Understanding Children′s Social Care

Politics, Policy and Practice

Nick Frost, Nigel Parton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412923507, 9781412923491
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

"These two authors are always worth reading for their breadth and originality. Their new book offers a timely and stimulating analysis of modern children?s services"

David Berridge, Professor of Child and Family Welfare, University of Bristol

"Clear yet thorough; practical yet politically insightful; complicated yet coherent ... this book will appeal to those who want to get an overview of the territory, but also to those who wish to drill down deeper and understand the theoretical underpinning of government policies"

Martin C Calder, Honorary Research Fellow, Sheffield Hallam Univeristy

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of children?s social care in England following the introduction of Every Child Matters and the 2007 Children?s Plan. Up-to-date and accessible, the book examines the key issues surrounding child care policy, politics and legislation, and the implications they have for practice.

The book is organised into three sections:

- From Children?s Departments to Departments of Children?s Services analyses the historical and political changes in the children?s service since 1948.

- Different Service Areas provides a critical review of the main service areas, including safeguarding and child protection.

- Current Issues and Future Prospects considers the main challenges and future prospects for children?s social care.

Essential reading for those studying child social care on programmes in social work, childhood studies and social policy, the book will also interest postgraduates and practitioners in child care.

Part I

From Children’s Departments to Departments of Children’s Services

1

Local Authority Children’s Services in the Post-war Period

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to outline the changing role and nature of what is now called children’s social care in the post-war period. While it might appear that the current changes, which have seen the establishment of departments of children’s services, give the impression that we may be witnessing a ‘return to the future’, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than simply be concerned with children who are in the care of the local authority, as was originally the case with children’s departments, the new arrangements aim to prevent poor outcomes for all children and young people and to ensure they fulfil their potential. Every Child Matters: Change for Children

sets out the national framework for local change programmes to build services around the needs of children and young people so that we maximise opportunity and minimise risk. The services that reach every child and young person have a crucial role to play in shifting the focus from dealing with the consequences of difficulties in children’s lives to preventing things from going wrong in the first place. The transformation that we need can only be delivered through local leaders working together in strong partnership with local communities on a programme of change. (DfES, 2004b: 2)

The vision is of integrated services meeting the needs of all children and being available as soon as problems and/or extra needs are identified. It aims to transform the way universal, selective and targeted services work together and it is the ‘well-being’ of all children which is the focus. However, this has not always been the case. In this chapter we outline how the focus and responsibilities of local authority children’s services developed in the post-war period prior to the election of New Labour in 1997.

The Children Act 1948 and Post-war Changes

The blueprint for the Children Act 1948 was provided by the report of the Curtis Committee, which was established at the end of the Second World War. In particular it attempted to provide a simplified and unified administrative framework at both central and local government levels for all children who, for whatever reason, were deprived of a ‘normal’ home life. The focus was very specific – those who were living in care, often in large institutions, and where the dominating philosophy continued to be the Poor Law. While the children came into care via a number of routes and for different reasons, the largest group was those in the care of local authority public assistance committees as ‘poor persons in need of relief’, and were either orphans or had been deserted by their parents, or had mentally or physically ill parents who were unable or unwilling to care for them. The total number of children and young people in care at the time was 124,900 (Curtis Report, 1946: 8).

The main purposes of the Children Act 1948 were: the establishment of local authority children’s departments which would take over responsibilities from other local departments for children in care, while, at central government level, the Home Office would take overall national responsibility; a new emphasis on boarding out (fostering) in preference to residential homes; the restoration of children in care to their natural parents whenever possible; and a greater emphasis on adoption.

Beyond this, however, the new departments tried to lay to rest the Poor Law and embodied the revolutionary principle that they should seek the best development of the children they were responsible for. Under Section 15 of the Poor Law Act 1930 it was the duty of the local authority to: ‘set to work and put out as apprentices all children whose parents are not, in the opinion of the council, able to keep and maintain their children’. Until 1948 the influence of the 1601 and 1834 Poor Law Acts was explicit and there was no reference to any duties to educate, compensate or care for the children involved. However, the responsibilities in Section 12 of the Children Act 1948 were much more generous and stated that:

1. Where a child is in the care of the local authority, it shall be the duty of that authority to exercise their powers with respect to him so as to further his best interests and to afford him opportunity for the proper development of his character and abilities.
2. In providing for a child in care, a local authority shall make such use of facilities and services available for children in the care of their own parents, as appears to the local authority reasonable in his care.

