Moving on from Munro

Improving Children's Services

Blyth, Maggie

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781447315681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Four years after the publication of the influential Munro Report (2011) this important publication draws together a range of experts working in the field of child protection to critically examine what impact the reforms have had on multi-agency child protection systems in this country, at both local and national level. With a particular emphasis on early intervention, vulnerable adolescents and effective multi-agency responses to young people at risk, specialists from policy and practice alongside academics in different areas of children's services consider progress in improving child protection arrangements, in transforming services and the challenges that remain. Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs), the statutory bodies responsible for local scrutiny of child protection arrangements, are now subject to Ofsted inspection and this publication considers the role of LSCBs, how services should respond to the most vulnerable children and what 'good' services look like.

1

Getting the right things right

Mark Gurrey and Eleanor Brazil

The context

First, a few disclaimers. This chapter does not aim to describe the path to the achievement of excellence or an outstanding service, neither is it a critique of recent or current Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) regimes and methodologies. It does not offer a road map for those authorities already in intervention – although it is hoped that it may be of assistance to them and indeed to those who feel themselves to be coasting and those waiting for Ofsted and maybe wondering whether they are heading for a fall. Nor is it a blueprint for the design of a social care service for children and their families: we are aware that many authorities are successfully working on this and some are offering very useful models for others to learn from and develop. We make no reference to those developments other than by implication and, as the reader will find, we support models and improvement activities that put good social work centre stage in service development.

Rather, this chapter offers an outline of those areas of any children’s system or service that must be addressed if it is to be considered ‘safe’. It is based on our combined experience (and that of others working in similar circumstances – the world of turnaround interims in local authority child protection services is small) in several different authorities which have fallen foul of an inspection and been judged inadequate. It sets out a number of organisational characteristics we consider to be key to the provision of at least safe services for children. Weaknesses in these areas were part of our inheritance when we moved to those authorities and needed to be addressed in order to help move those authorities forward.

Necessarily, we set out these areas in a somewhat linear manner. Not only has each area to be attended to and brought in to good order, what is overwhelmingly important is that the interrelationship between each and every one is worked on. If leadership, learning and development, performance management and supervision, and other key areas of service improvement are not all working together and influencing each other, the service response to the complexity of the task will never be what it needs to be or as good as it can be.

Finally, we set out our perspective on the impact of the recent child protection reforms on our view of ‘safe’ services. In clarifying the different components of what makes effective child protection arrangements, we consider whether the Munro reforms have helped shift practice and the extent to which they have impacted on senior leadership in children’s services through the setting of strategic priorities.

Many people will read this chapter and declare its contents to be obvious, self-evident and reflecting what they have been doing anyway. We are sure for most that will be true and we offer our apologies and permission to skip to the next chapter. However, our response might be: how come so many local authorities have been deemed inadequate in recent years, especially those who previously thought of themselves as safe, effective, even good? In our view, this is not simply a consequence of Ofsted setting the bar higher or even too high. It is true that recent changes in the inspection regime have focused more and more on the right things and left authorities with fewer and fewer hiding places. We would agree with the criticism that the Ofsted one-word judgement does scant justice to the complexity of the task but if we are to be inspected at all, clearly it is in our joint interests that the right things are looked at in the right way. We think, in nearly all instances, Ofsted has highlighted weaknesses in some authorities that were both identifiable and solvable.

This chapter is based on what are now considerable joint experiences of working in authorities that were either in intervention, at the beginning of the journey out or had emerged from intervention and moved on. We have discussed this with and learnt from others who have also worked in such circumstances. The content reflects that combined learning and in particular the assessment of what we inherited and the issues needing attention in order to lift all out of intervention. Lest anyone should think otherwise, we are clear that the lifting was not done by us alone; indeed, in at least one instance, all the heavy lifting had been done by the time we arrived. Nevertheless, the learning carries, we believe, both merit and interest.

Speak truth unto power

We take as axiomatic that the safeguarding of children is a difficult and complex business. It is probably one of the hardest jobs in the public sector. Eileen Munro articulated very clearly ‘the commonly held belief that the complexity and associated uncertainty of child protection work can be eradicated’ (Munro, 2011, p 137). The elements needed to ensure that the job is done successfully must recognise and to some extent replicate the complexity of the task. That is not to say that we need to build a complicated set of institutional arrangements to deliver safe services, but we do need to understand the complexity and in particular to ensure that the elements needed are all in place and working effectively and that the relationships between them are ‘right’.

