Conservative Party Commission

on

Social Workers

Submission

to

Lord Laming

 

 

 Conservative Party Commission on Social Workers

Response to Lord Laming’s Inquiry

Conservative Party Commission on Social Workers

February 2009

 

Membership of the Commission

 

Chairman of the Commission

Tim Loughton MP, Shadow Minister for Children and Young People

Commission Panel Members

Allan Bowman

Terry Butler CBE

Baroness Butler-Sloss of Marsh Green

Felicity Collier

Dr Ash Chand

Mark Houston

Melanie P K Gill

Baroness Morris of Bolton OBE

Polly Neate

Alastair Pettigrew

Cllr Shireen Ritchie

Carolyn Steen

Professor June Thoburn CBE

 

Editors

Flick Drummond

Alex Burghart

 

Contents............................................................................................................................................

Summary of Recommendations.........................................................................................................

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................

Shadow Minister for Children & Young People ...............................................................................

 

1. The IntegratedChildren’s Systemofcaserecording(ICS)...........................................................

2. OFSTED and Inspections...............................................................................................................

3. Structures and Strategies.............................................................................................................

4. Prevention and thresholds...........................................................................................................

5. Training........................................................................................................................................

6. Image, Recruitment and Retention..............................................................................................

7. Interagency Working....................................................................................................................

Appendix 1 ......................................................................................................................................

Appendix 2 ......................................................................................................................................

Biographies of Contributors.............................................................................................................

 

 

Summary of Recommendations

 

1. CHILD DATA

a. The template for the Integrated Children’s System should be abolished to reduce the amount of time social workers spend filling in forms.

b. ContactPoint should be scrapped.

2. INSPECTIONS

a. Documentation used for inspections should be kept for a 5-year period and should be available for future inspections.

b. There should be at least one senior social worker on the Board of OFSTED.

c. Inspectors should accompany social workers on visits.

d. Social workers should be given the opportunity to join inspection teams on temporary secondment.

e. Users and social workers should be able to make written submissions to OFSTED inspectors, anonymously if they so choose.

3. STRUCTURES AND STRATEGIES

a. There should be an end to widespread, disruptive structural change.

b. The post of Chief Social Worker should be instituted without delay.

c. Best practice in organising teams and administration from other authorities should be used as a good example and put in place.

d. Policies should be in place to protect social workers in the field, e.g. social workers should not go unaccompanied into potentially difficult circumstances.

4. PREVENTION AND THRESHOLDS

a. More resources and research needs to go into early intervention which has been proven to be effective in tackling many of the problems that, if not attended to, lead to family breakdown, mental ill health, chronic disease, addiction, violence and poverty.

b. Services should be targeted according to need and risk but one size must not fit all. The threshold for intervention must be adjusted to allow this. Specific services for the growing number of very difficult, complex and vulnerable families should include preventative features as well as intense interventions within the family / community unit.

5. TRAINING

a. The social work qualifying degree should continue to be at honours level and generic in content, with consideration as to how best to introduce elements of client group specialism in the final year.

b. The quality of final-year placements should be monitored to ensure that all students receive practice teaching and assessment by experienced Registered Social Workers, and have appropriate experience of statutory social work.

c. All those working in statutory child and family social work settings should be able to complete a General Social Care Council accredited Post Qualifying Specialist Award in social work with children and families within five years of becoming qualified.

d. Social workers will be obliged to attend training on a regular basis throughout their time as social workers or Children’s Services managers.

6. IMAGE, RETENTION, RECRUITMENT

a. Volunteer social work should be encouraged and expanded.

b. There should be a combination of a national recruitment campaign and local ‘headhunting’ to encourage more people to enter social work.

c. There should be a high-impact advertising campaign similar to that launched for the army, police and teachers, which sends a clear message that the role of social workers is important in society and should be respected.

d. A ‘Care First’ programme should be established and more care leavers should be encouraged to enter the profession.

e. Social workers must be able to have mixed caseloads of supportive and therapeutic work alongside more serious cases.

f. A career structure which allows experience social workers as Consultant Practitioners to remain on the frontline should be established.

7. INTERAGENCY WORKING

a. Interagency communication is a priority and considered far more effective at dealing with the increasing number of extremely dysfunctional families and communities. Training beginning at undergraduate level and becoming a philosophy throughout the working life of Social Workers is imperative, encouraging flexibility and creativity.

b. OFSTED should inspect how the relevant child protection services and other agencies are working together rather than the children’s services department in isolation.

Introduction

Tim Loughton MP

Commission Chairman

Shadow Minister for Children and Young People

 

Over fifteen months ago the Conservative Party’s Commission on Social Workers produced an extensively researched report on the state and status of children’s social workers, No More Blame Game. After assimilating a detailed round of submissions and interviews from people connected with all aspects of the social worker profession and child protection we made a number of observations and recommendations.

Much of the report dealt with the workloads on social workers, appropriate training and continuing professional development, inter-agency working and the dwindling morale of staff. With the heightened attention on social workers in the light of the Baby P case and a plethora of high-profile child murder cases, the issues discussed have attracted a fresh urgency.

In the light of this, I am pleased that the distinguished members of the original Commission eagerly volunteered to reconvene and produce an update on our report assisted by one of our patrons Baroness Butler-Sloss of Marsh Green.

Our other patron, Lord Laming of Tewin, has, of course, been recalled by the Government to conduct an urgent study of child protection in light of the Baby P case. This short paper is being produced both as a formal submission to his enquiry due to report at the end of February and as an opportunity to update and reinforce our original review in the wake of the recent high profile tragedies which are likely to keep the issues we raised in the spotlight for some time to come.

With one main exception we have not sought to visit new areas given the time constraints on us. We have instead elaborated on our original research based on the experience of events over the last fifteen months and made further recommendations.

We have, however, ventured onto ground not directly covered in the original report with Carolyn Steen’s work, based on her own professional experience, on the serious challenges to social work posed by acutely dysfunctional families affected by alcohol, drugs and mental health problems. Her personal views have been included in Appendix 2. The link with our subject is a direct one and we would have liked to have spent more time on this area originally.

As the title of the original report suggests, we have consistently sought to support the role of social workers as part of the solution to helping and monitoring vulnerable families rather than part of the problem as critics often portray them, notwithstanding, of course, the need for clear accountability and disciplinary procedures to deal with individual incompetence and failure. This support is more vital now than ever before as many social workers are clearly feeling bruised, demoralised, demotivated and scapegoated in light of the intensive publicity following the Baby P case.

 

Subsequently we reiterate our original recommendation to create a post of Chief Social Worker to champion the profession and be accountable for the shortcomings of some of its practitioners when necessary. When the public are faced with a medical scare they look to the independence and integrity of a Chief Medical Officer for an explanation of the dangers and action to be taken. When children die at the hands of their parents we have been instead confronted with politicians on the defensive or ill-prepared and anonymous local authority officers standing up for colleagues in the frame. A Chief Social Worker would also have a vital role in scrutinising proposals for ‘reform’, often put forward by civil servants who are new to the field. These may seem like quick fixes but turn out to be an expensive waste of scarce human and financial resources and can do more harm than good (the ICS and ContactPoint may be two of these).

