Child deaths link to pressures of pandemic and resources shortage

Questions about social work practice and information sharing among safeguarding agencies have once again come to the fore following the tragic deaths of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and 16-month-old Star Hobson in June and September 2020 respectively.

Arthur, from Solihull, was murdered by his stepmother, who was jailed for life in December, while his father was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 21 years in prison.

Star, from Keighley, West Yorkshire, was murdered by her mother’s female partner, who was jailed for at least 25 years in December, while her mother, who was found guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child, was sentenced to eight years in prison.

During the separate trials, harrowing evidence emerged that both children endured months of physical abuse, and that relatives and friends of Star and Arthur had raised concerns about their welfare with safeguarding agencies on several occasions.

The deaths of both children are subject to reviews. In Arthur’s case, the local practice safeguarding review, launched by Solihull Council, has been upgraded by Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi to a national review led by the National Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. The review aims to establish what improvements are needed by the agencies that came into contact with Arthur in the months before he died.

Bradford Partnership is set to publish a practice review into Star’s case in January, and the government has said lessons from this will be incorporated into the national review.

The cases appear to display characteristics of previous high profile child murders: perpetrators who hide the abuse, children cut off from family connections and missed opportunities to intervene. An additional dimension in both cases, however, is that they happened during the first pandemic lockdown. The reviews are likely to assess what role, if any, Covid-19 restrictions played in agencies’ safeguarding work and whether this combined with inadequate resources to stretch services to breaking point.

System under strain

According to reports, social workers visited Arthur prior to his death but found no safeguarding concerns. Similarly, six referrals were made about Star’s wellbeing over eight months, with social workers visiting the home four times but closing the case on three occasions. On one occasion, police visited and Star was medically examined at a hospital.

Exactly what happened at these visits will become clearer once the reviews report their findings, but experts point out that child protection work has been getting harder as a result of increasingly complex cases, rising referrals and inadequate resources.

In a statement issued after the verdicts in Arthur’s case, the Care Review Watch Alliance (CRWA) – a collective of care-experienced people, academics and care professionals – said: “The child protection system in England is under immense pressure, and local authorities and partner agencies are struggling to meet the growing demands for their services.

“Local authority children and families services have had no choice but to develop ‘thresholds’ and ways to assess evidence that allows them to direct stretched resources toward those most obviously evidencing the greatest need. While we do not know at this point, it should be explored whether this may have been a factor in this case.”

The concerns are echoed by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), which describes child protection as a “complex issue that requires appropriate funding, resources and time to form meaningful relationships”, and something “best done in partnership with agencies”.

“Safeguarding our children is everybody’s responsibility, and we must all get better at listening to each other with the appropriate time and resources to do so,” a BASW statement adds.

Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission is to undertake a joint targeted area inspection in Solihull to check multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

Yvette Stanley, Ofsted national director for social care, says the profession needs to learn the lessons of serious cases, but also recognise that “there will always be parents who refuse assessment, don’t give consent for assessment or refuse services, or are disingenuous and manipulative when agencies have concerns”.

Pandemic pressures

Both Arthur and Star received visits from social workers during the first national lockdown, a period when services were stretched.

A survey of 2,000 BASW members found three-quarters “strongly agreed” their experience of working under lockdown restrictions had increased their concerns about the capacity to safeguard children.

“We know from practitioner accounts that there has also been a marked increase in the complexity and difficulty of child protection work during the pandemic, particularly where some children already known to be vulnerable were not seen by any professionals other than social workers – removing important protective layers from these children’s lives,” the CRWA states.

Charlotte Ramsden, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, agrees that children were “not as visible” during lockdowns due to the disruption to universal services such as schools, GP surgeries, children’s centres and youth clubs.

“Schools were only open to key workers, GPs were doing few in-person consultations, and health visitors and school nurses were redeployed to more critical services,” says Ramsden. “Teachers were getting in touch when they were worried about children, but a lot of the early help services – our eyes and ears spotting when things go wrong – weren’t available. Some of the stuff we get from face-to-face contact just wasn’t there.”

While social workers maintained contact with families through video calls and doorstep meetings, children’s services front door teams also had to weigh up Covid risks when undertaking safeguarding assessments, explains Ramsden.

“If families needed a visit, staff went to those houses wearing full PPE (personal protective equipment) as children’s safety remained paramount,” she adds.

Despite these efforts, evidence has emerged of a rise in harm to children during the pandemic. Between April and September 2020, Ofsted received 285 serious incident notifications, a 27 per cent increase on the same period in 2019, figures show.

Serious incident notifications involve death or serious harm to a child where abuse or neglect is known or suspected, and also deaths of children in care and children in regulated settings.

The Children’s Society said the rise could be linked to pressures families were under during the first lockdown. Meanwhile, the NSPCC reported a 23 per cent rise in contacts over child wellbeing during 2020/21, suggesting a rising trend in safeguarding concerns being reported throughout the pandemic.

Ray Jones, emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University, says lockdown presented “multiple whammies of more stress, strain, conflict and violence within families” which was harder to pick up and offer support because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

He adds: “The availability of ease of contact and communication with workers in other agencies was hindered and harder as they themselves were in lockdown, home-based and working remotely; and an increasing number of social workers were getting unwell having been infected by the virus and depleting the workforce, and which will also have been hindered by recruitment to vacant posts having had to be put on hold.”

Bradford Council reported 26 per cent of children’s social work posts were vacant on 30 September 2020, compared with an England average of 16 per cent, according to most recent DfE data.

Sharing information

Less information coming into the safeguarding system during the pandemic made it more difficult to make decisions about children, explains Ramsden, which “could go either way” on whether a visit was arranged or not.

Ofsted’s annual report states how some authorities overcame this by using “high quality risk assessment procedures”.

One created a specific duty team to respond to queries about Covid-19 raised through the multi-agency safeguarding hub, while another used a risk assessment tool designed specifically for use in the pandemic to assess the level of risk for children already known to social care.

The report states: “This authority then created short-term plans for how to protect these children. In cases when there have been concerns that children may be at risk, they have usually been visited face-to-face by social workers and other professionals.”

The inspectorate’s report also highlighted how the fall in referrals seen in the first national lockdown had not rebounded in every area, which “would suggest that risk has not been identified effectively enough in some areas”.

“A good example of this is that some authorities reported an increase in referrals due to domestic abuse, while others did not,” it states.

Despite the challenges of sharing information, Ofsted did identify multi-agency meetings being held online had resulted in better engagement from GPs and schools in safeguarding work.

“Pastoral and teaching staff at schools sometimes carried out welfare checks on vulnerable children and were also able to pick up any concerns,” it states. “However, some schools felt they were left to be responsible for protecting their pupils, without the assistance they needed from children’s services.”

Ramsden says that while it is vital to learn from the case reviews, “it is important to remember that we don’t hear about when multi-agency safeguarding works well”.

“When we’re in a heightened state of anxiety like at the moment, the world thinks no child is safe and that’s just not true,” she adds.

Following the cases of Arthur and Star, the government vowed to do whatever it takes to protect children, including changing legislation and removing services from the two councils. Experts say this must also include recognising the impact of inadequate resources on safeguarding services.

With the Omicron variant presenting a fresh set of challenges, children’s services leaders will also be looking for insight into improving safeguarding practice as the pandemic endures into 2022.