Family Safeguarding Hertfordshire

• Specialist workers tackle domestic abuse, parental mental health and substance misuse problems
• Child protection and pre-proceedings cases have reduced by 47 and 67 per cent respectively

ACTION

The Family Safeguarding Hertfordshire (FSH) model grew from three aspirations. First, to keep more families together safely.

Second, practice needed to change to address disguised compliance by parents. "They're practised at telling us what they think we want to hear, so we go away," says Hertfordshire director of safeguarding Sue Williams. "So they don't get the help they need, and children's circumstances don't improve."

The third aim was to reduce social workers' paperwork and increase face-to-face contact with families.

In August 2014, children's service managers met with police, probation, health, and substance misuse teams to devise a new way of working: specialist adult professionals working alongside children's social workers to tackle parental substance misuse, mental ill health and domestic abuse.

With £4.9m from the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme, organisations collectively recruited 47 new staff: mental health, substance misuse and domestic abuse professionals, alongside social workers and managers. The authority's 19 locality teams have expanded to 21, across three offices. Each team has access to two domestic abuse professionals: one focusing on victims and the other on perpetrators; a substance misuse worker and a mental health worker, working alongside five or six social workers. They were supported by three clinical psychologists, one per office. All teams received three days' training in "motivational interviewing" a strength-based counselling approach helping people identify their needs and strengthening their motivation for change.

The teams' domestic abuse specialists sometimes refer abusers to a group developed and run for FSH by probation officers. "Participants say things like: ‘I didn't realise that was abuse: that's how I was taught to be a man'," says Williams. "They say they've learned better ways to deal with anger. It's heartening hearing them say: ‘I never want to go back to behaving like that'."

Through monthly group supervision, team members report interventions, all recorded on a shared "electronic workbook". Information-sharing agreements enable adult workers to record onto child and family files and share parents' records with children's social workers, eased by co-location. At the monthly meeting, each professional rates children's risk as red, amber or green. This feeds into an overall risk rating for each family, helping the team prioritise.

The Hertfordshire partnership also plans to bring child and adolescent mental health workers into its teams, to strengthen parent-child bonds, and teachers to improve children's education attainment.

Around 1,800 children are supported at any one time. Hertfordshire is now helping Peterborough, Luton, Bracknell Forest and West Berkshire councils replicate its approach, through a further £11.6m innovation grant.

IMPACT

A July 2017 evaluation report by Cardiff University's Children's Social Research and Development Centre and the University of Bedfordshire's Tilda Goldberg Centre for Social Work and Social Care, shows a pre-project monthly average of 1,055 child in need and 969 child protection cases in Hertfordshire between November 2014 and March 2015, falling to 962 and 687 respectively between April 2015 and June 2016.

The average number of days children spent in care reduced from 20.5 to 9.8 per family in the five months after allocation to FSH. These reductions saved an estimated £2.67m in the first 12 months.

Hertfordshire's child protection cases reduced by 47 per cent between January 2015 and March 2017 and the number of looked-after children by 118, with a 13 per cent drop among under-13s. Care proceedings reduced by 33 per cent in the same period, and pre-proceedings cases by 67 per cent.

The evaluation also shows reductions in repeat police incidents and adult emergency hospital admissions among families worked with. FSH is now jointly funded by Hertfordshire's police and crime commissioner, East and North Hertfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, public health and adult and children's social care.

This article is part of CYP Now's special report on intrafamilial abuse. Click here for more