” (whatever that is!) or read the wretched paper on ‘interoperability’ to which a link is provided on page 3. Don’t be conned into thinking that there is someone somewhere who understands this stuff. There isn’t.

Moving forward on ICS requires frank admissions that the project commenced under the last Government is totally misconceived and, like other Government IT projects, that it has been managed in an amateurish, if not naïve, way. The way forward is to admit frankly past mistakes, not seek to pretend that they are in some way part of the new way forward. And there needs to be a completely new approach, with, if necessary, new people at the helm.

A New Academy

2011-10-10T11:18:00.003+01:00

It’s good news that the much-criticised Birmingham Council children’s services department has jointly launched, with the University of Birmingham, an academy that will provide continuing social work development aimed at raising the standards of child protection social work in the city. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-15237288

And it is very good news that the academy is not just for newly qualified staff, but for all of Birmingham's social workers.

Although the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, there is every reason to suppose that ventures of this sort will support the development of better-informed and more reflective practice. Staff retention and recruitment should also be improved if members of staff feel that their professionalism and knowledge are being recognised and valued in this way.

The real issue for an academy like this, however, is one of resources. And the most important resource is that of the time that social workers can give to participating in reflective and educational activities. Without very careful management of caseloads there will always be a danger that the academy will remain inaccessible to many hard-pressed practitioners. This is something Birmingham council managers will have to monitor very carefully if the academy is to be a success.

Too many recommendations from Serious Case Reviews

2011-10-10T10:03:00.000+01:00

A very useful research report has recently been published by the Department for Education https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/RSG/AllPublications/Page1/DFE-RR157.

Researchers from the universities of Warwick and East Anglia looked in depth at the recommendations contained in 20 Serious Case Reviews. They found that these reviews contained more than 900 recommendations, an average of 47 (yes, 47) per review! And most recommendations were concerned with issues of procedures and training. The researchers also found that there was a "proliferation of tasks to be followed through" resulting from "breaking down recommendations into achievable actions".

The researchers conclude:

"Local Safeguarding Children Boards need to take responsibility for curbing this self-perpetuating cycle of a proliferation of recommendations and tasks and allow themselves to consider other ways of learning from serious case reviews. Recommendations may not be the best way to learn from these cases." (page 2)

These are very welcome words.

Back in February I criticised a Serious Case Review for making what seemed to me to be silly recommendations http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/tragedy-of-alex-sutherland.html . Hospital staff in Manchester had not recognised that an alcoholic woman they were treating had the care of a child. So the SCR recommended that all patients attending hospitals in the area should be be asked routinely about the dependents that they are responsible for.

I call this 'knee jerk proceduralism' - if something wasn't done in a case that went badly wrong, then make it a procedural requirement that it is always done in all new cases. The logic is simple but it is seriously flawed. And it doesn't take much imagination to see where this approach takes us. As time goes by there are more and more things which have to be done to follow the procedures, which leaves less and less time to provide the service.

The key to learning in child protection - as in other safety critical spheres of activity - is analysis and understanding of what goes wrong and why. Sheila Fish, Eileen Munro and Sue Bairstow are wholly on the right lines in recommending what they call a 'systems approach' to undertaking SCRs - http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/reports/report19.asp . In particular they argue that the report should always go beyond the basic facts of a case to try to understand the differing views that different workers had at the time, with the aim of identifying "... underlying patterns of factors in the work environment that support good practice or create unsafe conditions in which poor practice is more likely".

But I remain sceptical that the findings of individual SCRs are likely to be sufficient in themselves to produce a critical understanding. Although case material is an essential part of the building blocks of an analytical approach to safety it is only through aggregation of a number of cases that a full understanding arises. What we need are SCRs which produce findings in ways which can be more easily aggregated at a national level so that over time a robust understanding of the causes of error emerges.

And meanwhile let's get away from mountains of recommendations which are more likely to obscure safe practice than to inform it.

The NSPCC Prevalence Study Revisited

2011-09-20T16:22:00.000+01:00

It has been an unexpectedly busy month and I have only just got round to reading the NSPCC prevalence study http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/research/findings/child_abuse_neglect_research_wda84173.html.

I found it rather frustrating. There is a lot of data and all kinds of questions are raised, while only some are answered.

I would have liked to have seen much more analysis of the sub-groups of children and young people who were persistently abused within their families. In particular I would have liked to have seen what proportion became involved with statutory services, because to know this would be an indicator of how many maltreated children there are out there at any one time whose needs are not being met.

Table 3.2 (page 41) was of most interest to me. It provides information about the prevalence of severe maltreatment by a parent or guardian. 5% of children under 11 had been severely abused and neglected (on at least one occasion). 13.4% of 11-17 years olds reported severe maltreatment and 14.5% of 18-24s. Obviously the rates rise with age because these are statistics about prevalence, not incidence. In other words nearly 15% of young adults report at least one incident of severe abuse or neglect by a parent or guardian during their childhood. That should give us all cause to pause and reflect.

I wasn’t convinced that comparison between this survey and Pat Cawson’s survey for the NSPCC in the late 1990s provides proof positive that child abuse and neglect is decreasing slightly. Yes, there are statistically significant differences in prevalence between the two samples, but before we conclude anything about trends I think we would need to carry out the survey more frequently. Just because a particular result has a low probability does not mean to say that it won’t happen.

Sadly the cost of this type of research makes it unlikely that more frequent surveys will be undertaken by a charity like the NSPCC. I think government needs to pay for this type of research, as it pays for the annual British Crime Survey. Perhaps then we would get a better view of trends

The first report of the NSPCC prevalence study .....

2011-09-05T13:13:00.000+01:00

..... can now be accessed on the NSPCC Inform website - http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/research/findings/child_abuse_neglect_research_wda84173.html

It is a long and complex document which I will be reading over the next few days - so look out for my comments next week.

Fanning the flames

2011-08-25T08:47:00.000+01:00

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who has been an advocate of ‘family court transparency’, should learn important lessons from his latest foray into challenging the ‘secrecy’ of the family courts. The whole sad story is revealed at length in the Guardian (see below).

Sadly the family courts often have to deal with cases in which angry parents hit out at former partners by making reckless allegations. To borrow a phrase from Margaret Thatcher (something I don’t often do) the ‘oxygen of publicity’ can fan these flames of family conflict, often to the detriment of the children.

An important function of the Family Court is to create the conditions in which a child’s best interests can be calmly discussed and successfully realised. Lowering the emotional temperature and promoting a problem solving, rather than conflict sustaining, approach is key. But admitting the press to family court hearings inevitably raises in some people’s minds the possibility of inflicting severe and lasting damage to some-one who has hurt them.

Confidential (not secret) hearings are much more likely to promote a calm and constructive attitude by all the parties to the case.

You can read the Guardian’s story by clicking here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/24/john-hemming-resign-abusing-privilege

Record Numbers of Care Applications

2011-08-22T18:04:00.000+01:00

The Law Gazette reports that care applications have reached an all time record.

During 2010/11 there were more than 9,000 care applications in England, up 4% on 2009/10. This compares with a 36% increase in the previous year.

http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/record-number-care-cases-puts-courts-under-strain

Cafcass Chief Executive, Anthony Douglas, is quoted as saying that, as a result, pressure on all parts of the family law system is intense.

Christina Blacklaws of the Law Society Council described the family justice system as being “in meltdown”. She criticised the government for continuing with “savage” cuts in the face of the increases.

It is not just the pressure on the family courts that is the issue here. Care proceedings generate huge amounts of work for local authority social workers, both during the case and subsequently when an order is made. Without adequate resources the system will meltdown, with disastrous consequences for the children and young people it is designed to serve.

What's happened to the NSPCC prevalence study?

2011-08-22T03:23:00.001+01:00

Am I alone in feeling a bit frustrated that the full report of the NSPCC's prevalence study of child abuse and neglect still remains unpublished? Back in February they published a short summary with a promise of more to follow shortly, but so far nothing. http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/prevalence-of-child-abuse-and-neglect.html

Come on NSPCC. This is important research. At least give us a date when the full report will be available.

Media Access to the Family Courts - Children and Young People speak out clearly

2011-08-21T11:54:00.001+01:00

The Children’s Rights Director for England, Dr. Roger Morgan, has just published a new report on family justice.

Children on family justice. A report of children’s views for the Family Justice Review Panel, 2010, by the Children’s Rights Director for England. Ofsted, August 2011 https://www.rights4me.org/reportView.cfm?id=486

The research on which the report is based involved in-depth discussions with 58 children and young people who had personal experience of a range of different children’s services.

The children and young people said a lot of interesting things about the family courts and the family justice process. The one thing to catch my eye immediately was that 80% said very clearly that they did not want reporters or members of the public to be allowed into the courts where children’s cases are being heard.

This confirms the findings of other research and needs to be taken very seriously by policy makers. Most children and young people do not want the media to have access to their family court cases.

Book Review

2011-08-18T15:20:00.001+01:00

Caring for Abused and Neglected Children

Jim Wade, Nina Biehal, Nicola Farrelly and Ian Sinclair

London, Jessica Kingsley, 2011

http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781849052078

If we are to improve services to abused and neglected children, we must understand more about their needs and about what happens to them when services intervene in their lives. This book provides an account of high quality empirical research exploring what happens to abused and neglected children when they are reunited with their families following a period of being in care.

It is perhaps not surprising to discover that such children have poorer outcomes than children who remain in care, but the authors demonstrate this with admirable detail and clarity. They provide us with a solid understanding of what happens to reunified children and the risks they face. The messages they draw from the research are by no means entirely negative. The fact that there are risks to reuniting children with their birth families does not mean that we should not do it; only that we should take particular care when we do.

The book is well written and carefully argued. The research evidence is well presented and where tables are used these are clearly laid out and easy to understand. Detailed statistical analysis is confined to footnotes.

Anyone who works with or studies looked after children will gain from reading this book. It is exactly the type of research we require if we are to build services which are fit for purpose.

Unemployed social workers

2011-08-18T11:27:00.000+01:00

Hard on the heels of my last post – concerning child protection staff shortages – comes the puzzling revelation in Community Care that 27% (yes, twenty-seven percent) of newly qualified social workers in England are failing to find suitable jobs. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/08/17/117315/quarter-of-new-social-workers-in-england-remain-jobless.htm

What is going on? Community Care quotes Professor Ray Jones who speculates that some of this may be due to public spending cuts. Perhaps he is right, but whatever the cause this looks like a case of serious waste with young people trained at public expense now failing to gain the experience they require to progress their careers. And we know that child protection services continue to operate with high levels of vacancy.