As Jean Packman (1981) has argued, children in care were in future to be treated as individuals and not as an undifferentiated category of youngsters, and should have access to the same range of facilities as other children. The new departments were to be staffed by a new kind of personnel who were professionally trained in the psycho-social sciences and who had a thorough understanding of human relationships and the importance of the family and parental attachments, particularly in relation to mothers, for a child’s development. However, while the changes were significant, the focus of children’s departments was circumscribed and specific to children in care. The new service played a residual and particular role in the overall context of welfare services.

The post-war welfare state was based on a particular model of the economy and the family. Not only did it assume full male employment, it also assumed a traditional role for the patriarchal nuclear family (Pascall, 1986; Williams, 1989). The idea of the ‘family wage’ was central, linking the labour market to the distribution of social roles and dependency by age and gender within the family. Within the family, women were to trade housework, childbirth, child rearing and physical and emotional caring in return for economic support from a male ‘breadwinner’ (Finch and Groves, 1983). It was assumed that most ‘welfare work’ was carried out within the family, either by using the family wage to buy goods and services or by women caring for children. The provision of state welfare was intended to support, not replace, this arrangement. Such an approach was key to the work of the newly established children’s departments which were explicitly designed to provide a residual service for children deprived of a ‘normal family life’.

Clearly, however, the work and rationale of the departments would be subject to a whole series of tensions and difficulties if any of the underlying assumptions were to be seriously questioned or if there were to be significant changes in the key institutions that provided the key pillars for its work – particularly the labour market, the patriarchal nuclear family or the other universal state welfare services – health, education, and social security. Beyond this, further stresses and challenges would be created if the political consensus which underpinned the post-war welfare changes was itself to be put under strain. These were to become important issues from the mid-1980s onwards; however, between 1948 and the early 1970s, the focus and rationale of the work was to broaden and develop in significant ways.

The Establishment of ‘the Family Service’

During the 1950s children’s departments were increasingly finding their role far too narrow and restrictive and they began to expand their operations and reframe their responses (Packman, 1981; 1993). Increasingly it was felt that waiting until children came into care was doing too little too late. There was a need to intervene with families earlier in their own homes and thereby prevent children coming into care. Such thinking was given a major boost when influential members of the Fabian Society, prominent academics and senior civil servants, made explicit the links between child neglect, deprivation and delinquency such that providing help to families earlier would not only help prevent admissions into care but would also prevent future delinquency. The statutory power to provide services to families in the community in order to prevent children being received into care was provided in Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963. It provided the legislative backing for what a number of children’s departments were already doing in practice.

Moves to expand the remit and rationale of the work developed further in the 1960s. There was an increasing conviction that better services could be provided by means of reorganizing all local authority children’s and welfare services and bringing them together in an enlarged family service. This led to the establishment of local authority social services departments in 1971 following the Seebohm Report of 1968 and the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970 (Hall, 1976; Clarke, 1980; Cooper, 1983). The new department would be generic in nature with a focus upon the family and the community, and the new profession of social work would lie at its core. While the emphasis on genericism reflected a number of issues and was interpreted in a variety of ways, crucially it was premised on the view that the work drew on certain common values, knowledge and skills and was embodied most clearly in the role of the professional social worker. There were key similarities in, for example, assessment, support and counselling tasks regardless of whether the client was a child, an adult or an older person.

The role of the new social services departments was not just to provide a range of services and professional help but to coordinate aspects of other state services, such as health, education, housing and social security, and thereby make them more responsive to need, particularly with regard to the functioning of a small number of families who were seen as causing a disproportionate number of problems and were often referred to as ‘problem families’ (Philp and Timms, 1962). Social service departments, while clearly residual and small scale compared to the other state welfare services, were established as the ‘fifth social service’ (Townsend, 1970). They would provide the personalized, humanistic dimension of the welfare state, the primary tool being the professional worker’s personality and understanding of human relationships. The early 1970s marked the high point of optimism and confidence in social work, which had been fostered by the approaches developed in the children’s departments and its key political and academic advocates. However, during the 1970s not only were the assumptions on which it operated found wanting, but the social, political and economic contexts began to change significantly.

