Category Archives: Children

Social work, neglect and the renewal of ‘poverty aware practice’

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Carl PurcellCarl Purcell, of the Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London, reflects on a recent meeting of the Social Work History Network (17 June 2024). (791 words)

At a recent seminar organised by the Social Work History Network Dr Michael Lambert, Professor June Thoburn and Professor Marian Brandon reflected on the history of the concept child ‘neglect’ and how this has been redefined and responded to by policymakers and social workers.

The evacuation of children from towns and cities during the second world war exposed the appalling suffering of many children living in desperate poverty. Lady Allen of Hartwood was spurred to write a letter to The Times that provoked a remarkable political response.  Following the Curtis Report (1946), and subsequent inquiries, the Children Act 1948 established local authority Children’s Departments to make arrangements when children, including neglected children, needed to be received in to care. Subsequently, the Children and Young Persons (Amendment) Act 1952 provided powers to actively investigate neglect.

Many health and social work professionals working in this space located the underlying causes of neglect in the personal characteristics of parents. Jones wrote: “Their lives are characterised by dirt, disintegration and disorder. They are often shiftless, apathetic, irresponsible to an almost incredible degree”[1]. But some social policy writers were critical of this perspective.  Barbara Wootton argued: “About the only common characteristics of these families, it seems, are the financial ones”[2]. Continue reading →

In Search of Hidden Healthcare Workforces: NHS Therapists for Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Part 2)

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Prof Ian Kessler of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce is Professor of Public Policy and Management at King’s Business School. He introduces a new report from the Unit, scoping the demand and supply of NHS therapists for Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

This, the second of two blogs, focuses on the supply of, while the first addressed the demand for, therapists for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

The Supply Side

Commissioning. While the capacity to address this increased demand rests in large part on the scale, structure, and capabilities of the therapy and, as already implied, the wider health and care workforce, the commissioning process for CPY with SEND, is pivotal. Commissioning determines the services available and at what level of resource, inevitably feeding through to determine the workforce required to provide them: to put it crudely, if a service is not commissioned, a workforce is not required. The close connection between service design and the workforce is apparent from various ‘good practice’ commissioning models [1]. These typically distinguish different levels of services linked to the nature of need and support, with implications for the requisite workforce: for example, accessible universal services delivered by a wider workforce; targeted services provided by registered therapists and their support co-workers; and specialist services the exclusive preserve of the registered therapist. Continue reading →

In Search of Hidden Healthcare Workforces: NHS Therapists for Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Part 1)

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Prof Ian Kessler of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce is Professor of Public Policy and Management at King’s Business School. He introduces a new report from the Unit, scoping the demand and supply of NHS therapists for Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

This, the first of two blogs, focuses on the demand for, while the second discusses the supply of, therapists for Children and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Context

The workforce delivering care and support for children and young people (CYP) with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is an elusive one. In part this elusiveness stems from the diffuse and fragmented nature of the workforce as CYP with SEND typically engage with a variety of services- education, health, social care and sometimes housing. Even drilling down into these discrete service segments, tying the SEND workforce down in terms of its size, skill mix, and capacity remains challenging. Take health as an example. CYP with SEND will have a range of developmental, physical, and mental health care needs, addressed by a variety of staff groups to be found in different clinical settings including: nursing in both community, acute and mental health settings, clinical consultants in a similar range of settings, GPs in primary care, and healthcare visitors in the community. Adding to the challenges is the fact that those in any one of these staff groups will have clients which include but are rarely limited to CYP with SEND. With policies often framed by and centred on ‘children and young people with SEND’ as the named client group [1], the hidden nature of the workforce caring for and supporting them becomes a real challenge in meaningfully delivering on the policy initiative. Continue reading →

Working with fathers to protect vulnerable babies from harm

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Dr Mary Baginsky,Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. (414 words)

Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report The Myth of Invisible Men: Safeguarding children under 1 from non-accidental injury caused by male carers, published in late 2021, examined safeguarding of children under the age of one year from non-accidental injury caused by male carers.  In summary, the data showed that men are more likely to be perpetrators of physical abuse and harm to babies than women. It indicates that birth fathers are much more likely to be the perpetrator than other male figures. Importantly, whilst just over 50 per cent of families were involved with local authority children’s services (either through early help services or children’s social care), this means nearly 50 per cent of the cases considered as part of the review were only ever known to universal services. Continue reading →

Weeding out a few bad apples? What do we believe registration of residential childcare workers is for?