I suspect that local authorities would be more willing to fill their vacancies with experienced staff, but see newly qualified social workers as requiring too much support and not offering enough insight and experience to tackle child protection work effectively. It is a sorry situation.

I return to the theme I’ve been banging on about for a while now. Retention is the issue that needs to be addressed. And putting current employees under the continued pressure of working in under-staffed and under-resourced departments will only make matters worse. Somebody urgently needs to come up with proposals to halt the vicious cycle of decline that will otherwise result.

A response to staff shortages - try merging services

2011-08-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

It has all gone quiet on the subject of shortages of child protection social workers in Britain. One thing, however, is certain: there has been no profound change. Vacancy rates are still high and local authorities still have to cope with chronic staff shortages.

In a rational world people would be trying to come up with some urgent but effective responses to this problem. In the real world people seem happy to rely on agency workers to fill the gaps and on the future promise of more social workers coming from training. Neither response is satisfactory. Temporary agency workers can never provide the continuity of service that is so necessary for effective child protection. Although there are plenty of people training to be social workers, increasingly it has become apparent that the problems are of retention, not recruitment. And it is experienced social workers that are most urgently required.

My view is that the first thing we need to do is to use the current workforce more effectively. In big cities, like London, lots of relatively small local authorities employing a small number of social workers deliver child protection services. Inevitably this amplifies the negative effects of staff shortages on service quality and places greatest strain on employees. Greater flexibility would result from London Boroughs, for example, choosing to work together to cover the whole Greater London area with a single child protection service. This would facilitate the most efficient deployment of staff and generally make the service more resilient to staff shortages.

There are no legal obstacles to merging services in this way; they would be delivered as a partnership. Indeed some London Boroughs (such as Westminster, Kensington-and-Chelsea and Hammersmith-and-Fulham) are already engaged in merging children’s services with their neighbours, demonstrating that a wider merger of the type I envisage is feasible.

A Critical Incident in Hull

2011-08-09T16:09:00.001+01:00

I found the report, published today, of the Local Government Ombudsman into child protection failures at Hull City Council very interesting. Apparently, an aunt and another local authority referred two teenagers to Hull saying that there was a likelihood of significant harm to them because the mother’s new partner had mental health problems and had been violent. Hull, it seems, chose not to undertake a formal child protection inquiry (a Section 47 inquiry) and assigned the case to a trainee social worker for support.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/09/hull-council-child-protection-failure

What I found most worrying was that the response to the report from a spokesman for Hull City Council, as quoted in the Guardian, seemed to focus exclusively on improved guidance around “the process for placement of children within extended family” while the real safety issue is that the council appears to have failed to respond to a clear child protection referral.

The short, informative and very clear report by the Local Government Ombudsman contrasted favourably with many Serious Case Review Executive Summaries I have read.

http://www.lgo.org.uk/news/2011/aug/ombudsman-criticises-hull-council-child-protection/

However, its conclusions focused too narrowly on issues of blame and responsibility and did not explore ways in which a repeat of these mistakes could be avoided in the future. That is because the Local Government Ombudsman is charged with investigating a complaint, not improving child protection systems.

I would like to see much more open reporting of child protection ‘critical incidents’, like this one made suitably anonymous. I think there is considerable value in looking at cases where things have gone wrong without resulting in serious injury or death, because such cases are far more representative of the type of errors that occur everyday. To find out more see an article I co-authored on this approach.

http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/3/215.abstract

Ofsted - at it again

2011-08-04T11:19:00.000+01:00

With all the talk of a new approach to inspecting child protection services, I would have expected the inspectorate, Ofsted, to have started to change its ways. There is, however, little evidence of any new approach in the recently published report of an unannounced inspection in the London Borough of Waltham Forest - http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/local-authorities/waltham-forest - June 2011.

The problem with this report is that it is critical without being specific and that it points to shortcomings but with no analysis of the likely causes. The inspector writes that “children were placed at risk of inadequate protection” which sounds like it should mean something until you begin to think about it! Is she trying to say that some children were inadequately protected or that they could have been if some condition had been different or that there was some systematic organisational failing? It just isn’t clear. And how is ‘risk of inadequate protection' defined and measured? We simply don’t know. I wonder if the inspector does?

My guess is that this is an example of ‘inspection-speak’ – a kind of language that inspectors use to avoid saying anything which might be too helpful. The report continues in similar vein. Apparently “planning and analysis of emerging risks was poor”. But what is an ‘emerging risk’, as opposed not a non-emerging risk, and how was the analysis poor? Then we are told that the “… failure to effectively engage children and young people led to an incomplete understanding of the risks to them …”. But there is no hint here about the difference between ‘effective’ and ineffective ‘engagement’ (whatever that means) and no explanation of what is meant by ‘an incomplete understanding of the risks’ – is any-one’s understanding ever complete?

We are told, however, that as “… a result protection plans were inadequate leaving them (presumably the children, not the plans) at continued risk of harm”. (Page 4, Area for priority action). But there is no information provided about how or why the plans were inadequate or any hint about how they might be improved.

It is all a bit like saying that a plane has crashed because of a mechanical failure or a human error, but failing to say what sort of mechanical failure or human error was involved. It may be obvious and it may be true, but it isn’t very helpful. And it doesn’t help people make the improvements that result in increased safety – which is what matters.

If inspection of child protection is to stay with Ofsted, which as I understand it is now Government policy, the very least that Ofsted could do is to raise its game. Ofsted inspectors need to get away from glib uninformative inspection reports written in bureaucratic gobbledygook. They need to begin to produce reports that are informative, insightful and analytic.

Government loses appeal in Shoesmith case

2011-08-02T13:28:00.000+01:00

The Government has lost its appeal in the Sharon Shoesmith sacking case - which means that Ms Shoesmith is likely to receive substantial compensation. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sharon-shoesmith-challenge-bid-rejected-2330560.html

From the day Ed Balls decided Sharon must go, this has been a total mess. Successive Governments have appeared to be more concerned to appease the red-top press than to act responsibly.

In future let's look to making sensible improvements to the child protection system after a tragedy - not fostering the myth that a small number of people can be blamed, shamed and sacked and that it will never happen again.

More on media access to the family courts

2011-07-30T06:25:00.000+01:00

I was pleased to see that the report of the House of Commons Justice Committee on the Operation of the Family Courts agrees with me that increased media access should not go ahead. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmjust/518/51812.htm

The report concludes:

"... our witnesses were united in opposing implementation of the scheme to increase media access to the family courts contained in Part 2 of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010. While their reasons for doing so differed, and were sometimes contradictory, such universal condemnation compels us to recommend that the measures should not be implemented, and the Ministry of Justice begin afresh. We welcome the Government's acknowledgement that the way the legislation was passed was flawed, and urge Ministers to learn lessons from this outcome for the future." (para 280)

The report also notes:

"The work of the Office of the Children's Commissioner on media reporting in the family courts gives a voice to the most important, and least heard, group of people in the family court system. The research makes plain that children involved in family court cases fear identification by their community to such an extent that knowing a case may be reported in the media could inhibit them from giving vital information to family justice service professionals." (para 289)

Coupled with the on-going revelations from the hacking scandal, there is now an overwhelming case not to increase media access to the Family Courts.

The Terrible Twos

2011-07-21T15:34:00.003+01:00

The end of July 2011 marks two years since the birth of this blog, so it is now entering that period of toddlerhood known as the 'terrible twos'. Here’s looking forward to a year of temper tantrums and petulant outbursts!

On the blog’s first birthday I drew up a list of seven things I would like to see changed (http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/another-year-over.html), so today seems like a good time to assess what progress has occurred in the last year.

(1) Serious and seemingly intractable problems in recruiting and retaining child protection social workers.

In aggregate I see no evidence that much has changed, although as the year has gone on I have become increasingly convinced that retention is the key to this problem, not recruitment. Sadly there are few useful statistics on this subject, which makes analysis hard work. If I had a wish for next year, I’d wish for more, and better structured, information on the nature of the problem and a strategic approach to dealing with the problems of retention. In particular I would like to see some critical thinking about job design, with lots of thought devoted to how burn-out can be avoided. Greater job variety and possibly some kind of job rotation (e.g. with related specialisms such as adoption, or with training or academic roles) might be one way forward.

(2) Highly bureaucratic systems and working practices

The Munro review has provided an eloquent counterblast to bureaucracy, but how much will fall on deaf ears? I think here of the NSPCC’s untenable assumption that child protection social workers can continue working under tight procedures while at the same time developing professional expertise, or of those who still seem to believe that it is just a question of making a few modifications and tweaks to make ICS more user friendly. A great deal of work is required to make everyone aware of just how radical Munro’s reforms really are.

(3) Out-dated and misguided approaches to improving safety and quality in child protection work

I was disappointed that Munro did not say more on this issue. Her emphasis on the systems approach to SCRs is welcome, but I believe that it will have only limited impact on safety and quality. What we need is a new and comprehensive approach to workplace learning. The models I would draw on are the kaizen approach to quality and the human factors approach to safety. There is much in common between these approaches which might be captured in some combination of employee suggestion systems (for quality improvement) and by introducing briefing/de-briefing before and after significant work episodes.

(4) A chronic shortage of foster-parents

There seems to be little change here and no evidence that it is a policy priority. Sad.

(5) A dispirited workforce.

Again there is little evidence of significant change

(6) Services that continue to be driven by producer interests and internally agreed targets, rather than by the needs and wants of abused and neglected children

There has been some progress here, with the Munro Review recommending some sensible performance measures which are more outcome and less process focused. Abandoning the silly timescale targets now appears to be Government policy – which is to be warmly welcomed

(7) The blame culture

Just as I thought things were getting better, it was back to square one with the Government announcing it would appeal the court’s decision to allow Sharon Shoesmith to challenge her dismissal. I can see no point whatsoever in hounding people who worked for Haringey and who may have made mistakes but who were not wilfully in error. Instead we need to think about how we move towards Dekker’s just culture.

So it's been a mixed year, with some progress, but not enough. Lets hope the next twelve months bring much more change.

ICS – they just don’t get IT

2011-07-20T19:04:00.001+01:00

Community Care reports warnings by ‘experts’ that government proposals on national performance data collection may result in an increased “bureaucratic burden” on child protection IT. David Grigsby, of ICS provider Liquidlogic, is quoted as saying that new performance measurement data requirements will have a significant impact on children’s services IT and “… could even affect the processes they have to run." The implication is that ICS systems will be even more strongly specified from the centre.

