Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE 2009
LIZ DAVIES,
DR EILEEN
MUNRO AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
PRESTON-SHOOT
Q140 Chairman: You referred
specifically to the Victoria Climbié case and the Baby
Peter case, so you are saying that that lack of sufficient training
is at the very heart of some of the inadequacies in those cases.
Liz Davies: Absolutely, yes. Even
in the case of Lisa Arthurworrey, who I am still in touch with
and who is still trying to become a social worker again, material
from her university course was presented as evidence at her Care
Standards Tribunal, to show the lack of child protection focus
in some of the work, as it was very much following a family support
model of work and overlooked the risk involved in families. Her
dissertation was also presented as evidence. She had none of this
post-qualifying training with police at all, and neither did Gillie
Christou, the manager in the Baby Peter case. The problem is endemic.
The post-qualifying training, where I think the core specialist
training should happen, is not at all easily accessible now. We
introduce it in our modules but we can only introduce students
to its concepts; the actual detail of training jointly with police
and other agencies, for instance, has to be post-qualifying.
Professor Preston-Shoot: I would
like to underscore that and add to it. One of my major regrets
when we were planning the social work degree with the Department
of Health was that a recommendation we made at that point to Ministers
through the relevant civil servants to have a newly qualified
social worker system and to see the first degree as the beginning
of a journey—a very important beginning, but a beginning
none the less—which then required further periods of registration,
protected case loads, guaranteed supervision and post-registration
teaching and learning, was rejected at that stage. The newly qualified
social worker system that is now coming in is a major opportunity,
but we proposed that when working on the degree and putting it
together.
Q141 Fiona Mactaggart: Am
I not hearing from you that it is a major opportunity that is
unlikely to work, because of the standards of the existing work
force, or have I got that wrong?
Professor Preston-Shoot: It is
a major opportunity that can work, as long as we focus not only
on qualifying education but on continuing professional development
and post-qualifying education and particularly, from my area of
research and teaching expertise, on the legal rules, so that when
a student or qualified practitioner says to a manager, "You
cannot be serious. The legal rules require us to do this,"
they are listened to and respected, rather than ignored or turned
away because of other imperatives.
Dr Munro: You will not see social
workers sitting down on the floor with children because that is
not included in the Government's performance management system.
If you have a heavy case load and are being nagged by your manager
to meet the performance indicators, the aspects of your practice
that are about children have to be dumped because the priority
is sitting in front of the computer and filling in the various
forms. That is the reality of what people face. When social workers
talk about the work they are proud of, they talk about how they
defied the managerial system in order to put the child first.
We need to redesign the system so that putting the child first
is the priority, instead of a piece of personal preference by
dedicated social workers.
Q142 Chairman: I think we
will move on. When the Deputy Director of Children and Young People's
Services in Hackney was here, he rather chided me, I thought,
although I think it was amusing, by pointing out that the London
School of Economics no longer has a degree course in social work.
Dr Munro: I was hoping you wouldn't
mention that. No, we don't have a degree course. Again, that is
because of the Government's performance indicators, which have
created a system of inspecting and judging universities that makes
it very unattractive for research-intensive universities to provide
social work training.
Q143 Chairman: Right. He did
mention that it was an institution that, because of Titmuss, had
a certain reputation in social work.
Dr Munro: It has a great history
in social work, and I am very sad that it went. I would love to
see—
Chairman: Right, thank you for that.
We have to move on. Fiona, is that all right? We are going to
look at the question of generic or specialist training. Annette
will lead and Graham will follow.
Q144 Annette Brooke: As we
have Eileen and Liz here this morning I particularly wanted to
talk about risk-taking, which I believe you mentioned on "Panorama",
Eileen. To what extent is current social work training missing
out on the whole concept of making evidence-based decisions and
being able to analyse risk?
