Child Protection Social Work and the Law

Child Protection Social Work
and the Law

There are some councils in England which are catastrophically incompetent at running children's services. They are so overwhelmed with work they resist doing anything difficult or inconvenient. Fateful moments to intervene effectively with dysfunctional families are being missed, sometimes with tragic consequences - which I detail below. Furthermore, in the family justice system poor social work practice prior to a case coming to court is the real reason for a loss of confidence in Family Courts. Inconsistency in decision-making has given the impression that sometimes the wrong children are being taken into care. At the root of these problems is the difficulty for children's services in acting lawfully because of a lack of knowledge of the Children Act 1989.

The 1989 Act is an excellent piece of legislation and gives social workers adequate powers for protecting children from significant harm. However, key duties and principles seem to have been forgotten since the introduction of the Children Act 2004. The new Act aimed to focus services more effectively around 'children in need' through inter-agency working. At the same time a standardised approach to assessing children's needs, the Common Assessment Framework, was introduced with new procedures for initial and core assessments and reviews. Unfortunately, as the number of assessments/investigations has increased, the style of working has become more bureaucratic making the detection of 'possible risk of significant harm' more challenging. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many social workers no longer feel confident about making balanced judgements in complex safeguarding situations.

Furthermore, one of the key principles of the 2004 Act that 'safeguarding is everyone's responsibility' has allowed social workers to overlook their lead responsibility for child protection work. As a consequence, many social workers do not develop a sound grasp of the term 'significant harm', nor the threshold for a section 47 investigation, and consequently their everyday practice is out of kilter with their duties under the 1989 Act.

The child protection system now lacks clarity about who is responsible for child protection because everything is wrapped up in the language of 'safeguarding vulnerable children' which is often meaningless. Statutory guidance now makes only passing reference to social work duties under the 1989 Act and much practice wisdom around this Act has been lost.

Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 places a duty on authorities to investigate and make inquiries into the circumstances of children considered to be at risk of significant harm. However, in many authorities arrangements for processing section 47 referrals are often experienced by referrers as unhelpful - particularly if there is too much uncertainty about the threshold for formal investigation and a lack of urgency about responding to genuine concerns. The Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub has been introduced in some authorities to assist in information-sharing but this is often more concerned with processing child protection referrals than with the important task of gathering information from family members directly. It is well known that the competence with which an investigation is handled will crucially influence the effectiveness of subsequent work. Social work intervention with families under section 47 must therefore be of a consistently high standard and only carried out by social workers who have been trained in the appropriate use of authority.

A fundamental weakness in the system is created by the shortage of skilled, knowledgeable and experienced social workers capable of conducting section 47 interviews. Inevitably, managers seek to classify new referrals as 'children in need' where a more informal style of working is permitted. Although it is assumed that social workers carrying out needs assessments will incidentally pick up any child protection concerns, in reality there is a perverse incentive for them not to recognise something which might give them a lot more work. It should not be forgotten that the Children Act 1989 treats section 17 (children in need) and section 47 (investigation) as separate and distinct activities. It was therefore completely wrong to integrate them into a single social work task of 'assessment of need' - which in effect reframes 'risk' as 'need'. Assessment of risk may be insufficiently rigorous if this work is given to inexperienced social workers who are ill-equipped for dealing with serious child protection concerns and do not probe beneath the surface.

Nevertheless, some social workers doing 'assessments of need' do go the extra mile to protect children, in spite of the inherent difficulty in handling the complexity of the dual role of family support and formal investigation. Professional guidance shows the importance of maintaining 'respectful uncertainty' and 'professional curiosity' - though the role confusion can make it difficult for even experienced social workers to strike an appropriate balance between support and investigation. Unfortunately, if mistakes do occur and are widely publicised this can lead to a downward spiral in teams, caused by stress, the loss of experienced staff and low morale.

Many Serious Case Reviews have revealed a lack of clarity about whether a section 47 investigation has been carried out. Managers had not made a written record of their decision to instigate this and social workers appeared confused about the difference between this and safeguarding work. A section 47 requires a different mindset from a section 17 assessment with a clear focus on risks, and skills in probing sensitively beneath the surface. However, the requirement that a core assessment should be completed alongside the section 47 encourages a mindset of 'partnership working' that may seem inappropriate with resistant parents. This highlights the importance of social workers having the confidence to work in a flexible and creative way and understanding the forensic requirements of the task, if they are to carry out good investigative work.