Previously we considered the example of Teach First, a charity which has been very successful in providing enhanced training to young teachers and then placing them in challenging schools. This has proved greatly beneficial for the teaching profession and for the schools where they are placed. Surely the need is even greater for a well trained and highly motivated breed of ‘super social workers’ and so we recommend the establishment of a ‘Care First’ programme based on the teaching model as has been suggested by the Centre for Social Justice. As part of a desperately needed aggressive campaign, adults who have come from the care system themselves should also be prime targets for recruitment to the workforce.

At the moment the recruitment problems we face are acute. Vacancy rates across many boroughs now exceed 20% and in Haringey are over 35%. Last month’s survey by UNISON presents some alarming figures about vacancy rates and caseloads and refers to a ‘ticking time bomb’ which will lead to more tragic deaths in the future. When high vacancy rates have pertained amongst GPs and teachers, for example, a nationally instituted system of paying a premium has addressed the problem. Again the same principle should be applied to social workers in the areas worst affected.

More worryingly, many experienced social workers who rely more on experience, intuition and a long career of contacts to assess risks to vulnerable children have been departing the field. Their places are likely to be filled by newly qualified social workers who may be academically better qualified than many of their predecessors but will certainly be much less experienced. Yet after a short space of time they will be invested with the power to recommend the removal of a child from its family or to be duped by a highly convincing parent who appears to be complying with the authorities whilst abusing a child behind the scenes.

No such powers are extended to doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists or even vets in such a short space of time and we therefore revisit our recommendations for more practical training and supervision in the first place and much better continuous professional development. This should be across the board. From recent events it has become clear that many heads of Children’s Services departments come from an education rather than a social services background. It is even more essential for them and other senior staff therefore to take advantage of the post-qualifying programmes available. As well as pursuing management training they should be required to maintain up-to-date knowledge about social work methods and spend more time in the field with their frontline workforce, experiencing the challenges at firsthand. This will not turn a professional from a different discipline into a social worker, but the understanding acquired should better equip them to manage and respect the senior managers who are registered social workers and professionally accountable for the quality of the work. The same principle applies to the inspection regime which has come in for a lot of criticism post Baby P. Since taking on the social care inspection role of Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) there has been criticism at the capacity of OFSTED to extend its inspection regime from schools to child protection. The criticism could be directed at the whole structure of OFSTED given that no one on the board of OFSTED or in senior management is a registered social worker. It is vital that those responsible for the inspection understand the complexity of the social work task and the environment in which decisions have to be made which is very different to that in education. This is a legacy of the absorption of the role of CSCI which clearly remains unresolved.

The current OFSTED framework rarely involves the direct observation of frontline social work practice. It is difficult to see how inspectors can verify the quality of assessments without direct observation –

lessons could be learnt from the inspection of schools where inspectors observe teachers in the classroom. Is it unreasonable to expect them to accompany a social worker on a live case to meet the client rather than read the case notes back in the office? Should not an integral part of the inspection process be an assessment of the efficacy of joint working with other frontline agencies, so often cited as a common failing?

The integrity and relevance of OFSTED inspections of children’s services departments is now being called into question and it is vital that confidence is restored as a matter of urgency. The independence of the assessment must be assured and there is also a role for directors of children’s services departments to be seconded to OFSTED and play a part in inspections of unconnected authorities for mutual benefit. It is also absurd that recent inspections have revealed that child inspection records in some cases may be destroyed after only three months. In the world of financial services the Financial Services Authority has the power to demand records be kept going back seven years yet when a vulnerable child is involved the paper trail may be curtailed after just three months.

The Baby P case also drew attention to the inadequacy of certain Serious Case Reviews and the independence of their commissioning. Already the Conservative Party has recommended to Conservative-controlled councils that the Chairmen of Local Safeguarding Children Boards should be independent and certainly separate from the Director of Children’s Services. We would urge this policy is adopted universally as a matter of urgency.

Again confidence must be restored and the Conservative Party has recently proposed that serious case reviews should be published in full, suitably anonymised and reasonably redacted, unless this would seriously compromise the welfare of the child involved or their siblings. The Conservatives have argued that the lesson from Doncaster most recently where executive summaries took over three years to produce after a child death, is that we can only hope to learn the lessons of such tragedies and assure the public that steps are being taken to avoid repeating shortfalls that made them possible, by a timely publication of the details. There certainly needs to be a much more efficient sharing of best practice and lessons learned from bad practice by children’s services departments around the country who still appear to operate too often in silos.

Whilst we can call into question whether OFSTED is accurately inspecting the right things and measuring the appropriate performances, more importantly are social workers using their time most effectively, or more accurately are they free to do so?

The evidence to our original enquiry that social workers are under enormous pressure to cover the discontinuity caused by high vacancy rates and by high case loads has been repeatedly borne out in the recent high-profile cases.

Haringey social workers were said to be looking after at least eighteen cases at any one time against a recommended cap of twelve. The UNISON survey and repeated other testimonies claim that up to 80% of a child protection social worker’s time is spent dealing with paperwork or filling in assessments on a computer. Fingers point more than anything at the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) which since its introduction in 2000 has become a Leviathan of bureaucracy for social workers. We recommend a substantial reassessment of its structure and instead point to other authorities who have developed their own more user-friendly and less time-consuming versions. The highly prescriptive version the Government has imposed on local authorities appears to militate against effective child protection not to aid it.

Most recently, the Government’s latest major data project Contactpoint has started to go live. It remains controversial and has always been opposed by the Conservative Party who have pledged to scrap it if elected and replace it with a central ‘signposting’ database aimed at genuinely vulnerable children. This was also the overwhelming view of the Commission. Questions have been raised as to how much further yet another computer database will detain social workers from face-to-face contact with their clients, let alone whether the investment of some £224m to date would have been better invested in employing more social workers at the sharp end and reducing the caseloads of existing ones. Do they really need an elaborate database to liaise with other key professionals involved with a vulnerable child, and do we not instead want concerted action from a small core of those professionals who are already talking to each other physically rather than electronically?

Reduced caseloads and more face-to-face time is surely desirable for the future direction of social work. A common theme in many of the recent cases has been that social workers and others missed vital signs with families who were on their radar. Yet of the 60 visits made to Baby P by various professionals, how many of them were substantial visits by the same professional in the know? How many of them amounted to a snatched chat at the door because baby P was ‘unavailable’ rather than a proper inspection and discussion with the family and others, which should also include asking to look at a child unclothed and unmasked by chocolate spread? Were the social workers involved experienced enough to ask the right probing questions? Were they brave enough to enter homes in particularly challenging areas? Were there community police officers available to respond to requests for back-up, or more experienced social work colleagues to check out what was going on?

It is questions like these which have given rise to concerns that the thresholds for taking a vulnerable child into the care system have been artificially lowered to fit the capacity of the child protection system rather than to reflect the immediate threats to a child’s health and development.

The child’s welfare has effectively been compromised by the availability of case workers, the target culture to keep the numbers of children in care down, and the shortage of resources in increasingly squeezed children’s services departments who have had to invest much in new child protection systems in competition with resources at the sharp end.

It is not the intention of this submission to focus on recent events such as those in Haringey, Doncaster or Huddersfield. The tragedy is that the problems with child protection are not limited to those authorities but appear widespread. Clearly the system is still not working. Descriptions of the recent cases highlighted in these authorities all have a chilling echo of previous reports from which we appear still not to have learned the lessons. The specific points made above relate to the common themes of incompetent professionals (in medicine, nursing, psychology, the law, education as well as social work); lack of effective inter-agency working; excessive caseloads; high social worker vacancy rates; children’s services departments in chaos or taking their eye off the ball.