Dr Munro: To me, the level of
practice is worryingly low. It seems that people do not have a
good enough understanding of what a risk assessment is, so they
end up making defensive decisions that are basically aimed at
protecting themselves and the agency, rather than the child. A
lot of field workers have told me that one of the problems is
that the Government's core assessment form, which is the crucial
document in a section 47, quite accidentally does not focus on
risk. You can push it into the form, but the form is not designed
to remind social workers to think through clearly an entire risk
assessment. If you do not do it as a formal and explicit exercise,
you will do an intuitive kind of risk assessment, which will be
pushed around by your emotions and by the latest information you
have, and it will be very distorted. In the Baby Peter case, the
emotional dynamics with the mother seemed to have obscured social
workers' judgment to the point of not seriously looking at the
harm the child was experiencing and recognising that that was
very worrying. They somehow got distracted from it by the relationship
with the mother. If they had started to write that out clearly
for their seniors to look at, they would have said, "This
child is having far too many injuries for them just to be accidents."
Liz Davies: There is huge confusion
between investigation and assessment. All the current performance
protocols that Eileen is talking about are based on the assessment
triangle, which offers a framework of assessment for children
and their families and was introduced in 2000. They are not based
on the Working Together protocols relating to section 47
and the investigation of likely harm to a child—those are
totally different processes. A section 47 investigation, of course,
might well include an assessment of the child's needs and the
family's needs, but it is not the same process. That is where
there needs to be a revision in Working Together which
was published in 2006. It stated that a section 47 is a core assessment,
and that is completely wrong. It means that social workers are
now, when they get a child protection referral, following the
assessment route. It is the wrong process. It will not get you
to protecting a child.
Q145 Chairman: Do you agree
with that, Eileen?
Dr Munro: Yes. It is a different
mindset when you are suspicious, challenging, critical, looking
further and testing the evidence, as opposed to trying to work
in harmony and partnership with the family and to engage with
it. Those are different mindsets, and you need both.
Professor Preston-Shoot: You also
need to know that the organisation employing you is supporting
you, holding you and enabling you to manage the dynamics, the
pressures and the instances of violence you will encounter. It
must enable you to have the time to reflect on what you have seen
and heard and to have the courage to say what you need to say.
You have to have courage to have very difficult conversations
to drive down to the fundamental assessment judgments you need
to make. You need to know that your organisation is supporting
you to do that. My fear is that a lot of social workers cannot
count on that support.
Q146 Annette Brooke: Just
to pursue that point, is the core of the problem the system in
which the newly trained social workers are operating, or the training?
Dr Munro: They both matter, and
they are so intertwined that you cannot really say that one is
the first cause and the other a consequence. They feed into each
other in a way that, in the last few years, has been going downhill.
Liz Davies: Just to give an example,
when a child protection referral comes in, say, at school level,
they will pursue the common assessment framework. That means doing
a referral, a 12-page form. That is a delay; they should be ringing
it straight through under child protection procedures so that
there is action—immediately if necessary. When the referral
arrives at the social work office there will be an initial assessment,
which is a seven-day process. Child deaths have occurred in those
seven days. For babies, for instance, seven days is a very long
time if they are being harmed. Instead of triggering immediately
a section 47 investigation, they are following assessment protocols
that are highly mechanistic, rigid, and affected by time scales
that are all performance targeted. That does not allow the creative
thinking and multi-agency working that is needed in a child protection
investigation, where there should be immediate liaison with police
to get background on the adults, and so on. A lot of that is reflected
in the Baby Peter case where they were following the assessment
of the child and family, providing family support services, providing
new furniture, and not investigating child abuse or looking at
the perpetrators in the family. In a child abuse investigation
with the police, perpetrators will be looked at. There are unexplained
injuries—who could possibly have caused them? Where are
the adults in this child's life? What do we know about them? That
process was not happening. The social workers were off and away
doing their assessments of need and the police were off and away
investigating crime—police have done that since Laming's
recommendation in the Climbié inquiry, in which he said
that the police should focus on crime. There are two separate
directions and no joint investigation of child abuse of significant
harm; that is where Baby Peter fell through the net.
