Retention

I was pleased to read in Community Care that a local authority which had been experiencing acute problems in retaining children’s social workers has pursued a successful strategy to improve workforce stability.

  

In a re-inspection of West Berkshire Council, Ofsted found that the vacancy rate for children’s social workers had reduced to 10%. The inspection report concludes that children receiving services from the authority are now benefiting from what it describes as “stable, warm and helpful relationships with their social workers and foster carers”.

Key to achieving these improvements appears to have been the adoption by the Council in 2014 of a Social Care Recruitment and Retention Strategy.

This provides for a retention bonus, up to three months’ retention leave after three years’ service, employment of a recruitment and retention specialist, relocation allowances, employing additional family support workers to support children’s social workers and more help in owning and running a car for work purposes.

This focus on what Herzberg calls ‘hygiene factors’ builds on the views of a group of West Berkshire Social Workers who told managers in 2014 that 'Nobody does this job for the money, but a competitive salary/package would help recruitment and retention'.

But, to its credit, the strategy also recognises the crucial importance of Herzberg’s motivators in recruiting and retaining staff. It introduces better support and supervision, a social work academy to support newly qualified staff and stresses the importance of a good working environment, concluding that:

“Child Protection can be a frightening and dangerous role. Social Workers face threats and intimidation on a regular basis. Consequently it is essential staff return to safe and secure team environments where they can discuss complex case issues and debrief with colleagues following home visits.” (paragraph 5.2.1)

There may be some who think that this type of ‘retention package’ is expensive. Clearly many of the benefits involved do not come free of charge, but the costs have to be weighed against the costs of not retaining children’s social workers. These include the costs of having to cover vacancies using agency staff, the costs of trying to recruit to vacant posts (advertising, interviewing etc.) and the costs of long-term sickness which is often a consequence of overwork and stress. Perhaps most importantly are the costs of poor quality, such as children coming into care because they cannot be adequately supported in the community or the costs of re-work when a case needs to be revisited because of mistakes and quality shortfalls resulting from frequent staff changes or absences.

Not to mention the costs of having negative Ofsted inspections, with all the expense and disruption that a finding of ‘inadequate’ brings.

I do not know the details of how these costs are actually working out in West Berkshire, but I suspect that the long-term cost of doing things right will be less than the long-term costs of doing things badly. And I hope that the authority will go from strength to strength in continuing to implement its strategy in future.

I don’t know where the pervasive idea came from that the best way to get value-for-money from children’s social workers was to treat them badly, but it has certainly been a feature of the UK scene for many years. A command and control ethos saw the introduction of more and ever tighter procedures, making it increasingly hard to do a good job. There were timescales and targets and formal assessment instruments which, with the benefit of hindsight, almost seem to have been designed to impede good practice. [1]

Then there were IT systems which were hard to use, frustrating and demanding of time. Initiatives such as more efficient use of office space, culminating in some areas in ‘hot-desking’, and the effects of the public sector pay cap, which has meant in many cases falling salaries, added further to an unhealthy recipe for dissatisfied and demotivated employees.

But all of these de-motivaters pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of the surrounding culture of blame and fear. That is why West Berkshire's commitment to creating "... safe and secure team environments where (social workers) can discuss complex case issues and debrief..." is so important.

There are still many places where management practices of blame, command, control and bureaucracy are still the norm. Thank goodness that there are some places like West Berkshire that appear to be successfully reversing these unhelpful trends.

Notes

[1] K. Broadhurst  D. Wastell  S. White  C. Hall  S. Peckover  K. Thompson  A. Pithouse  D. Davey  “Performing ‘Initial Assessment’: Identifying the Latent Conditions for Error at the Front-Door of Local Authority Children's Services” Br J Soc Work (2010) 40 (2): 352-370.

https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/article/40/2/352/1645645/Performing-Initial-Assessment-Identifying-the

Back-tracking?

The new Children’s Minister, Robert Goodwill, seemed to have started off not too badly last week by making what seemed to be quite a sensible decision to scale back substantially the Government’s ill-starred plans for the accreditation of children’s social workers.

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/07/06/backlash-sees-government-scale-back-social-work-accreditation-plans/

Of course, he could have made an even more sensible decision – to abolish the scheme altogether. As far as I am concerned there are no reasons at all for saving an initiative which has so little to commend it that one wonders whoever thought it up.

http://chrismillsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/the-knowledge.html

Sadly, Mr Goodwill went on the very next day to blot his copybook and prove himself not to be a very effective ‘new broom’. Having been reported on 6^th July as saying that the analysis of the recent consultation had led his department to change fundamentally its plans for accreditation, he was then reported on 7^th July as saying that he had spoken to a lot of social workers in the last four weeks and that he had formed the impression that they were “up for it”. The accreditation scheme, he said, was all about recognising the professionalism of social workers and he now presented the proposed scaling-back as just an adjustment to the implementation timetable.

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/07/07/minister-defends-plans-social-worker-accreditation-tests/

Maybe he was got at overnight by some person or persons who remain intent on pushing ahead with the scheme in all its awfulness no matter what anybody says. Maybe he is just finding his new brief confusing. In the meantime, children’s social work is threatened by yet another poorly thought out policy. It’s all very, very sad.