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/07/18/117192/ics-freedoms-undermined-by-data-collection-rules.htm

What I like least about this kind of talk is the pervasive assumption that we have to have ICS whatever happens and that all that there is to discuss is how we can modify it to cope with changing requirements. This type of crude cultural hegemony is really an insult to our intelligence because the truth is that we don’t have to have ICS at all – there are better alternatives.

In previous posts I have mentioned Professor Darryl Ince of the Open University. He strongly believes that ICS is misconceived and that a simple ‘chronicling’ system may be a much better alternative. ICS is based on the mistaken assumption that working with abused and neglected children is largely a matter of completing pro forma assessments. If, on the other hand, we accept Munro’s argument that what is important is forming relationships with children and their families and making sound decisions, then a system that captures narrative is essential. And that is what Ince is advocating.

Of course lots of important (and some not so important) people have invested lots of time and money in ICS. That’s a shame but there is no point in continuing to try to make a square peg fit in a round hole. We need to cut our losses and accept that ICS is not what we require. Then we can move on.

Incidentally, I don’t think that Munro’s suggestions for performance data require a lot of sophisticated software to collect the data. The idea that performance measurement always requires a massive database is just naïve. Often a great deal can be done quickly and simply using spreadsheets.

The hacking scandal and the family courts

2011-07-20T08:33:00.003+01:00

A few days away from my computer and lo and behold yet another scandal! The corporate ethics (or rather lack of them) of the Murdoch empire are now unravelling in public and the true extent of breaches of privacy are now becoming apparent. The depths to which journalists have stooped are truly shocking. Carl Bernstein (the American journalist who – with Bob Woodward - uncovered the Watergate scandal) has referred to a “semi criminal press” in Britain.

It was a Murdoch paper, The Times, which campaigned so effectively for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘family court transparency’ – allowing the press access to family court proceedings and to make public highly private and sensitive information about children and young people who are the subject of care and other family court proceedings. Back in 2008 Camilla Cavendish argued in The Times that journalists (presumably including News of the World journalists) would act responsibly and would safeguard the anonymity of children and young people and their families (“Family justice: what we can do to protect our children” July 9, 2008). That argument seems to have carried weight with Jack Straw, who, when he became Justice Secretary, reversed his predecessor’s decision not to throw the doors of the family courts open to the hounds of the press and caved in to The Times’ demands. Subsequently there was even talk of allowing journalists to see confidential medical and psychiatric reports submitted in family court proceedings.

The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing. Who now would support the idea that people with the kind of morals which allowed them to tap the voicemail of murder victim Milly Dowler (and to delete messages, thereby risking interference with the police enquiry and falsely raising the family’s hopes) should be admitted to courts where the most private and sensitive details of a child’s life are being discussed? But that is what ‘family court transparency’ risks.

Losing the Plot? The NSPCC's response to Munro

2011-07-05T11:06:00.002+01:00

I have just discovered a response to the Munro report by the NSPCC's chief executive Andrew Flanagan. http://www.suttonnspcc.org/wordpress/?p=207 Although dated 10th May, and therefore definitely yesterday’s news, I cannot allow it to pass without comment.

While purporting to support Munro's vision of a child protection system centred on the child and free from unnecessary red tape, the NSPCC’s response describes her report as “short on detail”. The response continues:

“The government should not move too quickly to rapid deregulation. It needs to invest heavily in building the skills, confidence and experience of all professionals working with children. Controls which safeguard against poor practice must stay in place while professionalism is built. Otherwise, children's lives could be put at risk.”

Flanagan concludes that it will take at least 10 years to build and retain a high-calibre workforce and reminds the government that “child protection is everyone's responsibility”. He cautions it not to lose sight of the fact that “keeping children safe does not start and end with social workers”.

It is difficult to know where to begin. I was initially puzzled by the comment that Munro is short on detail, especially so given the length and complexity of the two volumes which comprise her report. However, it only takes a couple of minutes reflection that to see that Flanagan must mean 'short on detail' about what a reformed child protection system would look like. But that misses the point. The Munro report, unlike previous attempts at policy in this area, does not attempt to prescribe top-down what a child protection system should be. Rather it cautions against that sort of control. How abused and neglected children are helped cannot be specified by politicians and other policy makers - not even by the NSPCC. Indeed Munro's argument is that trying to do precisely that is what has got us into the present mess.

Flanagan compounds this mistake in the paragraph quoted in its entirety above. The key words are "Controls which safeguard against poor practice must stay in place while professionalism is built". Unpacking this sentence reveals its absurdity. It seems to advocate that social workers should continue to follow the rule book while at the same time developing greater professionalism. But how could that operate? Surely no-one is advocating a situation in which a worker says: "My professional judgement tells me to do X, but the rule book tells me to do Y, so I'll do Y even though I know it's wrong"? And where do social workers find the time to engage in reflective practice if they are still filling in all the forms? And how, precisely, do people become 'professionals' if they have spent all of their 'professional' lives being bureaucrats, following the rules which others have imposed? It could never work like that.

The whole point about Munro's approach is that something needs to happen to free social workers rapidly from the vice like grip of forms and check-lists and computer systems which divert practice from child-centred relationships and professional decision-making. Making that shift cannot be without risks, but it is preferable to the status quo where the prospect of ever increasing paralysis and ineffectiveness, due to proceduralisation, looms large. You can't have your cake and eat it, Andrew, and you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Before moving on, just a couple of comments about the tail end of Andrew Flanagan's statement. The phrase “child protection is everyone's responsibility” is a good one, but it does not mean that everyone has the same responsibility for child protection. Most professionals who have contact with children must be alert for the signs of child abuse and neglect and be willing to co-operate if inquiries become necessary. But they cannot be responsible for specific actions to protect a child, because they do not have legal powers and particular expertise. Those who do have powers and expertise must be well placed to use them - and that's why child protection social workers are vitally important. Keeping children safe does not "start and end with social workers" - it does not start and end with anybody - but social workers do have a crucially important and quite specific role to play which should never be understated.

Will Munro's recommendations be implemented?

2011-07-02T15:42:00.001+01:00

Community Care reports that Eileen Munro has told MPs that the government may lack the courage to implement her report, because government is the entity that created the prescriptive system in the first place. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/06/30/117089/munro-fears-government-lacks-courage-to-make-changes.htm

My own thought is that it must be very difficult for all those civil servants, who for years have overseen the child protection system by producing mountains of regulation and guidance, to suddenly realise that less is better, more is worse. I can imagine the culture shock.

You can watch Eileen Munro’s evidence to the Education Committee on

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=8746

A Good Read

2011-06-30T12:05:00.000+01:00

Whilst sailing somewhere above 71 degrees north earlier this month, I needed a good book to while away the endless hours of daylight. I found it in Harry Ferguson's Child Protection Practice (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

The great thing about this book is that it is primarily concerned, not with the macro world of child protection, but with the minutiae of everyday practice. Ferguson looks at such seemingly mundane events as performing a home visit or taking a child somewhere in a car and explores their significance and their potential as opportunities for effective child protection practice. There is an excellent chapter on the importance of touch in protecting children, which is a welcome counterblast to what he calls "deeply troubling cultural norms" surrounding touch.

This is just the kind of book we need: one that bases it's conclusions in an accurate understanding of what child protection practice involves and what can be achieved.

It is very readable too.

Bureaucracy - It’s not just the UK

2011-06-30T11:15:00.000+01:00

The Irish Examiner reports that Irish social workers are at loggerheads with the Health Service Executive (HSE) over a new standardisation process for dealing with child protection cases.

http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/social-workers-criticise-hse-child-protection-process-159523.html

Echoing concerns in England about the ICS system, it is said that research indicates that the proposed system in Ireland (The National Child Care Information System Business Process Standardisation Project) would result in “… social workers spending 60%-80% of their time at their desks”.

The system’s purpose is said to be “… to increase the amount of data the HSE has available on children interacting with care services”.

It is sad to hear that the Irish Government seems set to emulate the same mistakes as the British.

Unmanageable Caseloads

2011-06-30T10:44:00.001+01:00

Children and Young People Now report on research by the Children's Workforce Development Council that found that social workers in 57 English local authorities are dealing with between 20 and 30 cases at a time. In six authorities average caseloads exceed 30. The report also found significant levels of vacancy and agency working.

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Management/article/1077800/social-workers-50-councils-high-caseloads/?DCMP=EMC-CONCYPNow%20Daily

We need to remember that when we say "20 cases" this will always involve more than 20 children, since most families have more than one child. So many social workers are dealing with say between 30 and 40 children at any one time. That’s a lot of children to be concerned about and to keep track of.

Just consider home visiting, an absolutely essential part of working with children who are at risk. Most workers will be lucky to be able to conduct three home visits in a day and I expect that the average is about two. If you allow for a two hour meeting and one hour’s travelling time, that leaves just 30 minutes to write up the visit – and then half a day has been used up. So with a caseload of 30 it would take 15 working days to visit all the families – one home visit every three weeks.

But that does not allow for the fact that the social worker will be involved in other time consuming things as well. There will be meetings, child protection conferences and court hearings. Not to mention training. And then there is the administration! Some estimates say that more than 60% of a child protection social worker's time is absorbed in administration.

So it is not surprising that quite a lot of vulnerable children are not receiving frequent visiting from their social workers: monthly or even worse. And it is not surprising that social workers are often overtaken by events and fail to spot significant changes in children’s circumstances. In fact their workloads make it very likely, if not inevitable.

More Appeals

2011-06-30T09:59:00.000+01:00

I read in yesterday's Evening Standard that other Haringey staff, sacked after the Baby Peter tragedy, have followed Sharon Shoesmith in winning the right to appeal against their dismissals. The summary sacking of children's social care workers involved in the case sent out a most unhelpful and damaging message. I hope that they are successful in their appeals.

Ofsted should be split

2011-06-29T12:00:00.001+01:00

I was very sorry to hear that the Government has apparently decided not to split Ofsted.

Children and Young People Now identifies two reasons being put forward in support of this decision:

Structural change is less important than the quality of inspectors and inspection methods
A single inspectorate is necessary to mirror the structure of local council services.

(“Ofsted survives calls for it to be split”, 28 June 2011

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Education/article/1077311/ofsted-survives-calls-split/?DCMP=EMC-CONCYPNow%20Daily

The first reason is better than the second. Every-one would agree that in the final analysis it is the quality and competence of personnel that matters. But the question is whether the right people will be recruited and retained if they have to work in a small corner of a large organisation which is culturally distinct and which operates according to a different knowledge base. Understanding schools is quite different to understanding child protection.