Q147 Chairman: Could you tell
the Committee more about the police concentrating on crime since
Laming? I read that in your evidence and it seems disturbing.
Could you give us more detail? I am sorry to cut across Annette's
question, but it is important to get on record that you are saying
that something quite dramatic changed in terms of how the police
pursued the possibility of a child being at risk.
Liz Davies: Absolutely. At the
point of referral, we rarely know if a crime has been committed
or not, or even if one is likely to be committed, because child
protection is a complex subject. Often we only get clues or a
statement from a child. In the past, we would have worked together
with the police to look at the referral and, perhaps, screen it
out as child protection or screen it in. Lord Laming's recommendation
99 in the Victoria Climbié inquiry stated that the police
should focus exclusively on the investigation of crime. He even
said the police should conduct the investigative interviews of
children. That goes against the Achieving Best Evidence guidance
of the Home Office, which says it should be a joint process with
social workers. Since that point, if a social worker rings the
police and says, "A child in a school has made an allegation
of sexual abuse," the police will say, "Well, is there
a crime?" The social worker says, "I don't know."
The police say, "You go and interview the child and the family.
If you find evidence of crime, come back to us." That is
totally different from a joint investigation of significant harm,
when there would have been a strategy meeting with the police.
You would have sat down with the police and other agencies and
said, "We have had this allegation statement from a child.
What else do we know about this family and the children in the
family?" You would have then done an analysis together and
the process would be ongoing—it would not stop until the
end of the child protection investigation was reached.
Chairman: These are worrying comments.
Eileen, do you agree with them?
Dr Munro: Yes. There seems to
be a policy confusion between the fact that, on the whole, we
want to support families and work with them, but at times, our
agenda has to be challenging and coercive and we do things that
families do not like. It is as if people hope that by working
with families, child abuse will fall into place—and it will
not. It is a different type of problem from a disabled child needing
support.
Professor Preston-Shoot: I agree.
What comes to my mind is the uncertainty that is probably in the
minds of many social workers and police officers about whether
what they are dealing with can be encapsulated within a welfare
or a justice approach. We seem to swing between one or the other—actually
we need both. We need both professions there, asking the difficult
questions and supporting each other in their assessments.
Chairman: I just wanted to get that on
record. Annette, back to you.
Q148 Annette Brooke: Could
we expand the joint training and joint working towards health
and education? What improvements could we have in the basic training
to enhance joint working?
Liz Davies: At London Metropolitan
University, we involve paediatricians in the training of social
workers and we bring in the police child abuse investigation team,
so there are ways of bringing other professionals in to contribute
to the content of the courses; that is really important.
Professor Preston-Shoot: We need
to make sure that we have confidence that social work students
know what they need to know and are skilled in what they need
to be skilled in, so part of the initial qualifying degree needs
to focus on social work students and their knowledges and skills.
We need to have confidence in that. Equally, social workers need
to know how to work with paediatricians, police officers, solicitors
and barristers providing local authorities with legal advice.
They need to know when they should be taking control of interactions
when, in a sense, they are the lead professional; they need to
know when they are the supportive professional. They need to have
confidence in those interactions and, equally, teachers, health
visitors and lawyers also need those understandings and confidences.
You can only achieve that by, to a degree, training people together.
There is a judgment to be made about when you move away from focusing
on uni-professional training to make sure that the police officer,
the social worker and the teacher know what they need to know
to perform their professional roles and tasks. There is a judgment
to be made about when you move from that to training people together,
so that they can do these complex tasks confidently.
Q149 Annette Brooke: We clearly
have some conflict between the family support model and the extreme
cases and risk analysis. May I ask, finally, is there a reconciliation
between these two terribly important parts of the job in terms
of training? Has Every Child Matters been taking us forwards or
backwards in both respects—family support and child protection?
Chairman: Does Eileen want to take that
and take the pressure off Liz for a moment?