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Martin Elliott

Dr Martin Elliott

Dr Martin Elliott of the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE) at Cardiff University introduces a new project funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. The study, which runs 2022-24, also involves the Centre for Trials Research at Cardiff and, from HSCWRU, Jill Manthorpe, Mary Baginsky and Carl Purcell. (753 words)

Residential care for children ‘looked after’ by the state is often characterised as the placement of ‘last resort’, despite it being a positive and appropriate placement choice for some young people.  Across the UK, 16% of children looked after in England are living in residential settings, 10% in Scotland and 7% in Wales (Competition and Markets Authority, 2022). Historically, the children’s residential care workforce is undervalued and often seen as transient and low skilled (Department for Education, 2021), despite working with children who have often experienced significant trauma and challenges.

Residential children’s homes and those working in them have been the focus of much negative commentary for many years. High profile examples have ranged from the historic abuse of children in residential care in North Wales and elsewhere to more recent criticism of the impact of the marketisation of care and the profits made by private providers, and the inadequacies of children’s homes in Rotherham and Rochdale and their failure to protect children from sexual abuse. Continue reading →

Is the legal tail wagging the social work dog?

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Mary Baginsky, Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce, introduces the paper given by Martha Cover recently at the Unit. Dr Baginsky convenes the seminar series where the paper was presented.

We were delighted that Martha Cover led our latest seminar in the Contemporary Issues & Debates in Social Work Education, Research and Practice on 18 January 2022.  Martha is a very experienced child law barrister who has considerable experience representing parents and children in cases of serious injury and death. Until recently she was joint head of Coram Chambers.

Martha writes on this subject, and regularly gives television and radio interviews and has given evidence to parliamentary select committees.

She was legal aid barrister of the year in 2019 and has recently been given an honorary doctorate in Law by Queen Mary University of London.—Mary Baginsky

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Is the legal tail wagging the social work dog?

Martha Cover

Martha Cover

Martha Cover

What I do not propose to do in this talk is to enter into the debate about whether the “right” number of children are in care, or whether there are too many or too few – or whether they are in fact the “right” children. To set the scene, as of March 2021, there were 80,850 children in care in England. The great majority were the subject of section 31 care orders rather than voluntarily accommodated under section 20 Children Act 1989.

I want to travel upstream from that and ask the question: with legal processes and court requirements becoming more dominant, is there an unintended consequence that social work is now focussed from the start on court requirements, and proving the section 31 threshold? If that is right, then is there any room in frontline social work for open and supportive relationships with children and their families?

The idea for this topic germinated when reading some government research following the institution of the 26-week time limit for care proceedings, introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014.  In August 2015, the Department for Education published “Impact of the Family Justice Reforms on Front-Line Practice: The Public Law Outline”. The research examined the impact of the changes in the PLO on front line practice. It quotes a social worker:

“As soon as we have a case that we know may meet threshold, straight away we start doing pre-proceedings work- family group conference, viability assessments, more comprehensive chronology, exploring extended family members,…. doing any assessments that need to be done……” Continue reading →

Improving professional decision-making in situations of risk and uncertainty: a pilot intervention

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky,Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce, reflects on our seminar led, online, by Professor Cheryl Regehr on 28 September 2021. (763 words)

