Guidance streamlined to safeguard children - will it improve support?

In what is now a familiar cry from government, professionals seeking to protect potentially vulnerable children have been told that they “will be freed from pointless bureaucracy that has stifled their judgment for too long”.

The consultation on the reduction of more than 700 pages of guidance to three documents totalling just 68 pages has been hailed by the Department for Education as an attempt to create a culture that places trust in the judgment of professionals spanning the children’s sector.

Central to this is the Working Together to Safeguard Children document, which has been slimmed down in what children’s minister Tim Loughton says is an attempt to give staff greater flexibility to work more effectively.

While many professional bodies are reserving judgment until they have gathered responses from relevant members and colleagues, others have already voiced concerns.

NSPCC chief executive Andrew Flanagan says the fact that the draft revised guidance makes little mention of the voluntary sector should sound alarm bells.

“Developing a culture that recognises the role played by all professionals and volunteers, not just local authority social workers, is key to success,” he says.

He also says that despite the intentions behind significantly reducing nationally prescribed guidance, this alone will not necessarily improve direct work with children, a point echoed by the British Association of Social Workers. Professional officer Nushra Mansuri believes the process of revising guidance has happened with little consultation with frontline workers. “We have spoken to social workers who say that they don’t even support this particular approach to reducing the length of the guidance,” she says.

“We recommend producing information in a different format: a weighty policy document for senior management; a user-friendly guide for frontline social workers to refer to; and a longer series of guides on different topics available for reference as needed. Reducing guidance is undoubtedly part of the solution, but it has to be done in the right way.”

The revised document follows Professor Eileen Munro’s recommendation that the government distinguishes between the rules that are essential for effective working together, and less formal guidance that can be used to inform professional judgment.

The revised guidance is thus underpinned by the legislative framework of the Children Act 1989, the Education Act 2002 and the Children Act 2004.


Partner agencies

Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 places a statutory duty on key agencies to promote the welfare of children.

In each organisation, there should be a clear line of account-ability for the provision of services to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, along with arrangements to share relevant information and appoint a professional lead for safeguarding who can support other professionals to recognise and respond to the potential abuse and neglect of children and young people.

Adult services; housing authorities; armed forces; police, probation, prison and youth offending services; education; and early years are all responsible under this statutory framework to identify welfare concerns and indicators of possible abuse.

The Working Together Professional Advisory Group, which was involved in the scrutiny of the revision of the draft guidance, said that given the government’s overhaul of the health sector, the revised guidance was a crucial opportunity to address the issue of who will have responsibility for safeguarding under the new health structures.

The draft guidance states that the NHS Commissioning Board will be responsible for making sure the health commissioning system effectively promotes the welfare of children, and local clinical commissioning groups should employ designated safeguarding and looked-after children doctors and nurses.

All providers of NHS-funded health services will be expected to have a named professional who can help colleagues with advice, training and safeguarding expertise.


Local boards

Section 13 of the Children Act 2004 requires every local authority to establish a local safeguarding children board (LSCB) in their area.

As recommended by Munro, the revised Working Together guidance maintains that the chair of the LSCB should be independent, to enable their duty to scrutinise and challenge local safeguarding arrangements, while the responsibility for appointing or removing an LSCB chair remains with the local authority.

The statutory partners that must be included on LSCBs, according to the guidance, no longer include Connexions workers, given the government’s changing policy on advice and guidance for young people. Also, the draft document takes into account the government’s planned health reforms by including representatives from the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups.

Local authorities should also draw on the expertise of the voluntary and community sector and include two lay members who can represent their community.

During meetings of the Working Together Professional Advisory Group, members suggested that annual LSCB reports should be increasingly used to consider the effectiveness of agencies in developing local solutions to safeguarding.
The draft guidance covers this and adds that boards should conduct joint audits of case files involving practitioners to enable lessons to be learned.