The second reason is really quite silly. There is no reason at all why the structure of inspectorates must reflect the structure of local council services. Apart from anything else it is not the case that all local authorities have similar structures. And we certainly wouldn't expect that the structure of (say) the Nuclear Inspectorate would have to change because some of the companies it inspects had diversified into other activities, like retailing or financial services!!

Furthermore this reason contradicts the first, which insists that structures are really not very important. And it seems to miss an important point completely: effective inspection comes about because inspectors are knowledgeable about what they are inspecting, not because what they are inspecting has a particular organisational structure.

The problem with Ofsted inspecting child protection services, as I see it, is that they have inappropriately attempted to subsume child protection inspection under inspection methodologies which are designed for school inspection, and they have failed to develop any kind of knowledge centre about child protection best practice. These are singular failures which are reflected in inspection reports which are often uninformative and formulaic.

I think the government will rue the day it decided on this course of action. What is required is an inspectorate for child protection which is not limply configured to arbitrary organisational boundaries, but an inspectorate which can develop and focus its expertise on the issue of child protection across a range of organisational and professional boundaries. That would truly support multi-agency "working together".

Leave it alone ...

2011-05-30T17:32:00.001+01:00

Sad to hear that the Government has decided to appeal the Sharon Shoesmith judgement in the Supreme Court. I think that will be a waste of public money and generally very unhelpful.

NO POSTS FROM THIS BLOG IN JUNE. Going to the Arctic for a dose of midnight sun. Back in July.

The Recruitment Crisis and a Just Culture

2011-05-28T13:36:00.003+01:00

In an article entitled "Child protection work facing recruitment crisis after Baby P tragedy" the Guardian's Patrick Butler reports that many child protection social workers have resigned because of media attacks on the profession in the wake of Baby Peter's death.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/27/child-protection-recruitment-crisis

Butler talks of "a long shadow" having been cast over children's social care and speaks of

the results of workforce shortfalls being "catastrophic" for many councils. Sadly he does not provide us with the detailed figures, but there is every reason to believe that this report is accurate. Information from a variety of sources endorses what he says.

In this context, I was struck by John Humphrys' interview with Sharon Shoesmith on the BBC's Today programme this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9499000/9499424.stm.

Humphrys said that the nation wanted to know that someone was accepting the blame for Baby Peter's death, because, he said, "... if they do not accept the blame, how can we stop it happening again"?

But the opposite may be true. We may only be able to stop it happening again if we do not pursue blame against individuals too far. Not only does the pursuit of individuals give rise to a defensive culture, in which nobody will admit to even an honest mistake, but it creates a climate in which many people simply do not want to do the job, waking up each morning wondering just how long it will be before they become another Sharon Shoesmith.

Sidney Dekker is a Swedish academic, who also is an airline pilot. In his role as Professor of Human Factors and Flight Safety at the University of Lund, he investigates safety failures in aviation, medicine and other sectors. In his book Just Culture (Ashgate, Farnham 2007) he argues that not having a just culture in organisations damages safety by obstructing investigations, creating fear and fostering bureaucracy. His book should be read by everyone who works in a safety critical industry, like child protection.

If we want people to work safely in child protection - indeed if we want people to work in the profession at all - we need a just culture; and that is precisely what we have NOT got.

Sharon Shoesmith wins her appeal against sacking

2011-05-27T13:09:00.001+01:00

I don't have any torch to carry for Sharon Shoesmith. I don't even know her. But I can't help feeling relieved at the finding of the Court of Appeal today that she was unlawfully dismissed from her position as Director of Children's Services in Haringey. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13570959

This judgement sends an important message to all concerned. In the wake of a child protection tragedy the only thing to be gained from pursuing and blaming individuals is short-term publicity and tactical political advantage. It does nothing to improve the safety and welfare of children. Much more important is to focus on the organisational and systematic factors which have created the conditions in which disasters occur and how individuals interact with them.

The blame culture not only results in the absurdity of sacking people only to have to compensate them later for not treating them fairly. More importantly, it nurtures a climate in which people are unwilling to admit to failings and errors. As a result failings in practice and procedure go unreported and that makes children less safe.

Getting to grips with the Munro Review

2011-05-27T10:56:00.001+01:00

I have already predicted that people will find it difficult to adjust to the very different approach which is implicit in the Munro Review. A good example came to light this week in the form of a blog entry on the Children and Young People Now website by Peter Houselander (The Munro Review - A new vision for child protection? C&YP Now blogs - 25/5/11 http://community.cypnow.co.uk/blogs/ )

Peter notes Munro's endorsement of early intervention but he seems to assume that this implies that Munro is endorsing the information sharing initiatives of the previous government. Accordingly most of his entry is devoted to talk of removing barriers to information sharing and authorities having "...the right data sharing agreements and technology in place...." It sounds like a response to Every Child Matters rather than to the Munro Review.

In fact the Munro Review is skeptical of the value of information sharing. Munro writes: “A consistent finding from SCRs is that there is often a failure in the human performance, rather than an absence of the required framework, process, or procedures for sharing information.” (page 148)

Every Child Matters promoted the naive idea that simply as a result of having systems which shared more data between different agencies children would be less likely to slip through the net. Nine years on - and countless information sharing initiatives by the last Government - all we have is IT initiatives (like ICS) which continue to be both costly and unsatisfactory and no apparent impact on the safety or welfare of children, except the remorseless undermining of their data protection rights.

A careful reading of the Munro Review reveals how far her thinking is from the old paradigms. Children are made safer by contact with professionals who listen to them and take careful, thoughtful action - not by data exchanges!

The age of criminal responsibility

2011-05-20T10:22:00.000+01:00

It was good to read in Children and Young People Now today that Assistant Commissioner Ian McPherson, the Association of Chief Police Officer's lead spokesperson on children's and young people's issues, is quoted as saying:

"To say that at the age of 10 you suddenly become responsible as an individual seems to me a bit foolish."

What was very foolish was the peremptory abolition of the presumption of doli incapax by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. This meant that the prosecution no longer have to show that a child knew that what they were doing was seriously wrong. The Blair government's wretched publication, No More Excuses published in 1997, says:

"The Government believes that in presuming that children of this age (10-14) generally do not know the difference between naughtiness and serious wrongdoing, the notion of doli incapax is contrary to common sense." (para 4.4)

But in fact it is contrary to commonsense to presume that children as young as ten have a similar understanding of "serious wrongdoing" to an adult, as Ian McPherson has clearly recognised. We should be ashamed that we treat young people who appear before the courts as if they were invariably as culpable as adults. And we need to remember that the vast majority of children who come before the criminal courts are not charged with serious crimes of violence, but rather with matters such as dishonesty or criminal damage.

Our present Government has apparently said that it has no plans to revisit the age of criminal responsibility. It too should be ashamed that it is allowing an issue like this to fester, especially when the Scottish Government has raised the age of criminal responsibility to 12. No-one should take any satisfaction that in England and Wales we have the lowest age of criminal responsibility in Europe. It is a sign of a harsh and intolerant society.

Misplaced Procedures

2011-05-18T18:21:00.001+01:00

In a post I made in December 2010 I decried the voluminous London Child Protection Procedures, which have now grown into a huge tome over 500 pages in length. The Munro Review report makes similar observations about Working Together, the nationally produced Government guidance on which procedural manuals like the London one are based. Munro observes that one of the reasons for the huge growth in the length of such documents is the conflation of good practice guidance with regulation and statute. This contributes to the de-professionalising of child protection work by eroding the scope for discretion and judgement.

A little while ago I made a value-for-money Internet purchase, from a large on-line bookstore (which shall be nameless). For a couple of pounds – including the postage – I once again became the possessor of the 1991 edition of Working Together, my original copy having disappeared in the mists of time. This slim volume runs (not counting appendices) to only 60 pages of concisely expressed guidance and contrasts starkly with the 2010 edition, which runs to 335 pages (again not counting appendices) – more than five times the length.

1991 - 60 pages

2010 - 335 Pages

Successive Governments, aided and abetted by the children’s services ‘establishment’, have presided over this procedural verbosity. Why? Munro points to a risk-averse culture - and presumably the need to be seen to be doing something in the wake of tragedies may also have fostered this approach.

I believe, however, that the fundamental flaw stems from a widespread misunderstanding about the nature of child protection services. In my previous post I quoted IT expert, Darrel Ince, as observing that governments have perceived social work "as only slightly more complex than running a call centre”. Put another way there has been a tendency to see child protection not as being a "professional service" but rather as a "service shop" - a bit like retail banking, high street shops or fast food restaurants or call centres.

You can write procedures, and use IT to implement them, if what you are managing is a service shop. That's because service shops are relatively simple types of services, where the range of options is fairly limited and 'customisation' to the needs of the end user is relatively straightforward. But it takes only a few minutes reflection to understand that there is nothing simple and straightforward about the complex needs of abused and neglected children.

Why the "service-shop fallacy" (as I call it) has persisted so long is difficult to understand. Perhaps the great and the powerful want child protection social work to be a simple process which can be controlled from the centre. Perhaps we all crave certainty is an uncertain world.

The truth is that we cannot make difficult things simple by fiat. If we are to have effective child protection services, the only starting point is recognising that they are inevitably complex - too complex to 'proceduralise'.

Reactions to Munro

2011-05-18T16:35:00.002+01:00

The final report of the Munro Review is analytical, well argued, careful and balanced. It contains is no ‘magic bullet’; there is no quick fix. But the fifteen recommendations are sensible and, if adopted, seem to me to be likely to result in significant improvements in child protection social work. http://www.education.gov.uk/munroreview/

At last an official document has recognised that more guidance and more regulation does not result in improved practice and safer children!

In her first recommendation Munro asks Government to “… distinguish the rules that are essential for effective working together, from guidance that informs professional judgment” and to “…remove constraints to local innovation and professional judgment that are created by prescribing or endorsing particular approaches, for example, nationally designed assessment forms, national performance indicators associated with assessment or nationally prescribed approaches to IT systems.”

The recommendation also calls for the removal of “… the distinction between initial and core assessments and the associated timescales in respect of these assessments, replacing them with the decisions that are required to be made by qualified social workers when developing an understanding of children’s needs and making and implementing a plan to safeguard and promote their welfare”.

Judging by some of the comments in the press, I am not sure that the full implications of this recommendation have sunk in yet. What it means is the wholesale scrapping of the approach that has been developed over many years whereby groups of politicians, civil servants, “experts” and sector leaders have sat down in air conditioned offices and prescribed how child protection social work should be done. A raft of “tools”, “materials” “frameworks”, “exemplars” “procedures” and systems will have to be swept aside.