That said, it is our view that the single most important factor is the prevailing organisational culture and, by extension, the nature and quality of leadership in the service.

Safe and effective children’s services can only flourish in an atmosphere characterised by openness and transparency, by a willingness to have those ‘courageous conversations’, to challenge new clothes on the emperor and to raise the difficult and sticky questions that leaders often hope will be left unsaid. If it is true – and we firmly believe it is – that aspirations for the quality of external service delivery are reflected in the internal values and culture of the organisation, then, by definition, organisational culture is key to delivering effective safeguarding for children.

One of the core expectations of social workers is that they will ask those really difficult, challenging, embarrassing and intimate questions that are essential to knowing how safe it is for children in the family. Social workers have to find ways of talking about things that are ordinarily kept private and hidden from public scrutiny, that explore the very heart of family life and lie at the centre of people’s views about themselves. It is probably one of the most difficult conversations any public sector employee is asked to have with service users of any description. It is, however, these conversations, held empathetically and sensitively, that form the basis of assessments, care plans and ultimately judgements about the single biggest intervention the state can have in family life: the decision to remove children or not. The consequences of getting these conversations wrong are well known. Many of the recent too-well-known serious case reviews (SCRs), including those covering the circumstances leading to the tragic deaths of Peter Connelly and Keanu Williams, comment on missed opportunities to have and act on such conversations.

Good managers will always be alert and attuned to whether these conversations have been had or avoided, whether the ‘quiet knock on the door, no one in’ syndrome extends to interaction with the family. This is especially true in families who are resistant or aggressive in their responses. These are sometimes genuinely frightening conversations, particularly where a parent is constantly and stridently verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive, and difficult where parents provide potentially plausible alternative explanations, such as those provided by the mother of Daniel Pelka. But it is the role of the manager to find ways to enable them to happen.

The implications for organisational culture become, we hope, obvious. How much harder is it to have those conversations with families if the day-to-day experience of staff in their organisation is characterised by fear, denial or lack of interest, by a wish to bury bad news? They simply will not happen – and as a consequence the impact on child safety becomes manifest. We have worked in authorities where senior managers were barely visible, even where they occupied the same building as their front-line staff. Equally, we’ve known places where a request to the resource panel felt worse than going to the dentist, and managers knew that and relished it because … well, who knows?

Do what you say on the tin, show evidence of congruence between word and deed, work internally as you wish services to be delivered externally, walk the talk. Describe it as you will. But, however described, the culture and leadership of the organisation remains the key single most important factor in building effective safeguarding services. Social workers are very astute in identifying the gaps between the walk and the talk and as soon as they feel they are in an organisation lacking that congruence, the culture is lost. Good directors and assistant directors know and understand their staff, and they also know and understand the difficult judgements that complex cases require. In his report on Doncaster children’s services following the publication of the full SCR of the Edlington boys, Lord Carlisle commented positively on the knowledge that the then assistant director had of individual cases. However, what he did not reflect on was the need to balance that with the equally difficult task of implementing good systems and support (covered later in this chapter).

At the heart of the culture must be an agreed and constantly stated and restated sense of what good social work looks like. From our perspective, the fact that government accepted all the recommendations in Munro’s final report in 2012 and that her reforms have become a central plank of local authority arrangements and Ofsted regulation is indicative of the fact that she recognised most of what lay behind effective child protection arrangements. What has been most effective about the reforms in influencing improvements in children’s services has been the renewed focus on the impact on children in her description of a child-centred system and how to deliver improved outcomes through delivering better early help, improved assessment and analysis, and timely decision-making.