One thing that united all the commission and virtually all our witnesses is that whilst the system is clearly not functioning properly, yet another fundamental restructuring of it (with all the repeated upheaval that would bring) is the last thing that professionals want or need. However, the bigger issue here is the worry that we have created a system where the tick-box approach to child protection has become more about protecting the system than protecting the vulnerable children the system is there to protect. The challenge for management and social workers in local authorities is to ensure that procedures are read, understood, followed where relevant and departed from where appropriate. The attitude of government and its regulatory bodies seems to be that as long as all the procedures have been followed, and all the social workers have carried out their jobs as defined then that is what matters.

The selective reporting of the activities of social workers inevitably masks the success of many of these professionals who do their job in increasingly challenging and desperate circumstances. Too often this success is achieved in spite of the system that has been created rather than because of it. It can hinder good social workers from doing their jobs to achieve the best outcomes they aspire too and can disguise the shortcomings of bad social workers who are not up to the challenge.

It is tenuous to claim that the great deal of money, time and legislation invested by the Government in certain areas of children's services after the Victoria Climbié inquiry, such as Sure Start and Children's Centres, has resulted in a direct reduction in child abuse. Perhaps we should not be surprised as most of those accessing those services are willing volunteers who want themselves and their children to benefit. They are unlikely ever to be a serious threat to their children. In fact many families whose children are the subject of child protection plans want nothing to do with their local authorities. They do not acknowledge that their children are suffering from maltreatment and they actively avoid seeking contact with agencies.

I hope that this second report will make a constructive addition to Lord Laming’s enquiry and make a positive contribution to improving child protection in this country which the Conservatives continue to regard as a top priority. I am very grateful to those members of the Commission who have once again given of their time and commitment generously in support of this very important area of work.

Tim Loughton MP

Shadow Minister for Children & Young People

 

The Integrated Children’s System of case recording (ICS)

 

The common assessment framework for the assessment of children in need and their families was introduced in 2000 and the core format allowed information to be presented in a helpful and logical sequence, quickly identifying the key issues of concern.

However the ICS recording system, rolled out in the last two years, resulted from a drive for a nationally compliant template and was much more prescriptive. A number of concerns were raised during the consultancy process, many of which were not resolved before the ICS was introduced.

In 2007 a major evaluation of ICS concluded that the system, based on a series of tick-box forms, was not tailored to individual children, and failed to ask important questions of some children while asking others that were irrelevant, resulting in “bland analyses” (Margaret Bell et al, An Evaluation of the Practice, Process and Consequences of the ICS in Councils with Social Service Responsibilities).

This report said: “The process was felt to diminish analysis and risk assessment. There were particular concerns about risk because it was unclear where the information would be located.” Moreover, there were “serious reservations about the design and use of ICS in its present form and we believe the ICS has yet to demonstrate the degree to which and how it is fit for purpose”.

The report’s conclusions have been confirmed by concerns expressed to the Commission. Social workers have said the template is too detailed and requires so much standard information that workers have to focus on completing the document rather than the assessment. There is a difficult balance to maintain between collecting all the information required and focussing on the key safeguarding factors and the analysis. If you implement a tick-box approach to a case while at the same time you have a large caseload and are constrained by a strict timescale in which the assessment must be completed, you will get “tick-box assessments” rather the exercise of guided professional judgment. Reflection time is essential to enable professional social workers to exercise their skills. In addition, information in the ICS format is not acceptable to courts.

It is the opinion of the Commission that if there were broader headings, this might facilitate a more holistic approach and empower social workers to exercise their discretion. The report format should be multi functional so that it can be accepted for Child Protection conferences and for court.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is one of a small number of local authorities that have decided after consultation with staff not to implement the ICS recording system and to develop their own recording system in the light of local circumstances and professional best practice (see appendix 1).

 

Recommendations

The ICS template should be abolished and local authorities encouraged to set up more efficient templates based on the needs of their social workers.

OFSTED and Inspections

The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED), at the time of writing the original report, had only recently taken over inspections from the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) and there was not enough evidence to comment. There was concern from the panel that the acronym OFSTED does not recognise the considerable extra inspection duties of children’s services, and that it should be seen as equal partners with the education inspectorate and the acronym should reflect that.

The panel is concerned at the apparent practice of destroying supporting documentation after three months (which was an issue in Haringey) and suggests that there is an urgent need for an in-depth look at how OFSTED operates and indeed whether their methodology is fit for purpose. The panel welcomes the forthcoming DCSF Select Committee’s inquiry into the work of OFSTED. Documentation should be kept for a 5-year period and should be available for future inspections if necessary.

It is recognised that at present no one on the Board of OFSTED or in senior management is a registered social worker. It is vital that those responsible for the inspection understand the complexity of the social work task and the environment in which decisions have to be made which is very different to that in education. For example, it is not helpful to impose rigid timescales, with compliance linked to targets, for core assessments of children considered at risk when there are vacancies in the workforce

– inevitably the drive to meet targets will impact on the quality of work.

The current OFSTED framework does not observe frontline social work practice. It is difficult to see how inspectors can verify the quality of assessments without direct observation – lessons could be learnt from the inspection of schools where inspectors observe teachers in the classroom.

We would like to make a comment on inspections by recommending that experienced social workers and managers, once properly trained as inspectors, move in and out of OFSTED as a means of keeping inspection standards up and current to existing practice. It is also a means of raising standards of practice as returning inspectors will help drive improvement either on individual inspections or longer secondments. This would give social workers and managers experience of what goes on in other organisations and help towards their professional development and ongoing training. Caroline Abrahams, programme director for children and young people at the Local Government Association, has been quoted as saying “People raise questions about shortages of high-quality, experienced social care people in the workforce so it wouldn't be surprising if this were reflected in the inspectorate” (Children and Young People Now 11.12.08).

We also recommend that aspiring Directors and Chief Social Workers spend time as inspectors to contribute to their understanding and leadership.

The use of self-assessment must also be scrutinised and, in particular, the fact that annual performance assessment reports relied on self reporting. While most Directors will want to ensure that their self reporting is based on facts , Wes Cuell , Acting Chief Executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, suggested “people believe they are doing better than they are” (Children and Young People Now 11.12.08). He said that OFSTED must refine its assessment tools to measure performance instead of systems and process.

There should be an examination of the extent to which the recipients of services are involved in inspection. John Kemmis, chief executive of children's advocacy charity Voice, said, “OFSTED needs to talk to service users and go into depth to get a picture of what their experience is like. This is one of the primary tools of quality assurance”.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) is warning that the proposed focus of annual safeguarding visits is wrong and visits will increase administrative burdens on councils. A spokeswoman for the association claims: “Inspections will focus attention on local authority child protection services and not on how local partners are working together … This contradicts the principle that safeguarding children is everyone's business, which was the crux of the Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié.”. ADCS proposes that inspections should include agencies such as police child protection teams and accident and emergency services and we would welcome a cross inspection system to include all agencies involved in social work.

Recommendations

 

• Information on inspections should be kept over a 5-ear period for reference including for future inspections.

• There should be a senior social worker on the Board of OFSTED.

