Schools-based Services

Louise Tickle has an interesting article in The Guardian this week. 

She visited a primary school that operates a team that focuses on helping neglected pupils. Team members have expertise in family support, early years and child protection. The team appears to duplicate some of the functions of the local authority, especially with respect to early intervention with families where children may be being neglected.

The school’s head argues that the team is necessary because of high local authority thresholds and the subtle nature of neglect, the evidence for which is often patchy and cumulative. Teachers are said to have been reluctant to report suspicions of neglect to the local authority, being unclear when the threshold was reached and fearing the consequences of getting it wrong.

The head teacher sings the praises of the team. Children and their families are being helped earlier and crises are being avoided.

I think that schools based social work is basically a good idea. The NSPCC pioneered school-based teams in the early 2000s but somehow the positive messages from this work never seemed to hit the headlines. It makes sense to base children’s social workers near children, rather than in remote offices, and the school is one obvious place.

That is not to say that school based services are without problems. There need to be clear understandings with the local authority about how formal referrals and emergency action are to be handled and schools-based social workers will often have to wrestle with some difficult confidentiality issues.

Schools-based teams are not an alternative to Children’s Social Care – rather they are a form of complementary provision that can result in services which are more child-focused and which facilitate early intervention.

A Head for Figures?

I’ve been spending some time working through the British Government’s “Draft of Children’s Safeguarding Performance Information for Consultation” which was published in January and relates to England. A number of statistics surrounding child protection and related activity are proposed.

The consultation closes on the 16th April 2012, so there is still plenty of time to respond. I think doing so is a really important – although it is a somewhat technical issue – because if these ‘performance indicators’ are got wrong the child protection system, and those who work in it, could suffer the consequences for years ahead. 

So if you have strong views, a talent for constructive criticism or some good ideas, I would strongly urge you to contribute to the consultation, which you can do by visiting the following http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1803&external=no&menu=1

It will take me sometime to prepare my response to this consultation in full, but my initial reactions are very mixed. I think that the Government has rightly accepted some of the suggestions made in the Munro Review, but  some odd additions and elaborations are being proposed, which begin to make the list look formidable. There is no point having lots of statistics if they do not relate clearly to what you want to achieve.

A deep and fundamental flaw in the whole presentation is the careless use of the word ‘performance’. In the first place there is no definition of whose performance is being referred to. And a lot of measures that are suggested do not measure any-one’s performance at all, such as the rate of violent and sexual offences against children, or the rate of attendance of children and young people at accident and emergency units for assaults, deliberate self harm and other accidents. It is vital to understand that these are important items of contextual information, but they are influenced by factors beyond any-one’s control, so they are not 'performance information'.

I think it would have helped greatly to have divided the whole lot up into four clearly demarcated areas:

• Contextual information relevant to the demand for particular kinds of services at both national and local level
• Information about inputs into locally based services, especially staffing
• Information about the local operation itself based around quality, speed and cost
• Information about outcomes, where this is available

I have also found the consultation document to be sloppily drafted. For example statistics are proposed about ‘newly qualified social worker posts’ (whatever they are?) when what is clearly intended is ‘the number of vacancies filled by newly qualified social workers’. And the authors also seem to have forgotten the word ‘children’s’ in front of the words ‘social workers’, because there is no point measuring lots to do with the health and morale of the adult social care workforce in an exercise devoted to understanding services to children.

Then there are the usual problems associated with ‘performance indicators’. I fear civil servants have still to come to terms with these difficulties. As long ago as 1966 Peter Blau*, an American expert on organisational behaviour, found that performance measures often result in behaviour that conflicts with organisational aims; employees are able to improve their performance on an indicator, while, and often as a result, organisational performance actually declines. Nearly 50 years later British civil servants still do not seem to have fully got the point!!

The dangers are perhaps greatest with indicators that measure the speed at which parts of the process are completed. Over the years there has been a pervasive failure to understand that speeding up a particular stage of a process may not result in speeding up the whole process; and in some circumstances may actually result in slowing it down. Processes run at the speed of the slowest bottleneck, so speeding up stages other than the bottleneck will have no positive effect, and, if resources are diverted away from the bottleneck, will slow the whole process down.

I will be publishing on this blog a summary of my full response to this consultation, so watch this space.

* Blau, P. M. The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, Chicago UP, 1966.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't ...