Dr Munro: It is a very interesting
question. I have had a lot of contact around the world in the
Anglo-Saxon circle, where we have very similar child-protection
problems, and there is this difficulty of reconciling the two
dimensions of the practice, but I think the heart of any solution
is that they have to be reconciled within the one worker. You
cannot separate them into two different streams of services. In
one of the Australian states, they tried; they had two different
ministries and it has been disastrous—they are now merging
them again. It brings out the heart of it: the nature of the work
is that you work with parents, knowing that most parents care
far more about their children's welfare than you do, but that
some of them are either unintentionally harmful or maliciously
harmful—that is the reality of what you are working with.
You need an agency that helps you keep both mindsets in order.
If you are working with the nicest of families in a Sure Start
centre, you still have to have your eyes and ears open for concerns.
Professor Preston-Shoot: For a
number of years as a qualified social worker, I worked in an organisation
called Family Service Units, first in west London and then in
Leeds. We worked along a continuum. We worked with families, where
the family support model was appropriate; we were using family
aides, social work support and all sorts of methods of intervention.
At the other end, we were taking children into care. Social workers
need to be able to move along that continuum, they need to know
why they are at a particular point on the continuum at a particular
time and they need to be continually reassessing that.
Dr Munro: Because families move
along that continuum as well.
Professor Preston-Shoot: Indeed.
And they need to be very sure in their own minds, as do organisations
and wider society, about what we regard as good enough and what
we do not. If we reach a point where something is not good enough
and more interventionist forms of involvement are necessary, we
need to make absolutely sure that what the state is providing
is better, rather than worse, than what the family itself is struggling
to do.
Q150 Mr Stuart: Eileen, you
have just said that family support and child protection have to
be reconciled in the one worker. Michael, do you agree with that?
Professor Preston-Shoot: Yes.
Q151 Mr Stuart: You could
find a system in which you do not separate into separate ministries,
which one could easily imagine being disastrous, but actually
try to have teams working together in which there are separate
strands so that the family support person might be providing evidence
that triggers the hard-nosed child protection people to come in
as part of an integrated team. Is that possible, or would you
reject that out of hand?
Dr Munro: What I mean when I say
that it has to be in the individual head is that when you are
working in a supportive way with a family you have to be alert
for warning signs that the situation is deteriorating or that
you have misjudged it in the first place. But if you are working
in the more investigatory mode, you also have to ask, whether
they are abusive or not, "Does this family need our help?"
Although your prime job might be in one dimension or the other,
you have to be aware of the other dimension and the other way
of thinking when looking at the family.
Q152 Mr Stuart: But that would
not necessarily preclude specialisms within teams?
Dr Munro: Oh, no.
Mr Stuart: It would not preclude some
people being more suited to family support and others better suited
to the diagnostic effort of child protection.
Dr Munro: We have a history of
looking at either risk or need, but we have to look at both.
Liz Davies: Because we are so
preoccupied with prevention, we have lost protection, and that
is the most worrying thing. Because social workers are going straight
into assessments of need, they are missing the child protection
aspects. When you do an assessment with a family you actually
need their consent to look at any other records, liaise with any
other agencies or interview other children, and you are alerting
the family. If you were seeing it as a child protection investigation
you should not be doing that at all, because you might be completely
destroying any possibility of a prosecution, for instance, by
going in that direction. But they are routinely going in that
direction. What we have to do is get child protection back on
the map. Obviously, we have suffered the loss of the child protection
register last year, which is absolutely devastating.
Q153 Chairman: When did that
happen?
Liz Davies: April 2008. Even the
public have an understanding of what the register meant. To lose
it has been just awful—we have lost the alarm bell system
that it gave us with the emergency services, which are no longer
alerted when a child is at high risk of harm. The message that
getting rid of that register sent out was colossal, because it
undermined the status of the meeting. I know that Baby Peter was
on the register, but at that time the status of the meeting had
already declined greatly and meetings were very poorly attended
and not informed by investigations.
Q154 Mr Stuart: I notice that
you are nodding, Michael. Liz, you made that case very strongly.
We have picked up that that view is not necessarily universal
across professionals in the system. They do not all feel as strongly
as you do that the loss of the register has been a blow to child
protection. Eileen, do you agree with Liz's point?