• Inspectors should accompany social workers on visits.

• Social workers should be given the opportunity to join inspection teams on temporary secondment.

• Users of the service and social workers should be able to make written submissions to OFSTED inspectors, anonymously if they choose.

 

Structures and Strategies

There is little support for further restructuring of social work services for children and families. The evidence of past reorganisations is that it distracts from the delivery of services and potentially increases the risks for children as organisations become preoccupied and individual staff members suffer from continuing upheaval. Professionals indicate that they are fed up of continuous change.

What is needed is clear accountable leadership for social work in local authorities to complement the recommendation we make for the appointment of a Chief Social Worker. Such posts exist in Wales and Scotland but they are not necessarily Chief Officers and can have limited influence. It is essential that the Chief Social Worker has chief officer status, reinforcing the commitment to enhance the status and effectiveness of Social Workers. Such a post can also reinforce a holistic and generic approach to the provision of social work services to families, ensuring all the issues regarding mental health, illness, abuse of drugs and alcohol etc. by adults are tackled effectively as part of any plan to protect a child.

On the ground, many local authorities are seen as having poor workforce strategies. The ability to institute preventative work becomes impossible when strategies are only reactive. Long-term planning and management that supports continuity and the development of their own social workers is far more successful at establishing continuity of care and increased contact with families. The GSCC wrote that some social workers now spend at least 60% of their time dealing with administrative tasks as opposed to contact with families. However the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) pointed out that Scotland has reorganised their field work services so that teams are now based around the task / family with social workers in the leadership role. This structure allows the social worker to be supported by other workers, administrative staff and the service provided to each family is then related to skills levels and the needs of the family. Continuity and preventative work are a natural progression from this. The Commission wishes to reduce social workers’ desk time so that they can spend more time at the sharp end talking to the people and professionals who need them. As stated above, we believe that the abolition of the current ICS template is also necessary in order to achieve this.

It has also been reported that some social workers are working in extreme circumstances with very difficult families and may need to have another social worker or assistant when visiting families in their homes. The violence and difficult circumstances were not reported in our original submissions but should be highlighted here and some of the background to this can be seen in Appendix 2.

Recommendations

 

• There should be an end to widespread, disruptive structural change.

• Best practice in organising teams and administration from other authorities should be used as a good example and put in place.

• Policies should be in place to protect social workers in the field, e.g. social workers should not go unaccompanied into potentially difficult circumstances.

 

Prevention and thresholds

At present, the increasing number of abused and neglected children living within highly dysfunctional families translates into extremely high caseloads and little time for preventative work or therapeutic interventions. Preventative work was increasingly seen by some witnesses as very much the role of the voluntary sector, causing resentment and concern that local authorities will increasingly be left with the role of enforcement of child protection legislation.

A consistent issue running through the report from the Social Worker Commission, and discussed by the majority of witnesses and contributors, was that there is not enough preventative work and that thresholds are too high. It is tenuous to claim that the great deal of money, time and legislation invested by the Government in certain areas of children's services after the Victoria Climbié inquiry, such as Sure Start and Children's Centres, has resulted in a direct reduction in child abuse. Perhaps we should not be surprised as most of those accessing those services are willing volunteers who want themselves and their children to benefit. They are unlikely ever to be a serious threat to their children.

In fact, many families whose children are the subject of child protection plans want nothing to do with their local authorities. They do not acknowledge that their children are suffering from maltreatment and they actively avoid seeking contact with agencies.

The increase in funding initiatives results in problems of information sharing (there are many more professionals, paraprofessionals and volunteers involved) duplication and pass-the-parcel results. Better directed funding locally and less Whitehall prescription would have more impact; only local authorities themselves along with Children’s Trust partners can know how to best allocate funding.

Prevention should be the responsibility of all agencies involved not just social workers. Instead social workers should be part of preventive ‘teams around the child’. High thresholds have meant that social workers have had to become largely reactive due to a lack of funding and resources stretching back over decades dealing with only a fraction of the referrals they receive, prioritising cases is a necessity, and intervention does not happen until crisis point. Early intervention is essential to the effectiveness of social work and could prevent a child from entering the care system, a relationship with the child and family over time is seen as the primary contributor to an effective outcome. The level of thresholds was a continuous theme in the original submissions.

Unfortunately, most children’s policy as it applies to social services has tended to concentrate on bringing in legislation to ‘fix’ serious blunders in child protection procedures over several decades. This produces an aversion to risk and a culture of blame in which the negative factors of families become the focus rather than supporting the positive aspects.

Marie Connolly, the Chief Social worker of New Zealand, commented that in the 1990s New Zealand’s social workers were risk averse until they reassessed the system in 2000 and bought in three imperatives which included family decision making and support along with the safety of the child. This new approach has improved social workers’ approach and has lead to a more effective system. Prevention is made more difficult through faults contained within the entire social work system. Most of the areas covered by the commission affected preventative work in a negative way.

Recommendations

 

• More resources and research needs to go into early intervention which has been proven to be effective in tackling many of the problems that, if not attended to, lead to family breakdown, mental ill health, chronic disease, addiction, violence and poverty.

• Services should be targeted according to need and risk but one size must not fit all. The threshold for intervention must be lowered to allow this. Specific services for the growing

number of very difficult, complex and vulnerable families should include preventative features as well as intense interventions within the family / community unit.

 

Training

The importance of recruiting intellectually able and well-qualified people into the social work profession has only recently been recognised in the requirement for honours degree entry. No More Blame Game made practical suggestions for improved training of those entering the profession (summary recommendations paragraphs 5, 6, 7 and 8). We welcomed the degree course as a necessary but not a sufficient step in preparing graduates for child and family social work practice. Our witnesses told us that standards were variable, and especially that there is a shortage of placements and experienced social workers to provide practice education in statutory child and family social work settings.

A large majority of those who gave evidence to our Commission considered that the social work initial qualifying degree should remain generic to all social workers. The recent very worrying cases reinforce this view, in that mental health problems, addictions, learning disabilities and adult aggression have figured in the histories of the parents who have abused or failed to protect their children. Whilst focusing on the paramount interests of the children, their social workers must be able to put together appropriate packages of practical help, therapy and emotional support to help parents struggling with a wide range of difficulties, and have a good understanding of how adults with difficulties present so that they can better determine when it is essential that children be taken into care.

Within this generic framework, there is scope in the later stages of the degree for some specialisation, both in the acquisition of specialist knowledge and more specialist practice skills as students move towards employment.

Our witnesses recognised that, once in employment, newly qualified social workers will need intensive familiarisation with the specific needs and problems of the client group with which they are mainly working and the specific legislative and administrative requirements of the agency. The Newly Qualified Social Worker status is greatly to be welcomed as providing the opportunity to continue to integrate knowledge and skills gained during the degree with the realities of accountable practice over longer periods of time than is possible during practice placements. In particular, low caseloads and good supervision are needed for new workers to learn to recognise that parents are not always truthful, and how to combine a trusting professional relationship with appropriate monitoring and challenge. Those who have experienced good quality practice teaching on placements will be able to transfer the effective use of case supervision into the world of work. Good case supervision, and a restricted caseload, will provide an opportunity for those whose placements have been less adequate to make up the deficits. (We would hope this is a small minority, but received mixed evidence on this point, and it may be an opportune time to check out that the practice teaching and assessment of final year students is always carried out by a qualified and experienced social worker.)