Doffing the cap

On Saturday, 18 March 2017 I wrote a post entitled “Pay - how to dissatisfy child protection workers”. In it I said:

You can’t go on paying children’s social workers and other public sector workers involved in child protection less and less and expect it to have no impact. You can have all the recruitment campaigns you want, but you will not retain staff if you keep cutting their pay in real terms.

In the last week, there has been heated discussion in Britain about the cap on public sector pay, and a slowly dawning recognition in some quarters, if not in others, that you can’t keep paying people less and less in real terms without serious negative consequences.

The Guardian speaks of a damning government report that shows the depth of public sector pay cuts.

However, the BBC reports that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, is insisting that the Government must hold its nerve over public pay and not give in to demands to raise the cap. Other ministers are reported as holding different views.

There is a lot of talk of the pay of police officers, fire fighters, teachers and nurses. I haven’t heard anybody yet mention children’s social workers but they are public employees too and they are also hit by the pay cap.

In old fashioned English, they used to speak of doffing your cap which means in modern parlance raising your hat to acknowledge or or to show deference to another.

  

I’m of the view that the time has come for quite a lot of doffing, in acknowledgement of the difficult work that child protection professionals and other public sector workers undertake. 

Put simply, the Government needs to pay people a fair rate for the job.

Life, death and learning

Everybody who works in, or who has responsibility for, child protection should listen to Matthew Syed’s three-part series on BBC Radio 4, ‘Learning from life and death’.

He promises to explore how and why individuals and organisations learn from their mistakes or, alternatively, how they fail to do so. The programmes, we are told, will identify common obstacles to learning from experience and ways in which they can be overcome.

Not surprisingly the aviation industry is cited by Matthew as a repository of good practice. Learning, he argues, is at the heart of aviation’s safety culture. The emphasis is on learning lessons, not apportioning blame. Avoiding unnecessary blame and treating people fairly when they make mistakes results in a high level of reporting, which provides aviation professionals with a wealth of data which can be analysed. As a result, the causes of errors can be understood and systematic improvements made.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear me endorsing these arguments. For years now I (and others, such as members of the Safer Safeguarding Group) have been banging our heads against glass walls and ceilings (and even floors) trying to get policy makers to recognise that child protection will only become safer if it adopts an approach which is similar to that adopted by the airlines. Routine errors and mistakes should be seen, not as excuses to blame and censure, but as opportunities for learning and understanding. There is a overbearing need for transparency; for a just culture that thrives on openness.

Five routes to safer organisations emerge from the first of the three programmes:

• Understand that error does not equal disaster, it equals opportunity
• Put learning at the centre of the organisation’s culture
• Learn lessons, not apportion blame
• Treat people fairly
• Achieve a high level of reporting of mistakes and service failings

I believe each of these should be put into effect in child protection. Unless we begin to adopt approaches the wisdom of which is now widely acknowledged, we will be open to accusations of negligence, of letting children and young people down by not doing all we can to keep them safe.

The names of three people mentioned in the programme will stay with me. The first is that of the philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, who believed that the route to better science and a more open society lies in trying to falsify hypotheses, not confirm them. What counts is not having a theory that fits with all the facts but rather having a theory which is capable of being tested.

The second name is that of the statistician George Box.

Box is credited with arguing that all models are wrong but some are useful. He wrote: "The most that can be expected from any model is that it can supply a useful approximation to reality: All models are wrong; some models are useful".

  

Like Popper's, this philosophy is a form of fallibilism, the view that people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions of fact.  We should always be ready to be proved wrong and when we are we should learn from our mistakes.

The third name is that of the comedian John Cleese. Speaking about how he tries to learn to be funnier, he told Matthew Syed that it was vital to create a gap between yourself and your ego. He always tried to stand back and view things objectively, not emotionally. The key barriers to learning were blame and ego.

There is a great deal to think about in this series and a great deal that is very relevant to building safer child protection services. I am looking forward greatly to next week’s episode.

Liam Fee – the old, old story

Liam Fee, a two-year-old from Glenrothes, Fife, died at the hands of his carers in 2014. 

Reading the learning summary from the significant case review (published last month) does not provide any stunning new insights. It is full of the same old ‘lessons’ which have been rehearsed and rehearsed in hundreds of similar documents.

Disguised compliance is an important theme of the report. Liam’s carers were skilful deceivers. They lied and manipulated and hoodwinked, carefully playing one agency against another, one professional against another, pretending to co-operate while preventing anybody recognising the child’s true situation and so preventing agencies responding appropriately.

It all goes to show just how easy it is to lose situation awareness in child protection. Professionals are not only dealing with human behaviour, which at the best of times is difficult to perceive, understand and predict correctly, but they are faced with people who are sometimes hell-bent on deliberately misleading them about what behaviour is actually occurring and why.