The Growing Crisis in Child Protection

The consensus that had been established in the post-war period, based on the family as the primary mechanism for ensuring the welfare of children, with social workers entrusted with the key responsibility for state child welfare, began to collapse during the 1970s. What became evident from the mid-1980s onwards was that the problems had become considerably more complex and high profile and were not amenable to easy resolution. Up until this point social work was seen as having the key role to play in mediating and resolving the difficult and sometimes ambiguous relationship between the privacy of the family and the public responsibilities of the state, so that children could be protected and the privacy of the family was not undermined. However, the tragic death of Maria Colwell and the subsequent public inquiry (Secretary of State for Social Services, 1974) were to change all that (Parton, 1985; Butler and Drakeford, 2005, Chapter 5).

Maria had been in the care of the local authority in Brighton, East Sussex, and at the time of her death at the hands of her stepfather was subject to a supervision order. Although the authorities received numerous calls expressing concerns about her treatment and the home was visited by a number of professionals, she died a tragic and brutal death. The case received considerable media, political and public attention.

The Public Inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell can be seen as a watershed in the contemporary history of social work, particularly in social service departments. Prior to this, social work practice was seen primarily as a private activity carried out between clients and professionals, the latter optimistically feeling their skills and techniques could tackle, even solve, many social problems. The case of Maria Colwell and the numerous subsequent inquiries into cases of child abuse have quite changed all that. (Parton and Thomas, 1983: 56–7).

Between the publication of the Colwell Inquiry report in 1974 and 1985 there were 29 further inquiries into the deaths of children as a result of abuse (Corby et al., 1998). There was considerable similarity between the findings (DHSS, 1982). Most identified: a lack of interdisciplinary communication; a lack of properly trained and experienced front-line workers; inadequate supervision; and too little focus on the needs of the child as distinct from those of the parents. The overriding concern was the lack of coordination between the different agencies. The intensity of political and media concern increased further in the mid-1980s with the public inquiries into three other child deaths in different London boroughs – Jasmine Beckford (London Borough of Brent, 1985), Tyra Henry (London Borough of Lambeth, 1987) and Kimberley Carlile (London Borough of Greenwich, 1987). Until this point, all the public inquiries had been concerned with the deaths of children at the hands of their parents or carers. The child welfare professionals were seen as having failed to protect the children and did too little, too late.

However, the Cleveland ‘affair’ which broke in the summer of 1987 was very different. This time over 100 children were kept in hospital against the wishes of their parents, on ‘place of safety orders’, on suspicions of sexual abuse (Secretary of State for Social Services, 1988; Parton, 1991). Not only was it the first scandal and public inquiry into possible over-reaction by professionals, it was also the first when the actions of paediatricians and other doctors, as well as social workers, were put under the microscope and subjected to criticism.

The issues that were articulated through the inquiries into child deaths and the Cleveland ‘affair’ resonated with a number of developments in the wider political environment, and contributed to the increasing questioning of the welfare consensus around the family. From the 1960s onwards, with the growth of the women’s movement and the increasing recognition of violence in the family, it was argued that the family may not be the ‘haven in a heartless world’ (Lasch, 1977) it had previously been assumed to be. While campaigning was initially concerned with improving the position of women, from the mid-1970s, particularly with the growing attention to sexual abuse, energy was also directed at the position of children (Rush, 1980; Nelson, 1987). Such critiques helped disaggregate the interests of individual family members and supported the sometimes contradictory development during the period of the emerging children’s rights movement (Freeman, 1983; Franklin, 1986, 1995).

The period also witnessed the emergence of a more obviously civil liberties critique which concentrated on the apparent growth of intervention into people’s lives in the name of welfare (Morris et al., 1980; Taylor et al., 1980; Geach and Szwed, 1983). Increasingly, lawyers drew attention to the way the administration of justice was unjustly applied to various areas of child welfare and the need for a greater emphasis on individual rights. During the mid-1980s, the parents’ lobby gained its most coherent voice with the establishment of Parents Against INjustice (PAIN). Thus, while quite different in their social location and focus of concern, there was a growing range of constituencies that were critical of the post-war consensus in child welfare. These were most forcefully articulated in and t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I From Children’s Departments to Departments of Children’s Services
• Part II Different Service Areas
• Part III Current Issues and Future Prospects
• References
• Index