Newly qualified social workers should all start on the ‘consolidation units’ in their specialist field so that they can quickly complete the specialist post qualifying award within the first few years of starting work. With respect to child and family social workers, it is essential that employers, Higher Education Institutes, Children’s Workforce Development Council, Department for Children Schools and Families and General Social Care Council work closely together to ensure a good fit between the newly qualified social worker’s learning during the degree, the first year in practice and GSCC-accredited post qualifying training. This is particularly necessary as the senior social workers needed to be practice educators and supervisors of newly qualified staff are in short supply, as are university teachers who have experience of child and family social work. Unnecessary duplication of student / worker time and effort, and educator time has to be avoided.

 

Moving on to the middle stages of their careers, it is extremely important that social workers engage in training throughout their working lives. Continuing professional development is as important at the top as it is in the middle ranks of social workers. Those who become line managers and senior social workers must keep abreast of the latest thinking and (equally importantly) must demonstrate understanding and sensitivity towards the work at the coal face, particularly where there are concerns about child maltreatment. It is essential therefore that they continue to update their knowledge of child and family social work research and practice developments alongside acquiring leadership and management skills. All training should be in-depth, and a proportion of it should be assessed, and not just an exercise in ticking boxes.

Those at the top of the profession, particularly Directors of Children’s Services, should equally be required to be up-to-date with the latest thinking and to attend regular courses to update their knowledge about social work practice. Those who have become Directors who were trained in a different discipline have a particular need to understand the basics of social work practice. Those Directors who trained as social workers also need to be kept in touch by actual training in which they learn as well as teach. We would also welcome Directors of Children’s Services accompanying social workers on visits to families so that they can learn first hand about the difficulties and sometimes tough circumstances in which they have to work.

We welcome the GSCC requirement for Registered Social Workers, as with other professionals, to undertake continuous training throughout their careers. This requirement must also apply to senior managers who are not Registered Social Workers. It may be necessary for the Continuing Professional Development curriculum to be more prescribed, as for members of the Bar and solicitors who are expected to have continuing professional training throughout their practice.

The judiciary have their own training programme run by the Judicial Studies Board and all judges up to and including the Court of Appeal attend training courses on a regular basis throughout their time on the Bench. The JSB was set up 30 years ago and now includes all ranks of the judiciary and the magistrates. Judges and magistrates who try family cases, particularly children cases, public and private law and adoption, are required to take a course lasting several days before they are allowed to try a family case. They are then required to attend refresher courses on a regular basis throughout their sitting on children cases. If they have not attended the course they are not allowed to try children cases.

 

Recommendations

 

• The social work qualifying degree continue to be at honours level and generic in content, with consideration as to how best to introduce elements of client group specialism in the final year.

• The quality of final year placements is monitored to ensure that all students receive practice teaching and assessment by experienced Registered Social Workers, and have some experience of statutory social work.

• It is essential that employers work closely together to ensure a good fit between the newly qualified social worker’s learning during the degree, the first year in practice and GSCC-accredited post-qualifying training DCSF and employers should ensure that funding is available so that all those working in statutory child and family social work settings can complete a GSCC-accredited Post Qualifying Specialist Award in social work with children and families within five years of becoming qualified.

• Local authorities, in collaboration with other employers of social workers including Primary Care Trusts must put in place a training programme for social workers at all levels, who will be obliged to attend on a regular basis throughout their time as social workers or Children’s Services managers. This should include a programme for senior managers who are not social workers (including any Directors of Children’s Services who are not Registered Social Workers).

 

Image, Recruitment and Retention

The image of social workers has not been helped with the reporting of the Baby P and subsequent cases. The Chief Social Worker would be expected to liaise with other representative bodies and with the media to monitor the ‘health’ of the profession and to provide them with good news stories and cases.

Amongst those receiving help from social services, the image of social workers working in the voluntary sector is perceived as more positive than that of those working in local authorities. Social workers working in voluntary organisations such as the NSPCC, Welcare or The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (TACT) are seen as family-friendly, involved, for example, with adoption and fostering as well as helping families stay together. The image of local authority social workers is not helped by the fact that they are often only identified with separating taking children from their families or with failures in the system. Some of the preventative work is commissioned by local authorities but provided by voluntary organisations such as Action for Children or Barnardos. There was concern that the Government Green Paper Care Matters would encourage this divide leading to a negative impact on the image of the local authority social worker and impacting negatively on recruitment. The original Commission enquiry took evidence from Community Service Volunteers (CSV) about their volunteer social worker project. Findings from the pilot project in Bromley have now been evaluated and show very encouraging results. Cases involving volunteer social workers working alongside professionals initially have resulted in children coming off the at-risk register earlier and staying off for longer. The costs of running such a scheme are relatively small compared to the cists of maintaining children on the register and the response from professional social workers has been very positive. Other councils are now looking to adopt the scheme and we would encourage other authorities look at assessing its possible adoption.

It is also vital that we attract more people (and more people of quality) into social work. The increasing problem of recruitment has been highlighted recently in the UNISON response to Lord Laming’s inquiry and we would wish to bring attention to the fact that over 60% of their respondents have a staff vacancy rates over 20%.

For this reason the Commission restates its proposals for a high-impact national recruitment campaign, similar to that launched for the army, police and teachers to send a clear message that the role of social workers is important in society and should be respected. We also again advocate local ‘headhunting’ to encourage more people to enter social work.

In addition, the Commission encourages the idea, advocated by the Centre for Social Justice, of a ‘Care First’ programme (similar to the highly successful Teach First programme) which will encourage high-flying graduates to spend a few years as social workers (CSJ, Couldn’t Care Less). Additionally, we wish to encourage more people from the care system to bring their experiences to the profession by entering it.

A serious and related concern is the retention of staff. Many social workers in local authorities have large caseloads which are all at tier 3 and 4 (i.e. heavy and stressful cases). This creates high levels of stress, low morale and an exodus of staff. The knock-on effects are departments with not enough staff to cover emergency interventions let alone any form of preventative work.

To improve social worker retention there needs to be a better focus on work loads so that social workers can have mixed caseloads of supportive and therapeutic work alongside the ‘heavier end’ work with children actually suffering or likely to suffer significant harm. Local authorities with better levels of investment have managed to maintain sustainable mixed caseloads, with variation in caseload size and content, including preventative work.

Also vital is the retention of the right skills in the right place. The original report stated that “the role of consultant social worker – a senior practitioner – should be re-introduced to keep experienced social workers on the frontline, and an appropriate career and pay structure should be in place to support those who do not wish to go into management. In the light of recent developments, we feel that this must be bought in to keep experienced and confident social workers in the field” (No More Blame Game, recommendation 2). The Commission restates this as an urgent need to ensure that social workers are not promoted away from the sharp end where their skills are badly needed.

 

Recommendations

 

• The post of Chief Social Worker should be instituted without delay.

• Volunteer social work should be encouraged and expanded.

• There should be a combination of a national recruitment campaign and local ‘head-hunting’ to encourage more people to enter social work.

• There should be a high impact advertising campaign similar to that launched for the army, police and teachers, which sends a clear message that the role of social workers is important in society and should be respected.

• A ‘Care First’ programme should be established and more care leavers should be encouraged to enter the profession.