The extent to which people are struggling with this recommendation is well illustrated by two reports I have seen in the press this week.

Community Care, in article headlined “Integrated children's systems can be overhauled cheaply” (http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/05/17/116826/integrated-childrens-systems-can-be-overhauled-cheaply.htm) quotes Steve Liddicott, former chair of the national ICS expert panel, as arguing in the wake of Munro that it would be possible to make “quite big changes” to existing IT systems and so avoid the expense of developing new systems. The ability to do this, he says, would depend on the level of in-house IT expertise and on deploying the right skills.

But it is not just a matter of ‘overhaul’. In the absence of a comprehensive audit of these IT systems I do not know just how bad or good individual ones are, but I do know that there is a fundamental misconception behind many of them. That is the idea that rather than support practice – as a narrative or chronicling system would’ – many of these ICS systems are built around the nationally designed assessment forms which Munro, quite rightly, is at pains to reject. It would be better to have no computer systems at all than ones that drive practice inappropriately.

I think that Steve Liddicott and other apologists for ICS need to become familiar with the work of Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at the Open University and author of more than 100 research papers and more than 20 books on computing.

Darrel Ince obviously knows a thing or two about software. He has also described ICS as having “absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever” (“Computer says: ‘Misery’” Professional Social Work, March 2010). He believes that the short-term solution is what he calls the “barefoot doctor” approach based on devising MS Word templates or using commercial document management systems. These approaches are not likely to be expensive and would allow the development of systems that can cope with unstructured narrative. Most importantly they are not simply modifications, or overhauls, of what Ince refers to as a “forms-based, record-based, database-centred system”.

Incidentally, his article contains some great comments. I particularly liked his description of the failure of ICS as resulting from “… government perceiving social work as only slightly more complex than running a call centre”. That comment has wider resonances and might be applied to much of the recent history of child protection social work in the United Kingdom.

If there is still a long way to go for some people in understanding the implications of Munro for IT systems, then there is also a steep learning curve for those with wider responsibilities. For example, I was struck by comments in Your Canterbury (not a publication I read very often – http://www.yourcanterbury.co.uk/p_139/Article/a_13673/KCC_child_protection_chief_Cllr_Jenny_Whittle_welcomes_government_reforms ).

This quotes Jenny Whittle, Kent County Council’s Cabinet member for specialist children's services as welcoming Munro’s recommendations saying, "It's absolutely right that they (social workers) should be freed up to spend more time developing relationships with vulnerable children and families.” But she goes on to say that she does not agree with scrapping centrally-prescribed timescales for social work assessments, pointing out that Kent is working hard to improve after Ofsted heavily criticised it for poor timescale management. “If you don't have timescales, “ says Jenny Whittle, “then you risk losing discipline. If that is one of the plans adopted by the Government, we would seek to keep timescales in Kent."

Sadly, Jenny, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t "free-up" social workers time if you are prescribing how they will spend it. You can’t square circles.

It seems that the most difficult thing about the Munro Review may be the creation of the conditions in which it can be implemented. People will naturally adhere to the familiar. After years of central control and imposed systems, it will be difficult for many to think outside the box. Let's hope that the government moves swiftly to endorse the overall approach and begin the process of change.

Lean services - types of waste

2011-05-09T14:38:00.000+01:00

Back in October 2010 I made a long post about 'Lean" - the idea that successful operations are those that strictly focus on those activities which 'add value' and abhor waste.

I have just noticed a most comprehensive list of sources of waste, reported in Radnor et al - Evaluation of the Lean Approach to Business Management and its Use in the Public Sector Scottish Executive Social Research 2006 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/06/13162106/0

Rework
Preparing unnecessary reports
Working with badly designed IT systems
Fire fighting
Working from unreliable information
Checking other people's work
Too many meetings/working groups
Progress chasing
Doing things others have already done
Obtaining authorisation
Work not fit for purpose
Dealing with failure demand (i.e. demand for a service which results from failure to do something which is expected - e.g. "I am just calling up to find out what has happened to the referral I made")

How typical, I wonder, are these sources of waste in child protection work and how much more effective would services be if they could be severely reduced or eliminated?

Recruitment and Retention - Let's have the facts

2011-05-03T14:19:00.003+01:00

Following my two previous posts, just a thought. Why doesn't some-one (e.g. Ofsted, the Department for Education, the LGA) collect some basic data about recruitment and retention of children's social workers - and publish it?
The Local Government Workforce Survey - published by the LGA - doesn't really provide the kind of detail required. I'd suggest the following: vacancy rate, turnover, average time in post of current staff, reasons for leaving, proportion of agency workers, proportion of newly qualified staff in post, proportion of staff recruited abroad. All of that must be available in the HR systems of local authorities and could easily be sent to a central point for collation.
Having that sort of data would not only give a clear national picture, but would allow the identification of areas where the problems were most severe.

"Who'd be a social worker" episode 1 - BBC Radio 4 - Mon 2nd May 2011, 16.30

2011-05-03T09:56:00.000+01:00

There were parts of the first episode of BBC Radio 4’s Who'd be a Social Worker that I found puzzling [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010gj9k]. For example some of the social work students’ comments on their practice placements ranged from the odd to the bizarre. A couple of students appeared to have been sent off to handle child protection work on their own, with one claiming to have removed children from their parents on two separate occasions, with only a support worker in tow. In contrast two students had had placements with little social work involvement – “filing, faxing and photocopying” and “making breakfasts for service users”. Then there was the odd case of the student who had failed her placement for rolling a cigarette….

The programme seemed to be on firmer ground when it was a matter of facts and figures. We were told that Birmingham University had no shortage of applicants for the 64 places on its social work degree course – 1000 in fact. And as the programme progressed it became obvious that the problems of staffing afflicting child protection social work stem not from lack of recruits but from lack of experienced staff. A recruitment agency manager said that most of the jobs on her books were marked as being not suitable for newly qualified social workers and that it was very hard to place those with no post qualification experience. On the other hand experienced social workers – of whom there were very few – were like ‘gold-dust’.

And then there were those who had qualified and found work but did not want to stay. One disillusioned recruit complained of ‘so much paperwork’ and ‘so much working on the computer’. She described her job as ‘tedious’ and said she only had contact with service users occasionally.

I suppose none of this is much different from what we already know. There is a real problem of retaining experienced and qualified staff in children’s social work and the problem does not seem to be getting the attention it deserves. Clearly creating a surplus of newly qualified social workers is no solution. Having a few advertising campaigns to drum up interest in social work degrees is, of course, relatively easy. What is much less easy is creating the kinds of conditions within employing agencies which will make qualified people want to stay and develop a long-term commitment.

Children's Social Work - Recruitment and Retention

2011-04-28T12:52:00.002+01:00

It was interesting to hear Andrew Adonis on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours yesterday discussing the state of children’s social work.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b010mryz

Adonis, who was among other things a junior children’s minister in the last government, seemed to be in favour of recruiting the ‘brightest and the best’, by introducing social work’s equivalent of the Teach First charity which places ‘exceptional graduates’ into ‘schools in challenging circumstances' http://www.teachfirst.org.uk/AboutUs/

Sadly I think he misses the point. It is not just a matter of giving people more support and status. The problems with recruitment, and particularly retention, in children’s social work are very deep seated. They concern the fact that the job has become progressively harder to do because of ever more prescriptive guidelines and regulations and the introduction of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS), which forces practitioners to complete assessments based on ‘exemplars’ which hinder, rather than help, effective decision-making. Add to that the pervasive blame culture and it is not difficult to see why so many people come into children’s social work only to move on.

The best starting point is to think much more creatively about how to re-design both jobs and organisations to make children’s social work more do-able. This is not just a local matter, because many of the obstacles are to be found in government guidance and the imposition of working practices, through ICS, which are both unrealistic and unnecessary. There needs to be a radical simplification of regulation and guidance and the replacement of ICS with systems which actually support practice, through reducing bureaucracy and making effective case recording less burdensome.

Disturbing Trends?

2011-04-21T11:25:00.002+01:00

There is more evidence this week of increased demand for child protection services.

In the year ending 31^st March 2011, the NSPCC’s Helpline referred more than 16,000 cases to local authorities, a huge increase of 37% on the previous year. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/21/nspcc-hotline-record-number-of-calls

Helpline managers believe this increase results from members of the public being more aware of child protection issues and being more willing to act if they have suspicions.

Also researchers at Cardiff University’s Violence and Society Research Group report a 20% increase in the number of children under 11 who needed emergency hospital treatment as a result of violence last year. http://www.cf.ac.uk/news/articles/study-shows-fall-in-violence-6671.html

This is in contrast to other age groups where injuries from assault requiring hospital treatment fell by more than 10 per cent. The rise in the number of younger children requiring treatment follows an 8% increase in 2009.

Upward trends in child abuse and neglect are always disturbing, but sometimes result from changes in reporting practices. However, a clear-cut issue that will not go away is that the load on agencies – especially children’s social care – as a result of increased referrals is increasing substantially.

Given the long-term staffing and resource problems that afflict the provision of child protection services in the United Kingdom, there is every reason to view these figures with apprehension, if not alarm. Whatever the recommendations of the Munro Review are, they will not amount to a quick fix. In the meantime the system looks set to struggle to deal with substantial surges in demand without increased resources or improved working practices.

When splitting-up is the right thing to do

2011-04-17T13:07:00.001+01:00

A committee of MPs has come up with a sensible recommendation: Ofsted should be split into two, one part dealing with inspection of education and the other with inspection of children’s social care. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13095172

This conclusion is, of course, blindingly obvious, the only puzzle being why anyone should have ever wanted to subsume children’s social care inspection into a schools’ inspectorate in the first place.

Let’s hope the government gives this matter urgent attention. But there is no reason why we need to wait for legislation in order to see some change. Ofsted could begin preparing for a split right now by doing the following:

Ensuring that the right kind of expertise is brought into an embryonic children’s social care inspectorate at all levels - people with substantial research and practice experience of child protection and services for looked after children are required
Engaging systematically with leading academics and highly experienced practitioners expert in child protection and social care
Conducting thematic inspections focused on identifying good practice and exploring risk of service failure and how resilience can be increased
Abandoning preoccupation with targets and achieving procedural compliance - by developing an inspection regime based on informing and supporting the continuous improvement in the quality of services as perceived by children and young people

It would also be good to see some real management knowledge and experience brought in. And by 'management' I don't mean administration and bureaucracy. I do mean an intelligent understanding of how to design and operate complex services in a turbulent, at times volatile, environment.

