Safeguarding Children and Schools

Mary Baginsky, Mary Baginsky

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781846428081
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Safeguarding Children and Schools explains how schools are able to contribute to keeping children safe from harm and promoting their welfare, in line with Government Every Child Matters guidelines.

The contributors, who are all experts in the field of child protection, put the potentially daunting task faced by schools in context, explaining relevant policy, the latest research findings and offering practical examples to help schools to be more proactive and meet their responsibilities successfully. Areas discussed include the roles of local education authority services and schools in child protection, working with particularly vulnerable or difficult children, the relationship between safeguarding and the curriculum, and training school staff to safeguard children.

At a time when expectations of the role of schools are evolving, this book provides guidance and support for teachers, managers and social care professionals.

Part 1

Safeguarding and Schools: Policy

Chapter One

Placing Schools at the Centre of Safeguarding Children

Mary Baginsky

The concept that schools have a role in promoting the health and welfare of children and young people is not a new one. Schools have traditionally offered medical and welfare services of some sort alongside their more traditional educative function. The nature of the services and the extent of the involvement has varied tremendously but since the 1980s it has become more formal. Now following the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié by Lord Laming (Laming 2003) the first decade of this century has witnessed a radical reshaping of how services for children are delivered, which has an impact on all agencies that deliver these services, including schools.

While services have been remodelled, the messages that have informed this organization have been around for a long time and have underpinned previous legislation and guidance. The lessons learnt in relation to collaboration and policy implementation will continue to be needed in the future. In order to move forward it is important to learn from the past. Many of these lessons are drawn from the experiences of protecting children, but they are still useful in informing this new era when schools and other agencies are charged with safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. Over the past 40 years there have been other attempts to develop systematic strategies and programmes to bring agencies together to support families and protect and promote children’s welfare. In the 1960s reports such as Central Advisory Council for Education Report (Plowden Report) in 1967 and Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services Report (Seebohm Report) in 1968 emphasized the importance of agencies and professionals working together. The next major milestone was the inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell (Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) 1974a). This identified the greatest failure as being the lack of effective communication and liaison between the agencies involved. There had been a failure both to pass on information and to co-ordinate an appropriate response. As a result a Memorandum on Non-Accidental Injury to Children (DHSS 1974b) was issued in 1974 to area health authorities and directors of social services and copied to the schools section of the then Department of Education and Science (DES). The memorandum recommended that the Director of Education was one of the local authority representatives on the area review committee. It also identified the professionals who should attend case conferences and recommended that teachers should be invited as appropriate, along with police surgeons and representatives of the housing department, as well as other agencies that might have information about the child and family. The memorandum also recommended that the area review committees should monitor training and develop a training plan designed to ‘increase knowledge, awareness and vigilance’ among various groups, including teachers. With a few exceptions it was not applied systematically across authorities – agencies usually continued to operate as they had done before. Too much continued to hinge on individuals’ own knowledge and understanding, alongside serendipitous connections across professions. But the continued death of children at the hands of their parents and carers continued to demonstrate the failure of agencies to work together effectively.

The Children Act 1989 was, in part, an attempt to address this failure and at the same time respond to the alarm created by the Cleveland Inquiry (Butler-Sloss 1988) where social workers had been accused of removing children, whom they suspected of having been sexually abused, from their homes with ‘over-enthusiasm and zeal’ (p.244). The Act introduced the concepts of ‘children in need’ (s.17) and ‘children in need of protection’ (s.47). A legal threshold for intervening in a family to protect children was introduced. The concept of ‘significant harm’ was defined in section 31(2) of the Act as being attributable to the care given or likely to be given to the child by the carer. It became embedded in social work practice but few other professionals really understood (and in some cases had not heard of ) it. There are no absolute criteria to support a judgement of what constitutes significant harm, nor was there an operational definition of harm and risk. In addition, and to add to the lack of understanding, different thresholds are used across the country.

The number of child protection cases increased significantly from the early 1990s, a rise that was reflected in a series of studies that the government commissioned to throw light on the very problems that had also spawned the Children Act. These were published in 1995 as Child Protection: Messages from Research (Department of Health 1995). The studies clearly showed practice had shifted to the assessment of risk and investigation at the expense of providing services to children in need, with the result that vulnerable children were left to struggle on or go into crisis when they might then get an assessment but sometimes no service. The document Working Together Under the Children Act 1989: A Guide to Arrangements for Interagency Co-operation for the Protection of Children from Abuse (Home Office et al. 1991) had set out how agencies and professionals should work together to promote children’s welfare and protect them from abuse and neglect. However a report by the Audit Commission (1994), as well as the research summarized in Messages from Research (Department of Health 1995), indicated that there was still a great deal to be done. So what had gone wrong?

The Children Act 1989 had attempted both to safeguard children and to promote their welfare, providing for both the welfare and protection of children in need. It had been based on a philosophy which recognized that child protection cannot be separated from policies to improve children’s lives as a whole. This philosophy was undermined by both a failure to resource its preventive provisions and a failure across departments to address what a ‘child in need’ was, let alone to arrive at a consistent definition of ‘significant harm’. At the same time schools and teachers did not emerge from studies that contributed to the Messages from Research as being very engaged in the process. But the research did not reflect a situation that was in transition. Maybe some schools continued to be disengaged. On one level this might be explained, but not excused, in light of the revolution through which schools passed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But a fairer explanation probably lies in the fact that schools have usually developed their own response to working with families and children on what may be termed ‘welfare issues’. The natural role for many schools was not to be linked too closely to the local authority, other than to the education authority. While most teachers have always taken their responsibilities as being in loco parentis seriously, they have interpreted their duties in terms of making sure children and young people receive the services they need. In 1988 government guidance recommended that ‘a senior member of a school’s staff should have responsibility, under the procedures established by the local education authority (LEA), for co-ordinating action and for liaison with other agencies’ (DES 1988). Seven years later the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) issued Circular 10/95 (DfEE 1995), which set out the responsibilities of LEAs, schools and further education colleges for child protection and gave guidance on inter-agency links. In the intervening years between the circulars the amount of training teachers received in relation to child protection had increased, but this was developed significantly by specific funding in the years after Circular 10/95 appeared. This would not have been reflected in the studies that contributed to Messages from Research, most of which were concluded by the early 1990s.