• Social workers must be able to have mixed caseloads of supportive and therapeutic work alongside more serious cases.

• A career structure which allows experience social workers as Consultant Practitioners to remain on the frontline should be established.

 

Interagency Working

Much of government policy appears to be parcelling up different little pots of money -e.g. the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services grant, separate funding for Youth Offending Teams etc. which has negated the aim of having coherent, locality based, multi-disciplinary social care teams focussing on referred families. The full range of children in need as defined by the Children Act i.e. those who need an additional service if the children's health and development must be safeguarded if future harm and impairment avoided. By the nature of this work, social workers will make up the majority of these teams, and will often be lead professionals / key workers, but they will work in 'teams around the child' with psychologists, Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs) and social care 'paraprofessionals’ e.g. family support workers, welfare rights advisers etc..

Social workers are recognised to be good at liaising with other professional and government bodies when helping clients and are a crucial part of inter-agency working. However, there are some criticisms that because social workers often carry excessive caseloads due to the lack of resources and vacancies in some areas, this affects the quality of the relationships with other professionals and causes a lack of continuity from the client’s perspective.

These criticisms were particularly notable in the investigation into Baby P’s death in Haringey where it was felt that there was ineffective communication between medical staff and social workers. Indeed inadequate communication between social workers and the paediatrician who saw Baby P just days before he died, may have been partially responsible for the fact that he was not examined at his final medical and his broken back not discovered. The fact that this paediatrician was fully aware of Baby P’s association with social services means that ContactPoint would not have improved the situation and shows how essential regular personal contact between professionals is. Consequently it is vital that OFSTED take account of co-operation between child protection services and other agencies. Holistic working practices which grow organically within a specific community were consistently recommended to the Commission during research for the initial report, and this emphasised the need for generic training as many of the skills can be transferred between adults and children increasing continuity and preventative work.

The importance of the NHS to the Children in Need agenda has been recognised, particularly in the context of public health partnerships with local authorities. The Local Area Agreements & Local Strategic Partnerships are rather bureaucratic and cumbersome mechanisms but in some places are producing helpful local initiatives e.g. to reduce obesity, to tackle drug and alcohol dependency and to reduce crime. We await hard evidence of improved outcomes but acknowledge that this may be something to build on (and streamline) not dismantle at this stage.

Recommendations

 

• Interagency communication is a priority and considered far more effective at dealing with the increasing number of extremely dysfunctional families and communities. Training beginning at undergraduate level and becoming a philosophy throughout the working life of Social Workers is imperative, encouraging flexibility and creativity.

• OFSTED should inspect how the relevant child protection services and other agencies are working together rather than the children’s services department in isolation.

 

Appendix

1

Submission from the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea on the Integrated Children’s System

 

• RBKC has developed its own bespoke ICS, which promotes the Locality-based Social Work structure that we have within this Authority. The system has had a very strong practice influence in how it has been developed. This has attempted to ensure that the system is user-friendly, captures the work flow of Social Workers and those engaged in providing Family Services to children. Whilst we have worked within the spirit of the DCSF’s template exemplars and Regulatory guidance we have adapted them in order to ensure a greater emphasis upon Social Work risk assessments that promotes analysis of key information to promote effective decision making and positive outcomes for children and their families.

• Our focus on making the system work for practitioners and minimise bureaucracy is also important in bolstering social workers’ professional identity and pride. Concern has been expressed by practitioners, and in some of the research literature, that the professionalism of social workers can be undermined by an over-emphasis on processes, IT systems, forms and performance indicators. It is important that systems to ensure high standards and accountability support rather than undermine professionalism.

• Whilst our assessments are family-based the system provides the ability to view information at a family or individual child level.

• We are in the process of finalising our second launch of ICS and this phase will combine what are currently two electronic recording systems into one. This will mean that all of our Looked-After Children’s data will now be recorded on our new system thus ensuring greater management data, consistency of recording and enabling key staff such as our Independent Reviewing Officers to access and record onto this system.

• Social Work feedback has been largely positive on the implementation of the first phase and we are ensuring that this feedback is collated in order to help assess the benefit realisation of the new system.

• The development of a bespoke ICS that ensures that it matches the relevant workflow unique to its authority has been complex and costly. The first phase of the system was implemented in July 2007 after over 3 years' work and at a cost of £750,000, against an original project budget of £350,000. The second phase is currently on schedule to be implemented in March 2009. This was initially forecast to be delivered at a cost of £710,000; however, as a result of adding further system components to support practitioners working with looked after children it is now estimated that the project will cost £920,000.

• The RBKC system has attracted a high degree of interest from other local authorities that have purchased ‘off-the-shelf’ systems. Feedback has been that other authorities have experienced their systems as time-consuming, unfriendly to the Social Work task and Social Work Processes and equally unfriendly to Service Users who can be left confused in the huge volume of paperwork and bureaucracy. To this end exploration is currently underway as to whether our system may be ‘marketable’ to a wider group.

 

Appendix

2.  Submission from Carolyn Steen, Chartered Psychologist B.Sc., M.Phil., C.Psychol., A.F.B.Ps.S.. J.P.

 

The contributions from the various agencies giving evidence to the Commission did not reflect the appalling problems of the families preoccupying Social Workers in their child protection work today. The introductory paragraph 2 (p. 14) of No more Blame Game mentions the problems of the changing nature of family life and the pressures on “the family”. However little emphasis was placed either by those giving evidence to the commission or the commission contributors to what is really going on in the families confronted by social workers daily.

Why was that? Was it because the problems facing most social workers are so great that they and their seniors are traumatized by them? Has it become so hard to communicate to the man in the street the shocking reality of day to day life in the families where Child Protection Issues are present? I speak from experience of my Court Practice of which 2/3 is Children Act work in London, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. The remaining 1/3 is involved with issues of Contact after separation or divorce.

I have reflected on the problems which the families I assess present-these are typical of families presenting to social workers.

It is my view that in an important minority of families on social workers’ caseloads the dynamic of each family is so complex, intractable and frightening that even the most skilled psychiatric team in the world going into such a family would have problems diagnosing and producing solutions.

The problems are usually entrenched resulting from a lethal cocktail of social, financial and intellectual problems manifest in aggressive behaviour fuelled by abuse of substances (drugs and alcohol), personality problems, mental ill health and the resultant fleeting and unstable relationships. Sexual abuse is common within the family and many of the parents themselves have been subject to sexual and physical abuse and neglect as children.

The social worker doing Child Protection investigations and assessments tries to grapple with the issues in order to understand and investigate his/her hypotheses. When their questions and challenges hone in on sensitive issues the families become aggressive, rejecting and uncommunicative. As one social worker who has worked for 30 years in children’s homes and in Child Protection work said, many of us are frightened for our own lives as we interrogate and confront the families in order to make a diagnosis and plan for an intervention. “I will now take a police officer with me if I have to tell a family that their care is not good enough and their child may be taken into care”. He, other social workers and psychiatrists say that: “Many social workers don’t know what to look for. They don’t have the skills to make early diagnostic assessments, make plans to test out their diagnosis and put interventions in place.”

“They are afraid to admit to their seniors (many of whom have not been into families for the last decade), that they cannot hold the case together for fear they are not promoted”. “They fear challenging their seniors decisions re allocation of resources as this may also serve to prevent promotion”.