Child protection, like other safety critical activities, needs to adopt specific measures to guard against loss of situation awareness. These should focus on improving workers’ non-technical skills. In their excellent guide to non-technical skills Flin et al [1] provide a useful list of ways of maintaining situation awareness during the performance of safety critical tasks. These include:

• having a good briefing
• minimising distraction and interruption
• frequent opportunities to test and compare the mental model of the situation with the available evidence
• encouraging everybody to speak up and voice reservations and uncertainties
• avoidance of unnecessarily tight timescales

In child protection in Britain there has not been much focus on any of these. Although serious case reviews often draw attention to ‘information sharing’ problems, I don’t know of any research that has looked at how child protection professionals are briefed by others or of any discussions about how briefings can be improved. The Liam Fee report speaks of insufficient attention being given to existing information, saying that it was neither reviewed nor considered before decisions were taken. It also says that professionals had an inadequate understanding of the roles and responsibilities of other agencies and that they were often unclear about who was in charge of the case. A good briefing would have addressed these issues.

There is very little discussion in the child protection literature about the impact on professionals of distraction and interruption. I could see no obvious discussion of it in the Liam Fee report. Although taking eyes off the ball is a common theme of child protection tragedies, the causes are seldom examined. The extent to which workers are distracted by bureaucratic issues, organisational dynamics and events occurring in other cases is not routinely assessed. Rather than trying to minimise interruption and distraction, local authorities in Britain seem to have compounded these problems by creating noisy shared offices and sometimes even opting for hot-desking. Unnecessary procedures, meeting performance targets, poorly designed IT systems and form-filling all serve to distract workers from doing what they should be doing – focusing on the child. Completing complicated assessments can be time consuming, often with no guarantee that the result will be particularly informative. Sometimes even meetings and conferences are distracting and counterproductive, using up a lot of time without clear purpose.

Checking out the mental model of a situation is vital, but research suggests that this happens less often in child protection than it should. There is often pressure not to challenge or dissent from a dominant view of a child’s situation and the accompanying risk of confirmation bias (the tendency for all new evidence to be seen as confirming the original hypothesis). As Eileen Munro once remarked: “… the most striking lesson to be learned from inquiry reports … is how resistant people are to altering their beliefs. Inquiry reports repeatedly comment on the workers' reluctance to alter their views….” [2] Performance targets and high workloads also reduce opportunities to test and compare the mental model of the situation with the available evidence.  And, as Broadhurst et al [3] discovered: “Meeting performance targets, especially when the volume of incoming work threatens to exceed capacity, workers must make quick categorizations based on limited information; this will inevitably mean that some cases are filtered out that may require intervention.” Perhaps this is what the author of the Liam Fee review means by talking of a "lack of professional curiosity"?

There is, in Britain, often a lamentable failure to encourage everybody to speak up and voice reservations and uncertainties about a case, especially when something may have gone wrong. The pervasive culture in British local authorities, the police and health services is still one of blame. Workers continue to feel the need to ‘cover their backs’. We are still very far from what Dekker [4] calls ‘a just culture’ and much management practice is still rooted in what Reason calls ‘the person approach’ to organisational safety, focusing on “…the errors and failings of individuals” and blaming them for “forgetfulness, inattention, or moral weakness”. [5] The Liam Fee review speaks of a reluctance of workers to challenge the explanations given by his mother and her partner. That suggests that there was more generally a reluctance to challenge the status quo. Organisations have to work very hard to encourage people to speak-out. They have to build-up the confidence of workers and managers to challenge and be challenged and to reappraise and backtrack if doubts arise about the dominant view of a case.

Flin et al’s final recommendation for maintaining situation awareness is to avoid unnecessarily tight timescales. Sadly, in Britain, the completion of formal assessments in child protection cases is often accompanied by unforgiving timetables imposed by managers and civil servants which result in ‘hurry-up syndrome’. This is often exacerbated by rising demand for services, shortfalls in staffing and other resources and the consequent need to rush work in order to cope with unmanageable workloads.

It is not surprising that professionals dealing with Liam Fee lost situation awareness, believing as they did that they were dealing with a needy family rather than a dangerous case of abuse and neglect. Because it is all too easy to lose situation awareness in child protection, organisations need to take clear and deliberate steps to create systems which help to maintain it. It is no good just deploring the practice of individual workers who have held on to the wrong mental model of a case. Rather we all need to ask ourselves why and how loss of situation occurs and work together to create ways of reducing the likelihood of it happening in future.

Notes

[1] Flin, R. O'Connor, P. and Crichton, M. Safety at the Sharp End (Ashgate 2008)

[2] Munro, E. (1996) “Avoidable and unavoidable mistakes in child protection work”

British Journal of Social Work 26 (6)  http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000348/

[3] K. Broadhurst  D. Wastell  S. White  C. Hall  S. Peckover  K. Thompson  A. Pithouse  D. Davey  “Performing ‘Initial Assessment’: Identifying the Latent Conditions for Error at the Front-Door of Local Authority Children's Services” Br J Soc Work (2010) 40 (2): 352-370.

https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/article/40/2/352/1645645/Performing-Initial-Assessment-Identifying-the

[4] Dekker, S. Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability (Ashgate 2007)

[5] Reason J. “Human error: models and management” British Medical Journal 2000; 320:768–70