I have only just got around to watching the BBC programmes on child protection social work in Bristol. I thought they were very good, giving an accurate impression of what life is like on the front line and the issues that people trying to protect children face. 

I recommend, if you haven't seen them already, that you watch them on BBC iPlayer, which, as I understand it, is only available to viewers in the UK. In any case the accompanying BBC article gives a good flavour of the series.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16658110 

Problems of Authority

The Executive Summary of the Serious Case Review Report into injuries sustained by ‘Child F’ in the East Riding of Yorkshire provides some interesting insights.

The case concerns a man who has now been jailed for injuring two babies. In the first instance, however, a decision was taken that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Subsequently the man moved into another household with children and a social worker assessment was undertaken. That concluded in a decision to take no further action. Later the man injured a baby in the second household causing permanent brain damage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-17183309

We are told that, among other failings, poor judgements were made by managers when approving the closure of the case (para. 6.7, page 5). The author of the report notes: “The social worker clearly required direction and support which managers failed to make available. It is also noteworthy that the social worker felt ‘too junior’ to challenge the direction offered by managers” (para. 6.8, page 5 – my emphasis).

The issue of ‘challenging authority’ has for many years been of concern to safety experts in aviation and, more latterly, medicine. As long ago as 1977 it was recognised that a probable causal factor in the Tenerife North disaster was the fact that the captain of one of the two jumbo jets involved was the airline’s (KLM’s) most senior training pilot. When he made the fatal decision to take off in dense fog without the permission of the tower, his two colleagues on the flight deck appear to have dissented from the decision, but were apparently unable to challenge it. The flight engineer’s last words were “That Pan Am, is he not clear?” – a remark that the captain curtly dismissed. As a result the 747 hit the other heavily loaded aircraft half-way down the runway resulting in over 500 people losing their lives.

In another famous example some of the cabin crew and passengers of a British Midland 737 aircraft that crashed at Kegworth in 1989 failed to challenge the pilot’s announcement that the right engine of the airplane had failed, despite the fact that they could see smoke and flames coming from the left engine.

Lessons from such tragedies have resulted in the development within the airline industry of Crew Resource Management (CRM) or, as it is often called, Human Factors Training. (see Helmreich, R. L. “On error management: lessons from aviation” British Medical Journal Volume 320 18 March 2000, for an overview). Now mandatory with all major airlines employees are taught a variety of techniques to help them work together with colleagues in order to reduce errors and to mitigate their consequences. An important part of any such course will be looking at issues of how to challenge and how to be challenged.

It is some measure of the success of HF / CRM training that an embedded authoritarian culture in aviation has, over the years, given way to the expectation that junior crew members will challenge a more senior colleague when necessary and that senior staff understand how to accept challenge without feeling threatened or undermined.

The East Yorkshire case certainly suggests that similar approaches are required in child protection. And it only takes a moment or two to reflect that problems of authority pervade accounts of child protection disasters. Consider for example how Victoria Climbié’s social worker seemed unable to question a puzzling report by a senior paediatrician, or how the local authority accepted a decision by the police not to prosecute Baby Peter’s mother as a bar to continuing with care proceedings, or how teachers in the Khyra Ishaq case felt they just had to accept a decision by Children’s Social Care that Khyra was not in need of protection.

These and many other similar examples are ample evidence of the need to look urgently at the culture of many of the agencies involved in child protection; and to design ways of helping staff, many of whom are conditioned to working in hierarchical and bureaucratic environments, to think critically and constructively about how professional and agency disagreements can be handled so as to minimise the possibility of them resulting in errors and tragedies.

Ofsted and Adoption

It is regrettable that the children's services regulator, Ofsted, appears to be introducing what seems to be a crude performance measure for local authority adoption services in England. Local authorities are being told that they will not secure an "outstanding" rating from Ofsted in an inspection unless they have placed all children identified for adoption within 12 months. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17156982

I strongly support minimising all unnecessary delays in the adoption process, but the type of target setting proposed by Ofsted is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the ‘law of unintended consequences’ *. At worst local authorities may be tempted to identify fewer children for adoption in the first place, in order to ensure that they can all be placed within the twelve months deadline, thus achieving the opposite of what is intended.

I think Nushra Mansuri, BASW’s professional officer, quoted by Children and Young People Now, has it about right. She said that she wants to see Ofsted highlighting good practice, which can be shared between local authorities, rather than fostering a negative competitive culture.

* ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action', Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 894-904

And feeling the strain ...

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

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.