“New social workers, once they have completed their probationary period admit to wanting to get out of the work as soon as possible”.

“Those who are paid most in Social Services should be actively involved in the most precarious cases”.

“The other professionals-psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors should be going in to the families’ homes, not sitting back in their ivory tower clinics”.

As an assessing psychologist writing reports for the Courts I will not go out into families any more. I used to walk through desperate estates to get to the homes of the families I was asked to assess. The lack of a clean space for me to lay out my tests or interview uninterrupted, the smell, the darkness-curtains undrawn, the omnipresent noisy TV and the hostility became too much. I too was frightened.

I now do my assessments in a Family Centre where I have emergency back up if necessary. Also I can terminate my assessment if it becomes impossible to get cooperation. Social Workers however can not walk away-they are out in the homes in these poor conditions and they cannot cease their involvement when children are at risk.

It is my experience that over the last 10 years the problems within the families have increased. Abuse of substances (drink and drugs) is inevitably features of the assessments. (My experience is that 6080% of the families I assess have alcohol and / or drug problems). Statistics indicate the low rehabilitation rate for both drink and drug addicts. Drink and drugs fuel violence and crime pays for the habit. Many youngsters carry knives.

Further the parents of the children at risk have complex personality disorders arising from their own history of neglect and abuse. Many of the families have mental health issues. Probably 70% of the mothers I assess have been sexually abused as children.

Confronting these families in their homes and asking difficult and questions could result in violence and abuse. Social workers are frightened to ask too many questions or to insist that they inspect rooms, see children, look in the fridge etc when clients are abusing substances or have violent histories.

Many of the parents have criminal records and are used to lying and deception. It is difficult for a social worker to assess lying and confront for proof.

Many senior social workers have not been out on the beat to see the changes and experience the chaotic families which now present in Child Protection Work. It is imperative that seniors go with their junior social workers into the homes of a good proportion of the families being assessed.

I maintain that the 3 year social work graduate course is inadequate to equip a social worker to make accurate assessments early on in a case-They just do not have the experience to know what to look for, make quick and accurate assessments and decide on required resources. They should have the equivalent skills of an assessing psychologist (6 years training minimum), psychiatrist (8-10 years training) or doctor (6-8 years).

The many reported deaths of children in the UK during 2007 and 2008 (Baby P, the 7 deaths in Doncaster, etc.) all being investigated by Social Services, should serve to high light the fragile, inadequate and inappropriate service being offered by social workers. This has got to change.

 

Biographies of Contributors

Tim Loughton MP (Chairman) Shadow Minister for Children and Young People

Tim Loughton is MP for East Worthing and Shoreham and Shadow Minister for Children and Young People. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1997. He was first promoted to the front bench environment team in February 2000 with responsibility for regeneration, the regions and housing. In September 2001 he was made a Shadow Health Minister with mental health, social services and children's health, and since November 2003, he has been Shadow Minister for Children. He now holds this position on the Shadow Children, Schools and Family team and is responsible for looked after children, SEN, PSHE, child welfare and social work, youth justice (shared with Shadow Justice Team), general well being, youth policy and the development of the party’s National Citizen Service programme.

Allan Bowman

Allan Bowman was appointed Chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence in April 2006. A qualified Social Worker, Allan began his career in Social Work in Scotland in 1972. He has held various posts north and south of the border and was Director of Social Work in Fife for 11 years and Strategic Director for Health and Social Care in Brighton & Hove for 6 years. Latterly Allan was Head of Programmes with the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, ODPM with responsibility for a range of Regeneration initiatives including the New Deal for Communities. Specialising in Child Protection and Home Care he has spoken extensively on these subjects internationally and provided advice and consultancy on a range of community care and health issues in Europe and Canada.

Alex Burghart

Alex Burghart is Tim Loughton’s Political Adviser. He has worked with Tim since early 2007, most notably on the Children and Young Persons Act. He was previously Sir Robert Balchin’s researcher and lectured at King’s College London where he took his PhD. He is a governor of John Chilton School, a maintained special school for children with physical, medical or sensory difficulties.

Terry Butler CBE

Terry Butler CBE was Hampshire County Council’s Director of Social Services from 1988 to 2005. Nationally, he has regularly acted as a Government adviser and was seconded to the Department of Health in the early 1990s to help implement the community care reforms. He is a former member of the Home Office Advisory Board for Restricted Patients and Board of Governors for the National Institute for Social Work and was advisor to NPSA until 2007. He is currently a Non Executive Director of the NHS South Central Strategic Health Authority and a Council Member for the General Social Care Council. He is also an Adviser for Social Care at the National Patient Safety Agency, Member of the Information Tribunal and Vice-President of the Relatives and Residents Association. He is self-employed as an Adviser in Public Services and Social Care. In this capacity he does not undertake operational and management roles but offers strategic and professional advice, mentoring and assistance with the recruitment of senior executives.

 

Baroness Butler-Sloss of Marsh Green

Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was the first woman appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal (judge of the Court of Appeal), having chaired the Cleveland child abuse inquiry in the previous year. In 1999, she became President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice, the first woman to hold this position. She was advanced to the rank of Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 2005. In 2006, she was elevated to the peerage, being gazetted as Baroness Butler-Sloss, of Marsh Green in the County of Devon and appointed to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved for a period of five years. She became Chancellor of the University of the West of England in 1993 and an Honorary Fellow of St. Hilda's College, Oxford, Peterhouse, Cambridge, King's College London, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She sits on the Selection Panel for Queen's Counsel.

Dr Ashok Chand

Ash has been a lecturer in the School of Health and Social Studies at the University of Warwick since 2005. Previously he was a lecturer at the University of Nottingham in the Centre for Social Work. Initially he taught on the Post Qualifying Child Care Award (PQCCA) for three years and taught on the Master of Arts / Post Graduate Diploma in Social Work (MA/PGDipSW) course. Ash’s specialist research areas primarily centre on the child welfare system and its impact for minority ethnic families in the UK. Many of his publications evaluate and synthesize findings from existing research studies that consider child welfare policy and practice and its appropriateness for minority ethnic children and families.

Felicity Collier

Felicity qualified in social work in 1978 and gained an MPhil in Social Work at Brunel University in 1994. She is a registered social worker. Felicity worked as a child care social worker in Slough from 1978-82, and then joined the Buckinghamshire Probation service as a probation officer working with young offenders. In 1985 she was appointed senior probation officer and set up the first county specialist divorce court welfare team and in 1989 became county training manager. Felicity was active in NAPO and chaired the Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire branch. From 1992-95 she was, assistant chief probation officer in Oxfordshire, and responsibilities included young offender institutions, prisons, hostels, day centre, drug and alcohol services and media relations. Felicity was Chief Executive of BAAF (British Association for Adoption and Fostering) from 1995 -2006, where she initiated a number of landmark developments in the field of child placement and adoption, including developments in the field of child placement and adoption, including writing An Action Plan to improve Adoption services, based on research she had led, and this was launched in the House of Commons in 1998. Almost all the Report's recommendation have been taken forward including new adoption legislation, national adoption standards, paid adoption leave, comprehensive adoption support services and a national adoption register. Felicity was a member of the Presidents Adoption Committee and the Sure Start audit committee and has written and spoken widely on adoption, fostering and child care issues. She was joint author of The Cost of Fostercare which set out the case for major new investment in foster care across the UK. Felicity has also undertaken serious case reviews for local authorities and led a number of successful campaigns to improve services for children. A poll of Community Care magazine readers in 2005 voted her the most influential person in childcare. Felicity was a co-opted member of the Ethics and Law Committee of the HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) from 2003-6 and was Chair of the Standards and Ethics Board of BASW (British Association of Social Work) 2006-7. Felicity is now consultant director for Care and Health, responsible for the children's conference programme andis a trustee of Adoption UK, the membership association for adoptive parents. Felicity has five children, two of whom are local authority child care social workers, and ten grandchildren and is looking forward to spending more time with her family, while remaining passionate about the importance of social work in improving the lives of society's most vulnerable children.

