Child safeguarding: leaders' debate

The situation is now familiar and entrenched: financial hardship for families, domestic violence, mental health problems and the size of the child population are all on the rise, triggering increases in referrals to children’s social care and demand on services for children in general. Meanwhile, resources continue to shrink. Against the backdrop of this “perfect storm”, council directors from as far afield as Bradford and Cornwall were moved to discuss how they shift resources to early intervention; forge effective partnerships; deal with child sexual exploitation; and Ofsted inspections.

Early help
The financial climate requires a fundamental reassessment of priorities, according to Bradford’s strategic director Kath Tunstall. “Pressures of welfare reform and growing populations make 2014 and beyond almost unthinkable,” she said. “We have to look at zero-based budgeting, looking at the absolute minimum we need to do, and then do other things differently and more creatively.”

The sheer weight of care referrals has compelled many areas to act strategically for the longer term. Matt Dunkley, former president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and DCS in East Sussex, said: “A year ago, I managed to persuade our leaders to invest £10m of capital over three years for a programme [called Thrive] to change the model of social care… to invest in a variety of family-based services.” This has included refocusing its children’s centres to target only disadvantaged families, so it ceases to be a universal service. He said: “We’re turning the tide in terms of reducing demand on the care system, but we couldn’t have done it without the capital investment because it allows us to absorb the pressures of the old system while we turn it around to the new. You need a short-term injection of cash to turn the tanker around.

“You have to be ruthless about banking the savings that come from reduced demand. We’ve reduced caseloads in social work teams and moved some of that resource because we can’t afford the luxury of very low caseloads. Some of that has to move into early help services.”

Stoke-on-Trent has embarked on a “change programme” badged Make a Difference. “Our approach has been much more around children’s social care as opposed to the whole system,” said assistant director Mark Warr. It has commissioned the Institute of Family Therapy to train staff and boost direct work with vulnerable families.

Tower Hamlets, meanwhile, has invested substantially in training staff in the Family Functional Therapy intervention programme, revealed interim head of children’s social care Steve Liddicott.

However, Cornwall’s Trevor Doughty issued a note of caution regarding the effectiveness of early intervention programmes. “Although Cornwall’s Ofsted inspection went pretty well, inspectors were saying we should have intervened earlier in cases of long-term neglect at six months or 12 months where tough decisions should have been made. But my concern is that I don’t think we really have the evidence [about what works],” he said.

“Children in care are compared to the general population where outcomes are concerned, but if you compare them to children on the cusp of coming into care but didn’t, their outcomes are actually better, and consistently. It’s not an argument for not going down the early intervention route, but we’ll only really know in the long term, not the short term.”

Dunkley said East Sussex was also doing “intensive post-proceedings work” with mothers after their first child is taken into care “because of the high numbers of repeat children into care, which involves them volunteering for contraception jabs and things like that, and we work with them on what it takes to become a parent.”

There was evidence that councils are using the government-funded Troubled Families programme to help reduce the strain on the care system. For instance, Hertfordshire safeguarding director Jenny Cole said: “Our children in care population has come down. We’re successfully stopping adolescents coming in, but five-to-nine support is not there as much as it should be, so we have refocused and extended the troubled families model down to [age] five.”

Changing the culture in social work teams is also key. Leicestershire head of safeguarding Chris Nerini said it had introduced the systems approach recommended in the Munro review of child protection, seeking to identify deeper, systemic issues that influence social care practice, particularly when things go wrong. “That is one of the things that has made the biggest differences to our safeguarding practice on the ground,” she said.

Partnerships
Effective safeguarding depends largely on different professionals working well together. Areas across the country are adopting a Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (Mash), where social workers and police, in particular, pool resources and intelligence about children at risk in one location. Camden interim director Helen McMullen said its Mash was dealing with cases of child sexual exploitation and domestic violence: “We’ve had to build and develop relationships and systems so the old system is not thrown out before we are confident the new system is working, otherwise people will fall through the net. The Met have worked very closely with us to get to the model we have rather than imposing a model on us.” But police co-operation is hardly a given. Dunkley said that in setting up one of the first such hubs in East Sussex, “social workers felt the culture was police-dominated. That may not be the case now, but I think we can get hung up that everywhere must have a Mash. Just do what works”.

A particularly harrowing and topical subject of vulnerability is child sexual exploitation. After “tinkering around the edges” of the problem, Bradford set up a suite in a police station three years ago, explained Tunstall. “We have voluntary sector groups, a social worker, team manager, data analysts and intelligence officers based there,” she said. “Over the past year, 100 men have been arrested. The numbers of young women [exploited] are coming down. The police are the ones who are in fact challenging other agencies to make it a priority.”

Schools also have a crucial role. Barking and Dagenham DCS Helen Jenner said schools should allow pupils to discuss the problem of sexual exploitation as part of their personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE). She added that research must be used to alert the entire teaching profession of the importance of wellbeing to achievement: “I’m an ex-primary school head teacher and if we don’t help schools understand how important some of these other agendas are for children’s attainment, they’re not going to do it because that’s not what they are judged on.” Schools still regard children’s social care negatively as “social services”, she said.

On collaboration in general, Dunkley cited the saying, “working in partnership involves the mutual suppression of loathing in pursuit of funding” to point out that agencies must be persuaded that “there is something in it for them outside the general good”. He said that partnerships must be “built around mutual benefit and mutual gain”.

Inspections
Multi-agency child protection inspections were supposed to come into force this June, but were last month deferred. Camden was one of the pilot sites. “We thought it was excellent, because for partners it was clear about their role in helping to safeguard children in a way that sitting-around-the-table partnerships haven’t done before,” said McMullen. “Other partners took it very seriously because of the consequential actions and because it was their own inspectorates inspecting them.”

On his understanding of reasons for the deferral, Dunkley said: “Despite some good experiences, there were bad experiences where, for example, in one of the trial areas, a single supervision session of a midwife by a professional that was deemed inadequate triggered a series of judgments that led to inadequate for the whole authority. So you had a DCS responsible for the fact that somebody in the health service isn