However, as welcome as this training was, in hindsight the actual training, usually for designated teachers, was not always fit for purpose. If the intention was to increase the number of referrals of concern to social services the training possibly succeeded. Unfortunately the training usually focused on the recognition and reporting of child protection concerns but failed to address the complexity of the reality and messiness of child protection. For example, it often failed to discuss the definitional and threshold quagmire around ‘significant harm’ (Baginsky with Davies 2000). But as the number of referrals from various sources increased, social services were forced to raise the threshold of the level at which they responded. In the worst cases schools became disillusioned when they did not get a response, and when social services came across cases where schools had failed to make a referral the lines were drawn for a stand off between the two agencies. The more usual scenario was one where both would become occasionally frustrated with the other but they somehow rubbed along (Baginsky 2000, 2007). But this was not the best scenario for children and young people. Although the legislation was built on an assumption of partnership and inter-agency collaboration, what this was to mean in practice was less than clear. Hendry and Baginsky (Chapter 10) argue that for schools to play their full part in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people in the future, there is a need for a whole-school approach and a comprehensive safeguarding-training and development strategy. A similar theme emerges from the work of Laskey (Chapter 11), even though her work is based on the Australian experience.

In another arena the plight of looked after children attracted a great deal of attention during the 1990s and a stream of reports including those from Levy and Kahan (1991), Utting (1991 and 1997) and Kent (1997). An increasing amount of evidence emerged to show that the educational achievement of looked after children was low, with most leaving school as soon as they could and with few, if any, qualifications. In the previous decade a number of researchers had looked at the low educational achievement of those leaving care (see, for example, Stein and Carey 1986 and Jackson 1987). Berridge (1985) had found instability and frequent moves impacted on attainment, and little had changed more than ten years later (Berridge et al. 1996). At around the same time, Fletcher-Campbell’s (1997) work evidenced inadequate planning and support, while Aldgate et al. (1992) had uncovered the low expectations that professionals had of looked after children. The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) (1998) found that the permanent exclusion rate among children in care was ten times higher than the average and as many as 30% of children in care were out of mainstream education through exclusion or truancy. Reasons for the high level of exclusion included: the absence of an adult consistently to advocate for them in contacts with education services; difficulties in concentrating at school because of problems at home; possible stigmatization by pupils and teachers; and the level of disruption caused by the movement between care placements. These movements often then involved a change of school. Almost three-fifths of the children in the SEU study changed their place of education during the year of the study and one in ten had three or more changes. There is a great deal of evidence to show links between a history of care and subsequent homelessness, risk of criminality and vulnerability to drugs and prostitution. It is a major contributor to the numbers who have low levels of educational achievement and reduced employment chances. The SEU research pointed to the complex lives of these children which, in turn, demanded a more complex response than the ones that had been tried. Not surprisingly it was based on inter-agency co-operation and responsibility with initiatives and legislation such as the Quality Protects programme,¹ The Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, Guidance on the Education of Children and Young People in Public Care (DoH and DfEE 2000), Education Protects (DoH 2001) and now Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care (DfES 2007). In Chapter 4 Fletcher-Campbell unpicks the complexities that have developed around this subject and explores the extent and limitations of schools’ contribution.

But there are other groups of children with equally significant needs, including disabled children. Miller and Raymond (Chapter 5) describe the role schools should play in safeguarding disabled children. They identify the level of risk of abuse that disabled children face and the reasons for this; they also emphasize the role of the school in empowering and consulting with disabled children, and consider the safeguarding measures that are required.

One of the most difficult situations that schools face involves problematic and abusive sexual behaviours of children and young people. Despite the fact that schools are having to deal with these behaviours there has been no robust research carried out on the incidence, prevalence or how they are being dealt with. In Chapter 6 Hackett and Taylor draw on existing literature to provide information and advice for teachers and other staff in school settings.

While the agenda has now moved from the planning and piloting stage of redesigned children’s services into national implementation and operation, many of those working in schools (as is the case with practitioners in other agencies) are still trying to understand how best to make this work. Although the details and organizational arrangements differ across the four countries of the United Kingdom they do share a common vision, which is illustrated in the model adopted in England. The framework for delivering the reforms is set out in Every Child Matters: Change for Children (Department for Education and Skills 2004b).

The principal aims are to:

•ensure that no child falls through the net and that all children are helped to achieve their potential

•shift the balance towards prevention through tackling child poverty, improving early-years education and child care, raising school standards and supporting parents

•intervene earlier before children reach crisis point.

There is an increased emphasis on inter-agency communication and joint working, and on enabling the voice of the child, along with that of their families and carers, to be heard. There is a focus both on safeguarding children and on improving the outcomes of all, supported by the development of integrated structures and collaborative working between agencies.

But as described above this is not entirely new. Throughout the 1990s there had been an increasing emphasis on the need for joined-up government and inter-departmental co-operation, but the literature on the promotion of joint working in the area of social welfare used terms such as ‘collaboration’, ‘co-ordination’, ‘inter-agency’ or ‘multi-agency worki...