Child Protection Social Work in England: How Can It Be Reformed?

Higgins examines debates about child protection social work in England. His two main criticisms are that:

Contemporary child protection in England

Higgins suggests that it is difficult to see how concerns about child protection raised by Professor Eileen Munro in 2011 have been heeded in the recent national policy approaches (which he attributes to former Education Secretary Michael Gove and government adviser Martin Narey), which he says focused on procedures rather than service effectiveness. Narey, who undertook a review of social work education in 2014, seems more concerned with what social workers need to know in order to complete a task rather than what they should understand, Higgins argues. Additionally, the Frontline training programme's social work education focuses on child protection to the exclusion of any wider preventive function and reflects a shift away from the prevention of abuse towards protection from abuse (Featherstone et al, 2013). A report by Eastman in 2014 found that preventive work was limited and the needs of many young people were not being met early enough in their lives. Higgins' concern is that this narrowing of focus means that the children and their lives are sometimes still decontextualised.