These problems were apparent in the case of Daniel Pelka when he suffered a spiral fracture of his arm at the age of 3. This was a situation in which there was insufficient evidence for the police to bring a criminal prosecution but social workers had plenty of information about the presence of risk factors which should have indicated risk of significant harm to the children. It is therefore difficult to understand why there was no section 47 investigation. Instead a core assessment was carried out but it was insufficiently probing. It did not recognise the significance of mother's recent history of three successive, violent relationships with men, her overdoses, mental health problems and the parental alcohol misuse; and the social worker did not engage the male partner in the assessment. A competent investigation would have provided a much better understanding of the family dynamics and standards of parental care. The superficial nature of the core assessment caused significant problems with the subsequent handling of this case and the failure to recognise serious child protection concerns.

Many newly qualified social workers do not feel comfortable with the use of authority and do not have the capacity for thinking clearly about risks. The profession is committed to 'evidence-based practice' but fails to recognise that much learning takes place in a broken system which does not encourage social workers to look beneath the surface. Subjectivity has actually increased because many teams do not even have the basics of good practice in place owing to the high number of young and inexperienced social workers and transient staff.

A chilling account of what is really going on in children's services can be found in a recent Serious Case Review into the death of Daniel Jones in Wolverhampton. Daniel was the only child in the family and died when almost two years old as a result of ingestion of heroin. It was found that he had been regularly exposed to heroin and occasionally to cocaine and amphetamines. Both parents abused drugs and alcohol and had a history of offending. During Daniel's life there were a number of domestic incidents in which the police were involved. The Review reveals a serious failure of professional duty because clear evidence that Daniel was a child at risk of significant harm, requiring higher level services, existed before his birth but this was never acted upon. Although social care was the lead agency its slipshod attitude to home visits, meetings and record-keeping indicated that low priority was given to safeguarding work. An initial assessment by an unqualified social worker resulted in the case being referred on for a pre-birth core assessment but this did not take place. During Daniel's life there were eleven multi-agency 'child in need' meetings. Plans developed at these meetings were not robust and did not sufficiently address the risks to Daniel of his parents' substance use.

A week before Daniel's death a Social Care Team Manager completed a case closure summary, in which it was noted that a core assessment had not been completed and that there were still concerns about the parents continued use of illegal drugs. The Serious Case Review concluded that 'there did not appear to have been any significant changes effected by the Child in Need plan over the almost two years that it had been in place.'

It is not fair to put all the blame on social workers; it is the system itself at fault. Services around Daniel Jones were incapable of recognising the evidence of 'child neglect' requiring conference, registration, monitoring and review. From the moment of Daniel's birth a structured, inter-agency approach with a clear focus on child protection should have been provided. Cases of child neglect require both sensitivity and skills in making fine judgements. However, when a child suffers a physical injury, or concerns are cumulative, alarm bells should immediately ring. Unfortunately, the Serious Case Review did not get to grips with the failure to comply with legal duties in this case because it was more concerned with damage limitation than with a deeper analysis of the problems.

In the Khyra Ishaq case in Birmingham there was a background of increasing concerns before her mother removed her from school. This should have been recognised as an urgent child protection referral that required a formal investigation. Instead, it eventually resulted in a front-door visit two months later but the delay had effectively destroyed the social worker's credibility and no further action was taken. The seven year old girl suffered months of abuse and eventually starved to death. Although social workers had been presented with a serious challenge from her aggressive and threatening mother they could have done more to protect Khyra if they had made use of the legal powers they are given under section 47.

The worst performing authorities do not have an organisational structure that supports section 47 investigations and therefore the creation of a dedicated team for this work would be a step in the right direction. This should ensure that all referrals indicating evident risks of significant harm are dealt with in a timely and proportionate manner.

The key to good practice is social workers who are more confident, less defensive and more explicit about what they do. The problems are massive and poor performing children's services desperately need help in improving the skills of their workforce. Top priority must be given to referrals that need an urgent response so that it can be guaranteed that the voice of the child suffering abuse and neglect is heard and appropriate action taken.

Hilary Searing