What is the impact of the cuts?

2011-04-14T11:45:00.003+01:00

Judy Cooper’s article in Community Care yesterday should set alarm bells ringing.(http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/04/13/116655/alarm-as-children-are-endangered-by-child-protection-cuts.htm?printerfriendly=true )
It reports that a survey of 170 social workers revealed that 82% believed child protection thresholds have increased in the last year. Comments by the respondents were worrying, suggesting that in their experiences clear cases of abuse and neglect were not being actioned and that the Common Assessment Framework and the Team Around the Child were being seen as alternatives to Section 47 enquiries and Child Protection Plans.

We do not, of course, know how representative this sample is, but in the absence of information to the contrary it should signal grave concern. Despite assurances from central government that local authority cuts will not fall on child protection, there is no telling how, in times of unparalleled austerity, things will work out on the ground.

Ideally I would look to the regulator, Ofsted, to undertake urgently some thematic inspection work to monitor the impact of the cuts on child protection, but I am not aware of any such work currently in progress or being planned.

Listening to Children – not to systems

2011-04-11T11:19:00.001+01:00

Important and useful research by the University of East Anglia, and funded by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, has just been published. Don’t make assumptions: Children’s and young people’s views of the child protection system and messages for change, written by Jeanette Cossar, Marian Brandon and Peter Jordan, is essential reading for everyone engaged in providing child protection services. http://www.uea.ac.uk/swp/research/centre/crcfnews/prchildpro

The study looked at children’s views of the child protection system. The messages from the research are unequivocal: children involved in child protection inquiries must be listened to and their views respected. One important recommendation, among many, caught my eye:

"Local authorities should recognise the importance of the child’s relationship with the social worker and organise the work so that social workers can get to know children, and are not viewed as remote but powerful figures."

That flies in the face of trends in recent years to re-engineer child protection social work through the introduction of computerised assessment tools and highly structured approaches to child protection inquiries. Yes, I am thinking of the Integrated Children’s System here! Social workers cannot make trusting relationships with children if they are spending lots of time in front of computers and are seen by children and their families as bureaucrats who are just collecting information.

Another recent publication lends weight to these conclusions.

Bradford Safeguarding Children Board’s Serious Case Review Executive Summary Regarding a Child who was born on 17/4/2000 and died on 18/2/2010 (http://www.bradford-scb.org.uk/scr.htm#scr) draws attention to some of the adverse “… effects of electronic recording systems, protocols and pro-forma requirements…” which, it is argued, “… may constrain lateral thinking and initiative”. The review states that “… it is important that (these systems) should not erode the role of human intelligence in making connections between historical events”. The conclusion drawn is that “… practitioners should be encouraged to be ‘curious and to think critically and systematically’ in order to better understand the risk of harm to children” (p 22).

To summarise: we need child protection social workers who listen attentively and respectfully to children and young people and who are capable of building trusting relationships with them. And they need to be curious and to be capable of critical, lateral thinking and initiative. What we don’t need is people who are driven by systems, protocols and pro-formas which have been designed by civil servants and software developers!

I think the writing should now be on the wall for the Core Assessment, in particular, and the Integrated Children’s System, in general. I am not arguing that social workers don’t need to make careful assessments of children’s needs – just that the way to do this is by building strong relationships with children, gaining their trust and thinking critically and imaginatively about what to do next.

Management v Managerialism

2011-03-02T10:07:00.000Z

I concluded my last post by criticising Ofsted for not taking a "management perspective". Some people might misunderstand that, so the purpose of this post is to make my view clear.

I am strongly in favour of good management in child protection work. But I am opposed to what is called managerialism. What's the difference?

I think it was Peter Drucker who said that 'management' is all about "how to do the right things right". In child protection work doing the right things right involves creating conditions in which professionals can work as professionals, not bureaucrats, to meet the needs of abused and neglected children. The role of the manager is to ensure that the professionals are well supported and that systems and facilities are well designed and fit for purpose.

There are many definitions of 'managerialism'. Krantz and Gilmore ["The Splitting of Leadership and Management as a Social Defense." Human Relations 43 (February 1990)] stress that it involves promoting the analytical decision-making tools developed by managers "as ends in themselves". In other words the 'managerialist' believes in substituting management tools for professional practices; the manager knows best.

The differences between the two positions are illustrated by looking at the kinds of questions that advocates of the two positions might ask. Typically the managerialist will asks questions like:

What targets shall we set?
What rules and procedures should be enforced?
How do we monitor and achieve compliance?
What forms and computer systems shall we implement?
How can we best represent our work to inspectors and politicians?

In contrast the advocate of good management will focus on the following:

How do we discover the wants and needs of those we want to help?
How do we plan in order to deliver the required services?
How can we create conditions in which professionals and other staff are supported and motivated and able to succeed in delivering quality services?
What could go wrong and what do we need to do to avoid it?
How do we find, and best use, the resources to do the tasks which we know to be necessary?

Managerialism makes a fetish of management theory, raising it above professional and technical knowledge and even commonsense. Good management, on the other hands tries to use management theory to create the conditions in which those who understand complex problems can best deliver appropriate services.

Ofsted find Cornwall 'Inadequate'

2011-03-01T11:45:00.000Z

Reading the latest Ofsted report, which finds that Cornwall's child protection services are 'inadequate', I was drawn to the statistics on pages 3 and 4. (http://offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/NewsAttachments/PYC/Cornwall%20inspection%20report.pdf )

There one can find out all sorts of things about Cornwall's children, and the authority's services for children, including the number of Gypsy and Traveller children living in the county, and the proportion of pupils whose first language is known or believed to be other than English (which is very low).

Some data that I couldn't find in the report seemed to me to be much more important than this rambling statistical digest. Given that the report is highly critical of the services provided, I would have expected to have seen something about what are two key aspects of any operation - the demand for services and the capacity to meet it.

Some crude figures such as the number of children referred in a given period and the number of social workers and support staff trying to meet this demand would have been a starting point. And it would have been useful to have information on vacancy, retention and sickness absence rates as well. The second part of the report - on services for looked after children - mentions low vacancy rates in this part of the work, but there is nothing to indicate what the staffing of child protection teams is like.

Among the first things any Operations Management student would look at in assessing a service operation are demand and capacity. But Ofsted doesn't really take a management perspective - despite banging on about 'leadership' and 'performance management'. Rather inspectors are rooted in a tradition of regulations, procedures and targets and equate the 'effectiveness of safeguarding' to how well services conform to what are, more often than not, arbitrary requirements.

The Prevalence of Child Abuse and Neglect in Britain

2011-02-17T11:28:00.002Z

The NSPCC’s survey of the prevalence of child maltreatment is most welcome. (Child cruelty in the UK 2011 An NSPCC study into childhood abuse and neglect over the past 30 years February 2011 - http://www.nspcc.org.uk/news-and-views/our-news/nspcc-news/11-02-15-report-launch/nspcc-stats-launch-event_wda80813.html )

At this stage only an executive summary is available. Even a careful reading of this left me a bit confused about the main implications. It is, however, clear that this study, like its 1999 predecessor (also conducted by the NSPCC), is a very important piece of research that must be studied carefully by professionals and policy makers.

One in seven of the young adults surveyed (14.5%) reported that they had been severely maltreated by a parent or guardian during childhood.

This is, of course, a shocking figure, but a problem is that studies like this are, of necessity, studies of prevalence not incidence. In other words they survey a random sample of the population to determine if they have ever been victims of child abuse and neglect. Turning the findings into estimates of incidence (i.e. how many children and young people are being abused and neglected at any one time) is not easy. But by any standards it seems hard to reconcile the relatively small numbers of children subject to child protection plans (less than 50,000) with the main findings of this research, suggesting that under-reporting of abuse and neglect remains a serious problem.

I am looking forward to being able to dig down into the detail of this study when the full findings are released. Of particular importance will be information relating to the sub-group of those reporting persistent maltreatment and any information about the extent to which they received (or did not receive) help from statutory services.

ICS and the Mountain

2011-02-08T13:13:00.001Z

I was struck by the following comment in Molly Garboden’s piece in Community Care yesterday (“Munro's 'ideal' vision of child protection social work” Monday 07 February 2011 - http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/02/07/116232/munros-ideal-vision-of-child-protection-social-work.htm )

“There is much less in the latest report than in her (Munro’s) first installment, however, about ICS becoming an intuitive decision-making tool similar to those used in the airline industry and medicine. It seems likely that, even in an ideal world, Munro recognised that there is a pretty big mountain for ICS to climb.” (my underlining)

If this is an accurate prediction of what the review will ultimately recommend – and hopefully it is not - then it is sad. In my view no amount of remedial work is going to make the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) fit for purpose. That is because it is misconceived. Rather than supporting the professional work that child protection social workers do, ICS imposes an unrealistic model of practice. Completing all the forms and ticking all the boxes doesn’t result in better decision-making. In fact it impedes it, not only because is it time consuming, but also because frequently it is not possible to gather good quality data. The results are thousands upon thousands of yes/no boxes checked on which people do not (and should not) rely when making their decisions.

The purpose of child protection social work is not completing assessments. Assessments are only useful if they accurately inform decisions about whether or not, and how, to intervene in the life of a child. In order to have useful IT in child protection, it is necessary to begin by building an accurate understanding of how sound decisions are taken and what support social workers need in taking them.

Management accountants have an old – but precious – adage: sunk costs are history. Just because a lot of money, time and effort have been spent on something in the past has no bearing on whether it makes sense to continue spending money, time and effort on it in the future.

To borrow Molly’s metaphor: I don’t want to see ICS climbing any mountains. It’s best discarded at base camp. Otherwise its weight and cumbersomeness will cause climbers to lose their footings and bring the whole expedition to a sorry end.

The Tragedy of Alex Sutherland

2011-02-07T17:15:00.002Z

The executive summary of the Serious Case Review report concerning the death of “Child T” (Alex Sutherland) is generally clearly written and provides sufficient information to see the basic facts of the case (http://www.manchesterscb.org.uk/prof-scr.asp ). But I began to get depressed when I reached the conclusions and recommendations.

The report casts the net of responsibility for the failings widely:

“The Panel considered that no single agency was responsible for failing to protect Child T from the chronic neglect which he suffered at the hands of his mother, but rather he was the victim of the multiple failures of all those agencies with whom he was involved (with the exception of GMP) to recognise the risks to which he was exposed and to take appropriate protective action.” (para 7.2, page 23).