This all underpins the fact that although LSCBs do not have the power to direct other organisations in their work, they do have a responsibility to make clear when improvement is needed.
 

Identification

Under Section 10 of the Children Act 2004, local authorities have a duty to promote co-operation across multiple agencies.

The revised guidance stipulates that staff working in universal services such as health, education and early years must be able to identify the early signs of abuse and neglect and then work together to jointly assess the needs of children and offer ?co-ordinated support.

Currently, the lengthier guidance offers step-by-step instructions covering the processes that should be followed if a practitioner is concerned about the welfare of a child.

Under the draft revised guidance, local authorities are expected to produce their own shared framework for assessment that has to be agreed by all agencies.

This should focus on identification of children with “unmet needs” requiring help from more than one service; the practice of sharing relevant information between professionals; agreement of timescales; and delivery of a co-ordinated response. Each shared assessment should be undertaken by a lead professional who is chosen on a case-by-case basis.

Shared assessments can only be undertaken with the consent of the child and their parents. If the child is deemed as “in need”, then professionals must refer them to children’s social care services where a qualified social worker must decide on the course of action.

Under the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families, all organisations, including GPs, police and teachers should, where appropriate, share information to help with this process.

Expert view: Implications of the guidance
Dr Liz Davies, reader in child protection, London Metropolitan University

“There is a lot of misunderstanding about the implications of the government’s intention to reduce Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance, with all its important specialist supplements, to a mere pamphlet.

"Professor Eileen Munro rightly recommended increased use of professional judgment and a less prescriptive approach to assessments. However, this argument to reduce bureaucracy and prescription in relation to protocols regarding the ?assessment of children in need should not be confused with the important detailed guidance about the investigation of ?significant harm.

"Munro has often spoken about the importance of rules on which professional judgments are based. For instance, there is a national statutory requirement that we should drive on the left – such instructions to protect the safety of the public are not left to the vagaries of local decision-making. Are children now so devalued that their safety from harm will depend on local arrangements?

"I have spent time visiting child protection houses in Scandinavia, which provide an excellent model of a children’s rights-based multi-professional service. The emphasis is on seeking justice for children and prosecuting abusers as well as gaining protection for the children in the context of their wider needs.

"Rather than stand by and witness Working Together guidance being consigned to the bin, surely those of us with professional codes of conduct have a duty to ensure that systems known to protect children are retained, restored and developed in line with the excellent systems implemented by our European colleagues.

"We have watched the demise of tried and tested child protection systems in the UK since the mid 1990s – most of these changes, with very few exceptions, supported and promoted by academic literature. The child protection register was abolished, the police role amended to focus solely on criminal acts, the focus on perpetrators largely removed from practice, and the entire language of protection changed to one of need rather than risk.

"I would certainly alter Working Together to clarify the distinct yet overlapping processes of core assessments and joint ?investigation. While assessment processes require the parents to be informed of statutory involvement and to agree for checks to be made with other agencies, a Section 47 investigation and child interview may be undertaken without parental knowledge or agreement, if to do so may place the child at risk of harm. When assessment is the primary response there is therefore the high risk that parents may be alerted to a child’s allegation before arrangements have been made to make the child safe. The Victoria Climbié case was one clear example of this practice error.

"But the Working Together document is otherwise sound and based on years of learning from serious case reviews and ?research findings. It addresses many issues of diversity where abuse takes place in complex, culturally specific contexts and provides national consistency informing local guidance. I worked in the early ’80s when every locality and agency had their own child protection procedures and it was mayhem.

"This current suggested revision of Working Together is surely the last straw. A reduction in the stifling bureaucracy of ?assessments is undoubtedly welcome, but while Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 still exists, all the detailed guidance ?concerning multi-agency enquiries and investigation is essential to good ?protective practice.”

Davies is a registered social worker and took up her post at London Metropolitan University in 2002. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students and leads the modules on effective communication; care planning and safeguarding children. She also teaches police and social workers on a two-week advanced level child protection course