Leadership, organisational culture and all the other factors we touch on later are not ends in themselves, of course. They are means to an end and that end must be the delivery of good-quality social work, which entails setting out what that means and what it looks like. We have worked in authorities where the definition of ‘good’ has been based on form-filling or timeliness or more generally on the ‘mechanics’ of social work. Our view, and that of many others, is that definitions of ‘good’ are rooted in the quality of relationships built with people, direct work skills and creativity shown in driving change in families (most of which is not evident in the completion of forms). It has become something of a cliché to talk about what ‘good’ looks like – even Ofsted wants to know how it is defined and delivered in local authorities (as set out in the recent Ofsted [2013]framework). Again, this is not simply a question of writing it down and certainly not a question of simply telling people, although both might be necessary. Parenting classes often talk about the benefits of ‘descriptive praise’. Simply saying ‘well done’ is not always enough; it is necessary to say why something was good – how the behaviour sought by the parent was achieved by the child – and the same is necessary here. So, examples of ‘good’ need to be highlighted, to be shared and accompanied by clarity about why ‘it’ is as required. The analogy is not perfect, of course, because the basis for this chapter is the adherence to adult–adult relationships not parent–child ones, but it does serve a purpose. It is important in setting out what is good and what is not and reinforcing the former while specifically criticising or discouraging the latter. Definitions of ‘good’ do not solely reside with managers and leaders: good organisations will be characterised by the ability, indeed expectation, that front-line staff will contribute to, if not lead on, those definitions. If you are still wondering what ‘good’ looks like, consider this recent message from a head teacher in Doncaster about one of our social workers:

Yesterday, we phoned for advice regarding a family with suspected physical abuse. The social worker, K, dealt with the situation brilliantly. She was caring and supportive to the children, whilst being informative and empathetic to myself and my staff. K even phoned me at 10:10 pm to inform me where the children were for the night, and again this morning (on her day off) to see how the children were in school.

K worked a very long day yesterday and didn’t even stop for something to eat. She really did show dedication beyond the call of duty.

Having set out how ‘it’s going to be round here’, that must be evident in all you do – whether work on budgets and savings, human resources (HR) decisions, placement and case-based decisions. Everything needs to reflect those stated values. A periodic workshop and the issuing of a mission/value statement will not do it. These have their place but will count for nothing if social workers experience their managers as absent or invisible, if communication up the organisation is hard and anxiety-provoking, and if decisions are simply not made or are made in ways that leave practitioners with the problems unsolved.

Our view is that the Munro review has helped set the scene for this approach. She has, of course, shifted the focus back to the child and to the importance of building relationships, helping people change and simply helping people. However, we think that not enough attention is given explicitly to leadership and culture, which we believe to be central – hence our leading on it here.

Confident humility

All of the foregoing requires a certain approach, a certain style from leaders that describes what they do and how they expect others to behave. Googling ‘confident humility’ shows its roots in both religious and management teachings. For us, it captures the very heart of what makes for a good leader – and what makes for a good social worker. The mixture of confidence born of experience, professional knowledge and expertise, of academic learning and research combined with the humility to recognise there is always more to learn, that we can all get things wrong, that other people (wherever they are in the organisation or the family) may know something we do not, and the willingness and ability to step back from and review a position – all describe a good leader and a good social worker. Any organisation that is at least in part characterised by senior officers who believe or give the impression that they know everything and are always right simply by dint of their position will not encourage social workers to adopt the necessary position of confident humility with families.

Aggregation of marginal gains

So, leadership and culture rooted in the definition of good social work standards are, in our view, the single most important factors in a children’s social care organisation. They are not, however, the only ones; there are a range of other matters that need to be addressed and attended to in order to deliver good services. When we were in Haringey post-Baby Peter, our mantra was that there was ‘no one thing that would fix it’ (this was covered by a Guardian interview with Eleanor Brazil in February 2010). Progress was required simultaneously on a whole raft of interconnected but separate fronts, which moved them forward both individually and collectively. Sir Dave Brailsford coined the more elegant term, ‘aggregation of marginal gains’, to capture the same sense of needing to attend to every aspect of service development (or, in his case, every aspect that gives a competitive advantage), to ensure that each is as good as it can be in and of itself and that it makes sense of and contributes to the whole.

What we now would argue is that there are a number of relatively limited areas that are absolutely key to maintaining a safe service, or rebuilding a broken one. They might find their manifestation differently in different organisations but, at heart, they are constant and essential.

(a) Quality assurance and performance management

It remains remarkable that some services have poorly developed or even n...