The report then goes on to blame a combination of “single agency failings” and “generally poor inter-agency communication and collaborative working’, without engaging in any rigorous systematic analysis of the causes of the disaster. The result is a series of recommendations that seems to me unlikely to make any serious contribution to improving the safety of child protection services in Manchester or elsewhere. Two that struck me as being particularly weak were the following:

(For University Hospitals of South Manchester) “All patients attending the trust to be asked routinely about dependants that they are responsible for.”

(For Manchester Children’s Social Care) “Revise procedures to ensure social workers speak directly to family members as part of assessments.”

Resisting the temptation to fulminate - or even to wonder what people having in-growing toe nails removed in South Manchester will think when they are given the third degree about who are their nearest and dearest – I will swiftly move on to the crux of the issue which goes something like this.

Alex Sutherland suffered neglect as a result of his mother’s alcoholism. From the first involvement of statutory services to the last, it seems clear that the primary focus of all the agencies involved was concern for Alex’s care as a result of his mother’s drinking. Not only that but several referrals from members of the public also cited maternal drinking and consequent neglect. Yet having initially embarked on a child protection approach to Alex’s case, Manchester children’s services subsequently produced a Child in Need plan (instead of a Child Protection Plan) and then continued to work with Alex and his mother on the basis that he was a child in need but not in need of protection.

In view of what is known about Alex’s condition and the facts of the case, that decision – not to hold a child protection conference that would probably have resulted in a Child Protection Plan – seems to me to have been the crucial mistake. But it is not addressed in the Serious Case Review Executive Summary. Nor does it receive any attention in the press coverage.

Recognising this error is the beginning, not the end, of a proper analysis of what went wrong in this case. Bad decisions of this sort are not usually a matter of individual failings. They are normally the product a complex matrix of environmental, organisational and inter-organisational factors that result in individuals loosing situational awareness. One might speculate that staff and other resource shortages, and local and national procedures and policies, may have contributed to a climate in which an apparently clear case of child neglect was not treated as such. But it seems we shall never know.

Good news from Munro

2011-02-01T11:42:00.003Z

Eileen Munro’s review seems to be developing on the right lines. On the BBC’s Today programme this morning she told John Humphrys that more rules do not make children safer and that social workers trying to protect children are often distracted by filling forms and following procedures. She argued that professionals should be spending more time working directly with children, trying to understand how they feel and what they want to happen.

These are conclusions with which it is difficult to disagree. Child protection social work must be child centred. And procedures need to support good practice, not impede it. There is mounting evidence that huge procedural manuals and data driven recording systems, such as ICS, are obstacles to getting the job done and barriers to meeting children's needs.

The BBC also reports that Munro believes that formal time scales can distract social workers from making sound decisions. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12323806)

Again this is good common sense. Completing an assessment before some vital piece of information can be made available is actually a waste of time – because the assessment may have to be revisited. Holding a child protection conference on a date within the required timescales, but on which key participants are not available to attend, is equally counter-productive.

Child of ContactPoint?

2011-01-24T11:10:00.001Z

I was pleased to read last week in Community Care about children’s minister Tim Loughton’s plans for a ContactPoint ‘replacement’.

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2011/01/19/116133/contactpoint-replacement-could-be-tried-in-hospitals.htm

If, as reported, the plan is for a national database, to be used by hospital A&E departments, containing only the names of children who are looked after, or subject to a child protection plans or who have been the subjects of section 47 enquiries, then it has my wholehearted support.

Putting the names of such children on a database can be justified because they are known to be at risk, and making A&E medical staff the main users is sensible. The police have various national systems that let them know if a child has previously come to attention, but A&E staff frequently have to see children with puzzling or suspicious injuries who are not from the local area. Currently in such cases they can only find out if the child is subject to a child protection plan by making a child protection referral. And it might take several days to discover that the child was at risk, by which time the family is long-gone.

A simple system like this is very sensible and, unlike ContactPoint, the small restricted user-ship of professionals, bound by well-established codes of medical confidentiality, will make it much more secure.

Reducing Bureaucracy - and adding value

2011-01-14T11:22:00.001Z

Eileen Munro's review has been tasked by the Government with examining ways in which bureaucracy in child protection can be reduced. The Department for Education has recently published a list of questions (http://www.education.gov.uk/munroreview/) that the review would like answered by professionals, including this one:

“What prescribed procedures and forms do you feel are unnecessary, overly time consuming or cause you to duplicate work?”

I am apprehensive that this question might produce a rag bag of responses, targeting people's pet hates, while ignoring other work which, although unnecessary, is generally felt to be less objectionable. Ultimately a more analytic approach may be required. How might this be undertaken?

A good starting place is the concept of “adding value”. An activity is said to add value if it contributes to satisfying the needs and wants of the end-user of the service, in this case abused and neglected children. In any business or professional process some activities will add value while others will not. For example conducting an effective and sensitive interview with a child adds value by discovering the child’s needs and wants. On the other hand completing a travel claim for expenses involved in the interview adds nothing from the child’s point of view.

It is not always so easy to see whether a particular activity is value adding or not. Many activities do not provide value directly but do so by supporting an activity that does. And things are made more difficult because child protection is a very complex process that is not always easily understood.

But that should not stop us trying. The first step is to decompose processes into discrete activities. Then to ask, does this activity directly add value, and if so how? If we are unable to answer this question in the affirmative, we need to move on to consider if the activity supports another that is directly adding value. If we cannot establish that, then it is likely that the process is non-value adding and we need to look at ways in which it might be reduced or eliminated.

Many non-value adding activities are likely be found in the “back-office” in areas such as record keeping, filing, staff management and financial controls. While some of these are “necessary evils” (for example legal requirements) constant attention needs to be given to understanding how they can be simplified and their cost and impact reduced.

However, that does not mean that all client contact activities are value adding. Conducting unnecessary assessments, for example, is costly and time consuming. So is poorly focused casework. Clearly child protection social workers need to address constantly the issue of whether what they are doing adds value from the child’s perspective. But that is essentially what is meant when we talk about services being “child focused”.

Non-value adding activities are the same thing as “waste”. Some of the main causes of waste in a business or professional process are:

Waiting and delays

Transportation (e.g. of people) or transmission (e.g. of information)

Re-work

Set-up time

Downtime

Having a valuable asset like a social worker being unproductive because s/he is waiting to be called at a court hearing has a direct impact on the quality of service received by other children and young people. Similarly being stuck in a traffic jam on the way to a meeting is not a good use of a social worker’s time. Waiting to receive important information delays important decisions and disrupts the flow of the service. Having to re-do a piece of work is always wasteful, but this happens where the original piece of work was rushed and not done properly. While appropriate planning (set-up time) may make casework more successful, too much planning delays the service and diverts professionals’ effort from actually meeting the child’s needs. Downtime – such as team meetings or training events – needs to be carefully examined. If it is clear that it will improve the service, then it can be justified, but if not it is a poor use of scarce resources.

So it is not just the "back office" functions that need to be addressed in the quest for reduced "bureaucracy". Everybody who works in child protection needs to be alert for signs that an activity does not add value, and there need to be mechanisms by which workers can raise concerns that waste is occurring. Instead of organisations being attached to the way things currently work, there needs to be an understanding that children's needs will only be better met if challenging "the way we do things" ceases to be a nuisance to managers and instead becomes the hallmark of a good employee.

A matter of procedure?

2010-12-12T21:39:00.001Z

I see that the 4th edition of the London Child Protection Procedures has recently been published - http://www.londonscb.gov.uk/procedures/. The volume is 550 pages long!

When the 3rd edition came out in 2007 (a tome of similar size) I amused myself with some statistics:

Weight = 1.8 kilogrammes
Length = nearly 100,000 words
Hours to read (assuming a reading speed of 250 per minute) = about 6 hrs 40 mins

The authors tell us that the "... target audience is professionals (including unqualified staff and volunteers) and front-line managers who have particular responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children...." Quite a lot of people. If every such person in England had to read a volume like this (and the London Procedures are not untypical) and assuming a figure of 330,000 professionals (the number that was always quoted in connection with ContactPoint) then that's about 2.2 million person hours of reading time. Not cheap.

I think procedural manuals like this one have had their day. Here's why:

Most of the work child protection social workers and other professionals do cannot be proceduralised. There is no simple step-by-step guide to conducting a difficult inquiry or a complex assessment. Getting it right requires common sense, imagination, professional knowledge, the ability to relate well to both children and adults, being trusted, being a good listener, making sound decisions, being flexible, being persistent, being prepared to think laterally, being willing to revise an opinion. I could go on .... There is a a lot of process variability, as we say in operations management.
True there are some things in child protection that can be proceduralised. But these are the less interesting parts - the administration, the forms, etc.. Standardising some things may be a good idea but it should be done with three clear aims: (1) reducing unnecessary administrative labour and simplifying bureaucratic processes; (2) reducing the possibility of misunderstandings and ambiguities; (3) making sure that information is appropriately communicated and recorded.
Most professionals (such as teachers or GPs) do not need complex procedures. They encounter child abuse and neglect from time to time and they need to know what to do and how to do it as simply and as quickly as possible. The rest of the time they need to get on with their jobs. Having complex procedures has two downsides: (1) people don't have the time to read them and become familiar with them; (2) in an emergency people make mistakes because the procedures are too complex to remember. Having a clear set of procedures set out on one side of A4, which everybody follows if they have a concern, is the ideal.
Complex procedures contain "error traps" - weaknesses lurking unseen waiting to trip us up. The reason they are there is that the people who drew up the procedures are not omniscient. There's always something that will eventually happen which couldn't be foreseen.
Not infrequently there is something missing from the procedures. Take section 6.5 of the London procedures, for example. This concerns referral. Nowhere in this section does it deal with the issue of what the referrer does when the local authority refuse to act on a child protection referral. I looked specifically for this because Birmingham children's services refusal to act on a referral concerning Khyra Ishaq is still fresh in my mind. And it seems that exactly the same sort of impasse could occur in following the London procedures.
Having big volumes of procedures can result in a false sense of security. It supports the idea that it all works like a well-oiled big machine and that all you need to do is read and understand the "operating manual". But nothing could be further from the truth. We only make child protection safer by starting off from the understanding that there are a lot of uncertainties in the work. Rather than giving people the idea that the manual "has it covered" we should be giving them tools and skills to deal with situations which no manual can cover.