 

Flick Drummond

Flick Drummond is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Portsmouth South and is the clerk to the commission and the editor of the original report, No Blame Game – the Future for Children’s Social Workers. She recently completed a Masters degree in Global Politics and International Relations from Southampton University. She is a former OFSTED lay school inspector, was on the Winchester and Eastleigh Community Health Council 1991-1999 and chaired the Winchester branch of the National Childbirth Trust 1990-3. She is a mother of 4 teenage children.

Melanie P K Gill

Melanie Gill is a Brighton-based child forensic Psychologist. She is one of the founders of Commonsense Associates, the practice is based at the Sussex Medical Chambers in Hove, and utilises radical and innovative multidisciplinary approaches that seek to solve psychological problems as effectively and quickly as possible. She serves on the South Downs Mental Health Act Tribunal Panel and works part-time in a GP surgery in Brighton which deals with the most deprived areas of the city. She has also helped with the Centre for Social Justice in organising a symposium to highlight social problems and the increasing criminalisation of children: ’Thugs beyond Redemption’, which gave rise to the ‘Hug a Hoodie’ phrase. She was an adviser on the Family Breakdown Policy group advising David Cameron, which produced policy recommendations in ‘Breakthrough Britain’, following on from the publication of ‘Breakdown Britain’, She is also part of a group of experts in child issues who are attempting to change attitudes and policy to deal with the growing number of vulnerable families and children through ‘Psycho-Politics’. She trained at Brunel University in the late 70’s, working in special schools and a high security remand home for adolescent girls. She studied Child Forensics at Leeds University, her other academic interests and training are in Cognitive Neuropsychology and Schema Therapy. She has had extensive careers in both the music and television industries. She is at present also setting up a psycho-legal phone line, to try to fill the gap caused by diminishing community and legal aid services.

Mark Houston

Mark is a Development Officer in Hampshire County Council, Adult Services Department, where he has specific responsibilities for service user and carer participation. He has both personal and professional experiences of social work. Having received support from Social Services as a child with a disability, he became actively involved in his local care forum. This led on to working part-time in the Children & Families strategy team where he led on a number of projects across the Council, while studying for his degree in mathematics. He has also worked closely with teams in the Department of Health, the former Department for Education & Skills and the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in relation to social care legislation and guidance, including the Quality Protects programme and the Every Child Matters agenda. He also has a wide range of experiences with the voluntary sector. He is a member of the Young Minds Council and has undertaken project work with a number of other charities, including the National Autistic Society, the British Institute for Brain Injured Children and the UK Youth Parliament. He has also served on various Parliamentary Committees, including the All Party Group for Looked After Children and Care Leavers and the All Party Group on Autism.

 

Baroness Morris of Bolton OBE

Trish Morris entered the House of Lords in June 2004. In September of that year she joined the front bench team in Education and Health and was until recently Shadow Minister for Children, School and Families, Women and an Opposition Whip. Prior to entering the Lords, Trish was Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party with responsibility for candidates. She is President of the National Benevolent Institution, a trustee of the disability partnership, co-chair of women in public policy and a governor and trustee of her old school Bolton School. A former member of the Advisory Committee to the Abbot of Ampleforth, Trish also served as Deputy Chairman of the Salford Royal Hospitals NHS Trust and as a Director of Bolton Lads & Girls Club. She is also patron of OXPIP, the Oxford Parent-Infant Project, which is a registered charity working with families who are struggling to cope with the emotional demands of their baby and helping them to form secure attachments.

Polly Neate

Polly Neate is Executive Director of Public Affairs and Communications at NCH, the children’s charity, which she joined in November 2005. Her directorate includes communications, campaigns, public policy, marketing and new business. She is part of NCH’s Executive Management Team. A journalist by profession, Polly’s previous role was as editor of Community Care, the leading weekly social care magazine, where she was responsible for two magazines, several web-based products, and an annual programme of conferences and large-scale events. Polly has spoken widely on social care for both children and adults, the media, and the relationship between the two, both on conference platforms and in the media. She has also written for other magazines and national newspapers, and has won several awards for writing, campaigning and editing, including the Periodical Publishers Association Business and Professional Magazine of the Year, and Campaign of the Year. She has sat on several stakeholder and working groups for government.

Alastair Pettigrew

After graduating with degrees in Economics in 1964 and 1965, Alastair worked initially in industry in a management services function in a couple of multinational companies. During this period he was a volunteer for a charity for the homeless. He then completed social work training in 1972 and worked initially as a probation officer in inner London and then as a psychiatric social worker in the children's department of the Maudsley Hospital. Next he ran a day project for young offenders; this project employed teachers, social workers and youth workers and was an alternative to Care and custody. Subsequently he joined Kensington & Chelsea social services department initially as a manager of 9 children's homes and subsequently as manager of under fives, fostering and adoption, child protection, CAMHS and children with disabilities and the Youth Offending Team. Two years ago he became Director of Children's Social Care in Lewisham.

Cllr. Shireen Ritchie

Shireen Ritchie is a Councillor in the Royal Borough of Kensington, a diverse area of central London. It is the most densely populated local authority in the country and displays great contrasts in its’ population, including ethnic and linguistic diversity and wide socio-economic disparities. Shireen is the statutory Lead Member for Children in the borough, under the Children Act 2004. In 2005Kensington & Chelsea was one of only 11 authorities in England to achieve an overall ‘excellent’ rating for children’s services. Shireen is the Executive Cabinet Member for the Family and Children’s Services and has responsibility for Social Care services to children, Child protection, Children – Looked After, Adoption, Fostering, Family Support and Youth Services and an overview responsibility for education. She has served on both the Adoption and Permanency and the Fostering Panels of the local authority. Shireen is Vice President of UK Youth, the largest non-uniformed charity for young people in the country. She is also sits on the Trustee Board of BAAF. Shireen is active in the central organisation of the Conservative Party, particularly in respect of Candidate Selection.

Carolyn Steen

Carolyn Steen is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the assessment of children and families as an Expert witness for the Courts. She trained as an educational psychologist, family mediator and family therapist and has worked in schools, clinics, hospitals and children’s homes in London. She has spent much of her time working in children’s charities and other voluntary organisations. She chaired Coram Family for 6 years and was instrumental in refocusing, rebranding and raising its profile as well as setting up, with others, the adjacent Foundling Museum.

Professor June Thoburn CBE LittD

June Thoburn is an Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of East Anglia. She is a registered Social Worker and has worked in child and family social work in England and Canada. She has an international reputation for her publications on family support, child protection and adoption and fostering and has just completed a study of children in care in 15 countries, funded by the Leverhulme Foundation.