Professor Cheryl Regehr is Provost and Vice-President for the University of Toronto and former Dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. She is also a Visiting Professor at our Unit this term. We were delighted that she agreed to lead a seminar that focused on her recent work. In this she explained how the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada has supported a number of her recent research projects that have examined stress, trauma and decision-making in social work (see examples below). The aim is to develop a new model for improving decision-making in situations of high-risk to reach a better understanding of the factors that drive decision-making in these situations. Professor Regehr and her team piloted a new approach for improving professional decision-making. The researchers examined biological, emotional, cognitive and contextual influences and this involved measuring social workers’ heart rates and recording their reflections on the decisions they had taken at specific times. The participants were able to link their emotional responses to the points at which they had been under physical stress. By raising their awareness to the relationship between their physiological responses and their automatic responses to the decisions they made the intention was to help them move towards more deliberate decision-making. Continue reading →

Signs of Safety: Findings from the second evaluation by King’s College London

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky is Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. (1,109 words)

The report on the second round of Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme funding for the 10 MTM (Munroe, Turnell and Murphy) Signs of Safety (SofS) pilots has just been published. The strengths-based approach to child protection and safety is widely used around the world, as well as in two-thirds of local authorities in England (Baginsky et al., 2020). The term ‘Signs of Safety’ refers to a model of practice that consists of:

  • principles that privilege relationships with children and their families
  • disciplines in relation to assessments, behaviours and language
  • tools for assessment and planning, as well as for use with children and families.[1]

It is not known to what extent a ‘pure model’ of SofS is in place in English local authorities. The survey that identified its use also showed the variations – and pick and mix approaches – that  were in place.

Back in 2014 when the 10 MTM pilots were recruited the idea was that they worked to the model above which was developed into a whole system design that MTM considered essential to support, monitor and build high-quality SofS practice based on a supportive organisational culture and the commitment of those in senior leadership positions. The first evaluation found that: Continue reading →

Child and family welfare services: where do we go next?

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Dr Carl Purcell, NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London. His book, The Politics of Children’s Services Reform: Re-examining Two Decades of Policy Change, is just out. (849 words)

As we emerge from the current crisis, we must rethink how we resource and deliver child and family welfare services. The incredible contribution made by everybody working in the NHS is now widely appreciated. But we must remember that there are many others working to protect the most vulnerable in our society who also deserve our recognition. Furthermore, as we move, tentatively, towards easing the lockdown the skills, knowledge and dedication of teachers, childcare workers and social workers, to name just a few, will be vital to ensuring that we are able to identify and support the most vulnerable children and families.

However, as we place greater demands on schools, local authorities and a vast array of voluntary sector agencies we must recognise that before the current crisis our child and family welfare system was already under significant strain. In my new book I reflect upon recent national policy developments to help explain how we arrived in this position. As we chart a way forward, three aspects of the contemporary system need to be addressed.

First, we need to reconsider the extent to which, and how, we provide financial assistance to those who need it most. Since 2010 welfare payments and tax breaks offered to the poorest families have been reduced or withdrawn. Progress made in reducing child poverty over the preceding decade has been reversed, with over 4 million children now living in poverty, many of them in working households (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2018). Moreover, the current crisis has demonstrated how precarious and insecure many people’s jobs are, and we have seen record increases in benefit claims. Many more families have been pushed beneath the poverty line. Continue reading →

Social Austerity – Child Protection and Human Rights

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

Senior Research Fellow at HSCWRU, Dr Mary Baginsky, reports from a conference that took place in Komotini, Greece,1-3 November. (456 words)

I spent last week in the small Greek city of Komotini which nestles in the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains near to the borders of Turkey and Bulgaria. It has a minority Muslim population, many of whom came from Turkey originally and formed a protected population under the Treaty of Lausanne. They have mostly chosen to stay in Greece through to recent times.

The Democritus University of Thrace was established in July 1973 and is based in Komotini, Greece, with other campuses in Xanthi, Alexandroupoli and Orestiada. The Social Work Department was established in the 1990s. I was invited to contribute to a conference on Social Austerity – Child Protection and Human Rights. Most of the contributions were in Greek with intermittent simultaneous translation. In addition to finding it difficult to concentrate on the translation when animated presenters were more of a draw, the fact that the written programme was all in Greek meant that the subject of each presentation was a surprise. Continue reading →