Dr Munro: I don't have enough
experience of what the implications have been in practice to comment.
Mr Stuart: Michael is nodding.
Professor Preston-Shoot: Yes,
I would agree with Liz that the loss of the register is regrettable.
Going back to your question, I agree with my colleagues that what
you are looking for in a team is a continuum of experience and
people with knowledge and skills to move along that continuum,
even if it is the social worker who takes the child into care,
alerted by the family aide, as was often the case in FSU when
I was working there, that actually the welfare and support interventions
were no longer good enough. One of the other viruses that I think
has entered the system and that deters people from looking at
section 47 investigations and care proceedings, especially in
financially very hard-pressed local authorities, is that local
authorities now have to bear the cost of care proceedings, and
those costs are substantial. I know from first-hand experience
of qualified social workers and their managers who have been deterred
by their employing organisations from intervening at that level,
because of the cost.
Q155 Mr Stuart: I had better
get us back to training, although this is a fascinating digression.
I didn't really get a straight answer as to whether or not you
both agreed with Eileen that the strands had to be reconciled
in the one worker.
Professor Preston-Shoot: Not in
the one worker—in the one team. But each worker has to be
able, in their own mind, to move along that continuum.
Q156 Mr Stuart: Understood.
But they don't have to be all-purpose; it is possible within a
team. That is your opinion. I want to ask about the substance
of the generic social work role, as opposed to the role of a children
and family social worker. Going back to the training issue, we
seem to be turning out generic social workers who then may or
may not turn their hand to specialising in working with children.
Can you tell us about the substance of that generic role?
Dr Munro: It is very easy to design
specialist training for child welfare. We did it rather well in
1948 and it worked for decades. I do not think that we should
necessarily have an either/or situation. Particularly if people
are coming into the profession at the age of 18, they need broad
training; they are too young to know where they want to specialise.
It could be attractive to consider having specialist entry for
mature entrants in their 20s and 30s, who have a degree and some
relevant life experience. They might do specialised child welfare
training.
Q157 Mr Stuart: That would
only be available to mature students?
Dr Munro: Yes.
Q158 Mr Stuart: Going back
to the courses, from the evidence that we have received it seems
that there is basically a dispute between those who support generic
social work courses and those who suggest that, at least in the
third year, there should be specialist training in children's
services, particularly so that there is an understanding—to
go back to Liz's earlier point—of the interaction between
all the complex agencies within this new children's services world
where everyone is supposed to be joined up. If you emerge from
three years of training as a children's social worker and you
have precious little understanding of this new supposedly "joined-up
government", you are not very well equipped. Can you give
us your thoughts on that?
Professor Preston-Shoot: I don't
think that my university—
Chairman: We are running out of time,
so I would like shorter answers, and shorter questions from my
team.
Professor Preston-Shoot: My university
allows students to specialise, to a degree, in the third year,
whether in children's services, adult services or mental health,
on the basis of at least two years of solid, generic training.
My experience as a social worker, both as a child protection specialist
and a mental health specialist, is that people do not come in
neatly compartmentalised boxes. A person with severe mental distress
may also be a parent and vice versa. I am absolutely clear that
you need a generic foundation. People may then specialise, with
particular service user groups and within particular service user
groups, in particular methods of intervention or in particular
aspects of that service user group, but it has to be on the basis
of a generic foundation.
Chairman: Does anyone else want to comment?
This is a pretty crucial question.
Liz Davies: I really support generic
training at degree level and at masters level, because social
workers working with children and families must have an in-depth
understanding of the world of adults. Look at the Baby Peter case
and the role that adults played in it. The social worker was not
homing in on those issues about violence, mental health, learning
disability and so on. That broad-based training is absolutely
crucial if we are going to be able to protect children effectively.
Q159 Chairman: Why can't you
have a broad-based approach in the first two years and be more
specific in the third year?
Liz Davies: We do something similar.
We have some options in the third year—
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