The College of Social Work

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

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

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

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?

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

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"

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.