Good Practice in Safeguarding Children

Working Effectively in Child Protection

Hilary Owen, Liz Hughes

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781843109457
• eBook ISBN: 9781846428944
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Good Practice in Safeguarding Children considers how front-line professionals can keep the best interests of the child at the heart of their work when statutory guidance, the way agencies are integrated and the delivery of services are changing.

Liz Hughes and Hilary Owen have drawn together contributors' experiences of working with safeguarding children on a broad range of issues, including neglect, trafficked children, parents with learning difficulties and child protection supervision. The contributors discuss current dilemmas in safeguarding children work and provide models of good practice, including case scenarios and exercises. This book explores how changes in the system offer an opportunity to enhance the quality of service provision, to achieve better outcomes for children and their families.

This book is a must-read book for all front-line practitioners involved in safeguarding children, including social workers, child and adolescent mental health practitioners, police officers, healthcare professionals, probation workers and teachers. It is also suitable for undergraduate, post-graduate and post-qualifying students.

CHAPTER 1

FROM PROTECTION TO SAFEGUARDING: BRINGING YOU UP TO DATE ON STATUTORY RESPONSIBILITIES

HILARY OWENA

INTRODUCTION

This chapter brings together recent legislation and statutory guidance which every practitioner working with children or parents, whatever their professional background, needs to know about in order to practise competently and confidently. It describes the development of key government initiatives which provide practitioners with powerful tools to do their jobs well. It reveals some of the complexities of the work and how thoughtful, intelligent and imaginative practitioners sometimes need to be to achieve good outcomes for families. Other chapters in this book describe these complexities in more detail and demonstrate how to work with them safely and successfully.

Initiatives in one part of a complex human system always produce unforeseen consequences in another part, particularly when resources are tight. Many parts of our safeguarding system are improving: a few are deteriorating. I shall draw attention to some issues of concern which practitioners in all sectors, statutory, private, voluntary and community, might take responsibility for raising with their managers and indeed government ministers whenever the opportunity arises.

First, a point of interest. All specialisms have their fashionable jargon, and safeguarding children is no exception. The language of government guidance in safeguarding children has become more sophisticated and expresses very precisely the nuances of changing ideologies and politicians’ intentions. The clearest example of this is the extension of the work from ‘child protection’ (protecting children from maltreatment) to ‘safeguarding children’ (ensuring that children are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care). Safeguarding is a wider range of activities, often preventative and proactive. It ranges from taking children into care because of maltreatment by parents to putting strategies in place to prevent knife and gun crime amongst young people, from prosecuting paedophiles to ensuring agencies use safe recruitment and employment practices. A more hidden example is the change from ‘child protection register’ to ‘list of children who need a child protection plan’ (HM Government 2006a). Lists work in just the same way that registers did but, for a parent, the sting of hearing that your child has been ‘registered’ has been removed. The emphasis now is all on the child protection plan, the future, the support to be offered; rather than on the past, the injury, the cry for help. Considering carefully the terminology of government guidance will reveal the ideas, debates and current (if sometimes short-lived) consensus behind it.

Listen for the language: the guidance means very precisely what it says.

The recommendations of Lord Herbert Laming (2003) and Sir Michael Bichard (2004) have provided the framework for the Labour government’s approach to safeguarding children. The government’s helpful emphasis on outcomes for children, rather than service outputs, is expressed as its Every Child Matters agenda (Department for Education and Skills 2004), which has five aspirational high-level outcomes for children, underneath which all performance indicators now sit:

1.stay safe

2.be healthy

3.enjoy and achieve

4.make a positive contribution

5.achieve economic wellbeing.

The Every Child Matters agenda, whilst framed by the Children Act 2004 and the Education Act 2002, is without boundaries. It is not a single strategy or initiative; it is a ‘systems approach’ which is meant to ensure that safeguarding children is considered at every level of every organisation offering services to children and/or parents. This includes strategic documents, policies and procedures, individual job descriptions and person specifications, supervision arrangements and practice. It has arguably been characterised by four principles: accountability, information sharing, integration and the move from protection to safeguarding. Each of these principles has been applied at all levels of organisations, affecting government departments, chief executive officers, local structures, management, professions and practitioners alike. As can be imagined, an initiative as thoroughgoing as this produces a huge number of changes, and the pace of change is very rapid. It is difficult to distinguish those new practices which will last from those which will fall by the wayside after a year or two. One of the first changes to be made, in 2003, was the removal of overall responsibility for safeguarding children from the Department of Health to the Department for Education and Skills, which was renamed (on 28 June 2007) the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (note the order of the words and the significance of schools in the government’s agenda for children). The statutory functions of the posts of Director of Education and Director of Social Services were combined to form a single post of Director of Children’s Services, ensuring that accountability is very clear and integrating management of all local authority services for children. Joint commissioning arrangements have been put into place to deliver integrated Children and Young People’s Plans.

The effects of organisational change can take a long time to filter down and alter the quality of practice. Some of the things that are changing are good. The DCSF has energy and resources to put into children’s issues because their only concern is children: children were only a small part of the responsibilities of the Department of Health. However, the DCSF’s initiatives are all about schools and school-aged children, and pre-school children seem to have been left behind, with health visiting services being cut by many Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). This is an issue because these children are the ones most likely to die from maltreatment. The UNICEF report Child Maltreatment Deaths in Rich Nations published in 2003 indicated that ‘the risk of death from maltreatment [is] approximately three times greater for the under-ones than for those aged one to four, who in turn face double the risk of those aged 5–14’ (reported in the Guardian, 18 September 2003). Joined-up government is as essential as joined-up services.

