Training of Children and Families Social Workers - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


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—


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2009
Prepared 30 July 2009