There's a lot in the London procedures which I find confusing and which I expect people less familiar than I am with child protection would find baffling. Section 6 on referral is especially complex and unclear. The problems start because the authors appear to want to dovetail the Common Assessment Framework with the process of referring a child or young person about whom their are concerns of abuse and neglect. Paragraph 6.4.2 states:

"Other than in cases where it is immediately clear that a child is, or is likely to be, at risk of significant harm, professionals should complete a common assessment and discuss this with their agency’s nominated safeguarding children adviser, LA children’s social care or the police, to help them reach a decision that the concerns they have about a child are sufficiently serious for a referral to be made to LA children’s social care."

The central weakness of this paragraph is in the first sentence. "Other than in cases where it is immediately clear that a child is, or is likely to be, at risk of significant harm ...." casts the net very wide. Suppose a seven year old boy arrives at school one morning with a classic black-eye (circular bruising around the eye) and when asked by the teacher how it happened he says: "Walked into a door, Miss". That sounds to me like a situation in which the teacher might feel she was not "immediately clear" that the child is at risk of significant harm. She probably would be very suspicious and she probably would know that it is quite hard to get a black eye from walking into a door (unless you walk into the door knob). But it is not "immediately clear" that this child is at risk of significant harm in the way in which it would be had he said: "My Dad thumped me". So what should the teacher do?

Well I think that the correct answer is that she should make a child protection referral. This is a worrying case. But the procedure leaves open the alternative of completing a common assessment. And it is just possible that in some cases that's what might happen. Not in the real world, I hear people say. Well that's exactly what happened in the Khyra Ishaq case, where the school tried to make a child protection referral but were invited by Birmingham Children's Social Care to conduct a Common Assessment instead.

Paragraph 6.4.2 goes on to pile confusion on top of uncertainty by suggesting three alternative sources of help are available to a practitioner who cannot decide, but notice that the implication is that this would only be done after a Common Assessment has been completed. And I don't think that's safe, or fair to the practitioner concerned. If people with little experience of child abuse, and no clear authority, are left to conduct a screening check on what is possibly a case of serious child abuse through the use of the crude tool of the Common Assessment, then sooner or later something will go badly amiss.

So I've got it in for procedures. I'd like to see some simple ones which don't over-step the mark and which everybody could become familiar with. A few clear things we all need to do when we suspect child abuse. But don't let's kid ourselves that voluminous manuals make practice any safer. They just waste paper and time.

A system under pressure

2010-11-24T08:29:00.000Z

Ofsted’s Annual Report 2009 – 2010 (www.ofsted.gov.uk/publication/annualreport0910)
has just been published.

It tells us that, between March 2009 and March 2010:

Referrals to children’s social care services increased by 11%
The number of initial assessments undertaken increased by 12%
The number of core assessments increased by 17%
The number of children subject to child protection plans increased by nearly 5%
There was a marked increase in the complexity of referrals
There was a 34% increase in the number of public law care cases

By any standards these are staggering statistics. Combined with chronic shortages of social workers and foster carers they point to a system which is under extreme pressure. Urgent steps need to be taken to allocate more resources to increase capacity. Failure to do so will result in more and more children not being adequately protected.

Lean thinking in Solihull

2010-10-19T15:42:00.000+01:00

On Monday 18^th October 2010 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme had an interesting report by Andrew Hosken that detailed initiatives by Solihull Council’s to apply lean thinking to their systems for vetting foster parents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9101000/9101255.stm

The Chief Executive of the council said that a large part of the problem of slow and inefficient vetting of foster parents was found to be caused by custom and practice. Over the years steps had been introduced into the processes which were not strictly required, but which various people at various times in the past had thought to be helpful. As a result there was repetition and waste. Instead of getting it right first time it was more a matter of getting it right in the end.

The council has been working with consultants who come from an engineering background and who are introducing council employees to key lessons from Japanese motor industry practice. The lean approach is applied to analyse business and professional processes: look for the value-adding parts of the process and avoid activities that consume time and resources that don’t add value. The emphasis is on avoiding duplication and waste and on ensuring that things happen at the right time, so preventing downstream delays. For example it was reported that by doing CRB checks early in the process, rather than late, unnecessary work could be avoided if they come back negative.

Back in September of last year - following a conference paper which I felt had fallen mostly on deaf ears - I wrote about the lean approach in this blog. I said that

"....Lean is the deceptively simple idea that we need to devote our energies to those business and professional processes which "add-value" rather than to those which don't. Put at its simplest this means that resources should be directed so far as possible only to those activities which are strictly necessary to satisfy the needs we are trying to meet. In child protection terms this means activities which either prevent child maltreatment or which rescue children from it and meet their resulting needs; not administration, paper-work, recording or meetings.

"In the mid 20th century Japanese manufacturing companies realised that they were wasting time and resources on non-value-adding activities such as administration, in-process inventory and re-work. They developed an abhorrence of waste and gradually moved towards a situation in which all changes to the production system were vetted for their contribution to establishing a truly lean environment. In child protection work in Britain we appear to have moved in the opposite direction by developing ever more complex procedures and time consuming recording and IT systems. The amount of time that front-line staff are engaged in administration appears to have increased dramatically. Indeed it is hard to find any evidence that the impact of changes such as new procedures, recording and assessment systems on the ability of front-line staff to practice effectively have ever been evaluated.

"Becoming lean would involve child protection services rigorously re-assessing where value is added and where it is not. Procedures, recording systems and administration need to be re-designed to maximise the time available for direct value-adding work with families and children."

I'm glad to hear that the folks in Solihull have come to similar conclusions. They are likely to end up with a better service as a result.

There are strong moral and ethical reasons why we should embrace lean methodology in children's social work. The whole business of safeguarding children and promoting their welfare, and of acting in their best interests, involves us not only in doing the right things, and not doing the wrong things, but also ensuring that all the available resources go towards doing the right things, not other things which have no value for children and young people. Ethical child protection requires us not only to do no harm, but also to ensure that we do not squander scarce and valuable resources by doing things which make no difference.

If you are interested in reading more about Lean there is a very good account of how it can be applied in the public sector - and some of the pitfalls - which has been produced by colleagues at the Warwick Business School:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/06/13162106/0

The Lesson of the Khyra Ishaq Tragedy

2010-10-19T11:32:00.002+01:00

Welcome opportunities for travel in September and October have kept me away from the blog. But I have done some reading, in particular looking at the Khyra Ishaq Serious Case Review Report.

A crucial and very worrying part of the report focuses on the events of 19th and 20th December 2007. What follows is my précis of pages 49 – 51 of the report.

On 19th December a child protection referral was made by the Deputy Head Teacher of the child’s school to Birmingham Children’s Social Care. The concerns expressed were that the child and a sibling had been taking food from other children’s bags and cramming food into their mouths. Both children were reported to be thin but generally clean and tidy. It was also reported that the child had been out of school following a meeting between school staff and the mother, after which the mother had been very hostile towards school staff.

The response by Children's Social Care to this referral was as follows:

It was stated that the Children’s Social Care team manager had recommended that the school education social worker and the school nurse should deal with the matter
It was also suggested a CAF (Common Assessment) was required, with the education social worker as the lead practitioner, even though the mother was uncooperative and hostile.

Later the same day, the Deputy Head spoke again to Children’s Social Care. Again s/he emphasised that this was a child protection referral and raised further concerns about the sibling cramming food into her/his pockets, loitering in the dining room and reporting feeling cold. S/he also stated that there had been a sudden change in the mother’s behaviour and described her as “concerned and agitated”. Again s/he was told that the recommended approach was for the education social worker to prepare a Common Assessment.

The following day, 20th December 2007, the Deputy Head again contacted Children’s Social Care, asking for an update on the referral. S/he was told that it was not being progressed and that an initial assessment would not be undertaken. Again the Deputy Head requested a home visit and was told that Children’s Social Care had decided not to proceed. The Deputy Head was not satisfied with this response and requested that the concerns be taken to the line manager. But s/he was told that the manager would not accept the referral and had suggested a CAF. The Deputy Head was told if the school remained concerned then the police could be contacted for a “Safe and Well” check. This was subsequently undertaken by West Midlands Police, who visited the home but were not admitted. Officers did however see the children on the doorstep and were reassured.

There is no doubt that crucial errors occurred at this point:

The failure to accept what was clearly a child protection referral
The ill-judged advice that a CAF should be completed, instead of a child protection assessment
The ill-judged recommendation that the police should be requested to perform a Safe and Well check (these are checks generally performed by the police when children who have been reported by their parents as missing subsequently return home).

The report gives some context to these failures:

There was a history of high levels of vacancy in Birmingham Children's Social Care, with a vacancy for qualified social workers of 14% when the report was written (June 2009).
Social care staffing per capita was 22% lower than the national inner city average.
The Social Worker involved in the case had an excessive workload of 50 allocated cases.

We know generally that decision-making can be adversely affected by over-work and difficult working conditions. One can imagine - although the report provides no detail - that staff in a hard-pressed child protection team where trying to keep too many balls in the air. Any referral that could be marked "NFA" would be a welcome outcome. And we can imagine that a decision-maker in this case may have erred because s/he wanted this not to be a child protection case, looking perhaps for any details which would mean that it did not need to be allocated. The alternatives of the Common Assessment and the Safe and Well Check may have predisposed to turning down the referral.

There are two morals. The first is that over-worked teams cannot function safely. The pressure to increase referral thresholds is too great. The second is, perhaps, less obvious. While the Common Assessment Framework has been welcomed in many quarters as part of an early intervention approach, there has been too little attention given to how it operates alongside child protection inquiries. An inherent danger will always be that a CAF will be undertaken or recommended where a child protection assessment is required. Thought need to be given to how this danger can be reduced or eliminated.

Family Proceedings - a sensible view

2010-08-20T13:39:00.001+01:00

My heart sank last week with Barnardo's calling for the speeding-up of care proceedings. So it was good to read a very sensible and well-informed piece in the Guardian by Leslie Baker, a family court magistrate ("Decisions on care orders are too sensitive to be given a fixed deadline" Friday 20 August 2010).

Baker rightly points out that the family courts do not simply grant a care order because a local authority has asked for one. The process involves the careful gathering of evidence and informed decision-making. The quicker this can be done the better, but some cases are very complex and cannot be rushed.

And the article reminds us that the family court can only function as quickly as key agencies, such as children's social care and CAFCASS, can undertake the work necessary to inform the decision. As Baker points out these agencies are under unprecedented stress, due to staff shortages and increased work since the Baby Peter tragedy.

Speeding-up the proceedings without resourcing these agencies more effectively would be bound to result in miscarriages of justice and in the courts failing to act in the best interests of the child.