The Laming Report (Laming 2003) made a recommendation to the police which was intended to improve their response to crimes against children. Lord Laming’s view was that a crime against a child should be treated just as seriously as a crime against an adult, and therefore the police should very much take the lead in investigating and prosecuting child abuse offences (Laming 2003, Recommendation 97). However, in many areas this has led to a loss of impetus in the social work role in investigation developed since the Cleveland Inquiry (Butler-Sloss 1988), and to a deterioration in close joint working between police and social workers. This counters the integration of professional teams working with children recommended elsewhere in the Laming report (see, for example, Recommendation 14). It is early days as yet in the life of the Every Child Matters agenda, given the number and depth of the changes required, and it is important that practitioners, managers and service commissioners keep a close eye on how it is developing.

Despite the unforeseen consequences above, many of the changes brought about by the government’s response to the Laming and Bichard reports are evidence-based and are contributing to clear improvements in practice. Which legislation and statutory guidance does today’s practitioner working with children and/or their carers need to know in order to achieve best practice? There is an impressive amount of practice guidance, case study material and examples of good practice available on the government’s ‘Every Child Matters’ website. However, the number of national documents conscientious practitioners might feel they need to look at is now slightly overwhelming, particularly since they need to follow their own local procedures as well. I have made an attempt below to simplify things, and present the key issues for practitioners.

LEGISLATION AND STATUTORY GUIDANCE TO KEEP AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

1. The Children Act 1989

This is still the most important piece of legislation in the practitioner’s toolbox. It remains the basis of our safeguarding system, defining the threshold for state intervention in family life to protect children from abuse. The definitions it contains of ‘significant harm’ (section 31) and of a ‘child in need’ (section 17) are still current.

It is still the case that a local authority (children’s social care) has a duty to investigate whenever it receives information which gives reasonable cause to suspect significant harm (section 47). Agencies (like health services and schools) still have a duty to co-operate with a local authority making investigations under this section (47 {11}).

2. The Adoption and Children Act 2002

A) DOMESTIC ABUSE

Whilst lawyers were very happy with the definition of harm contained in the Children Act 1989 (section 31{9}), feeling that it was very inclusive and covered all aspects of children’s health and development, the Labour government was mindful of consistent research findings demonstrating that domestic abuse could cause emotional harm to children witnessing it (see, for example, Mullender et al. 2002). It wanted to emphasise that agencies had a duty to assess harm whenever domestic abuse was present, and so included in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 an amendment to the definition: ‘impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another’.

This is notable because it takes account of evidence from children and young people that they are often in the position of overhearing abuse to a parent in another part of the house, whilst the parent believes they do not know about it because they are not seeing it. Since this Act, the indications are that some areas of the UK (see, for example, Sheffield Safeguarding Children Board 2007) have seen a rise in the numbers of children referred to Child Protection Registers/Lists of Children with Child Protection Plans in the category of emotional abuse because of domestic abuse. However, whilst it is obviously an improvement that harm to children as a result of domestic abuse is being assessed properly, there has as yet been no increase in resources for services to assist them and those who commission children’s services are having to consider what can be done to improve their response within current budgets. Likewise, adult services commissioners are having to think again about how to offer effective programmes to perpetrators and protective services to victims. In some areas, there are so many referrals to children’s social care because of domestic abuse that they cannot be looked at and risk assessed. An improvement in one part of the system again is producing unforeseen consequences in another.

B) PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

This legislation also contributed a further amendment to the Children Act 1989 in respect of fathers’ parental responsibility. A basic piece of information which all practitioners, particularly early years, school and social care staff, working with a child should know is who has parental responsibility. The Children Act 1989, whilst an excellent piece of legislation in most respects, contained the odd piece of Conservative Party ideology that did not sit well with its overall aim of putting children first. One of these was the refusal to allow unmarried fathers parental responsibility except in limited circumstances. As our child protection system developed, however, children’s social workers became used to looking at which adults in a family had real relationships with children, rather than just those whom the Conservative Party would like to have relationships with them. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 reflected this reality, and provided an additional key, easy method for unmarried fathers to acquire parental responsibility: having their name registered on the birth certificate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also in the series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 From Protection to Safeguarding: Bringing You Up to Date on Statutory Responsibilities
• 2 The Contribution of Schools to Safeguarding Children
• 3 Making the Most of a Home Visit
• 4 Infant Mental Health and Early Attachment
• 5 Working with Unco-operative or Hostile Families
• 6 Neglect and Parental Learning Disability
• 7 Safeguarding Children Who Live with Parental Substance Misuse
• 8 Domestic Abuse and Safeguarding Children
• 9 Safeguarding Children and Mental Health Practice: Experiencing the Field
• 10 Safeguarding Trafficked Children
• 11 Criminal Investigation and Safeguarding: Dilemmas for Policing
• 12 Good Practice in Undertaking Social Work Assements
• 13 The Most Important Professional Relationship
• 14 Doing Serious Case Reviews Well: Politics, Academia, Risk Management and Staff
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index