I'm Delighted to Talk to You About in Safe Hands
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I’m delighted to talk to you about In Safe Hands – a community initiative combining genuine collaboration, training, partnership and timely intervention in order to safeguard children. Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the Farrer & Co Child Protection Unit, Annual Child Protection Conference. As Deputy Head and Designated Safeguarding Lead of Meadlands Primary School and Nursery, Ham - I took a keen interest in everything the presenters had to say. But I found two presentations particularly striking because in essence, they had the same message. The first message came from Ian Wise QC I wasn’t surprised Of course the need to do this is partly financial, with to hear that we don’t always work together effectively local authority funding seeming to continue to enough to safeguard children. I’ve heard that many times. I decrease at a rate of knots. However, it’s not the wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that collaboration budget which bothers me, it’s the fact that when I have across professional agencies was an issue even ten, twenty been part of a genuinely collaborative, pro-active and or fifty years ago. However, I was astonished to hear that timely ‘Team Around the Child’ – I have been part of a even as many as one hundred or more years ago, working positive force, effecting genuine change in the lives of together effectively was seen to be one of the major reasons children and families and surely – this is what we want. why, on reflection, children were not kept safe. A lack of genuine, ‘multi-agency working’ is often sited The second presentation which resonated came from Lisa in the findings of Serious Case Reviews and even at the Harker who last year represented the NSPCC. She described ‘Early Help’ stage, in my own context, I was often the national context in terms of child protection and frustrated by a lack of true partnership working. safeguarding issues and discussed the need more than ever We’re still not ‘working together’ often or effectively for organisations to ‘hold hands across agencies to protect enough. children’. I have been Deputy at Meadlands for eight years now and my role has always focused squarely on pastoral and welfare issues. People often assume, that in the leafy borough of Richmond, that there aren’t really any Safeguarding issues, that it’s in the inner city schools where children really need protection. But children everywhere need protecting, and every community, irrespective of its socio- economic profile, has its challenges. Ham is a really interesting place – I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed at Meadlands so long. It’s really very beautiful, nestled between the River Thames to the south and Richmond Park to the north, we certainly have an enviable location. However, the school serves two fairly large council estates, hidden behind the multi-million pound mansions on Ham Common and this makes for a really interesting and diverse school community. People are often very surprised to hear that 27 languages are spoken at our school. The other interesting thing about Ham is you wouldn’t really go to Ham unless you had a reason to. By that I mean it’s rather ‘cut-off’ in geographical terms. And the many families who have lived in Ham for the last fifty years or so, tend not to leave, why would they in that location? And if they do leave, there seems to be some invisible, magnetic pull – they always return. For this reason, there tend to be many ‘generational’ issues which present a challenge to us as a school in terms of promoting the safety and welfare of children. Neglect and domestic violence are common, much of the community are complacent and flippant about their misuse of drugs and alcohol and mental health issues are a problem not just for the adults but increasingly for our children as well. Back at school, following the conference, the idea for In Safe Hands developed over a cup of tea with our wonderful Safer Schools Police Officer who was also questioning how he could communicate more meaningfully with parents, frustrated as he was that the same individuals were being arrested time and time again. I re-read Adele Eastman of Farrer & Co’s paper for the Centre for Social Justice, ‘Enough is enough’ and I began to ask myself how we could do things differently here in our community. How could we work smarter to create a robust network of support to ensure important messages are communicated with families? Alongside this my wonderful Headteacher was encouraging me to DREAM BIG! And so, these seeds of an idea began to take root and grow. Back in April, we held our first In Safe Hands Professionals Network Meeting. Representatives from Health, Education, Children’s Services and the Voluntary Sector came together in our school hall to begin to explore how we could establish genuine, cross-agency partnerships; sharing our aims and objectives; pooling our resources; in order that we can provide targeted support, at the right time, with a focus on early intervention and prevention and hopefully with a secondary benefit of saving money. Working together collaboratively and proactively and not just coming together reactively after an issue or trauma has already occurred. It was so interesting that with no seating plan, professionals grouped themselves according to their sector – teachers on one table, social workers on another, police on another etc etc! I mixed them all up when we began the workshop and some really fruitful conversations began! Because at the heart of In Safe Hands is the principle of building relationships – professional to professional, professional to parent, parent and professional to child. That same week, the Early Intervention Foundation held their conference and discussed the concept of ‘picking up the signs, not the pieces’ again the financial gains of intervening early rather than waiting until young people have deeply entrenched and complex mental health or substance misuse issues. It’s common sense. KEY MESSAGES FROM PROFESSIONAL’S NETWORK MEETING APRIL 2016 • Consistency in the messages – do we need a shared, cross-agency policy? • Clarity on what we can offer • Simplifying and clarifying pathways to support • Importance of professionals getting together, talking, building relationships, sharing frustrations • A shared responsibility • Stigma and power around the language we use. Instead of multi-agency – what can we use? Instead of ‘reporting’ how about listen-affirm-pass on • Challenging the intrinsic fear our community appear to have around receiving support but also reporting abuse • Developing trust across agencies but also between families and the agencies • Having the confidence to hold each other to account and the humility to accept when things go wrong – learning from these experiences • Providing personalised, localised services • No surprises for families – clarity on information sharing – communicating the importance of information sharing and the reasons why it’s necessary • Importance of reassuring parents, they are not alone and all parents struggle some of the time, dispelling myths • What are our cross-agency, bottom-line, non-negotiables • The child at the centre • Talk to each other where possible and not rely on email • Make ourselves accessible • Recognise that families function in a myriad different ways and explore what ‘good enough’ means to us • Intervene early and in a timely way – picking up signs not picking up pieces Children’s Services, Education Welfare, School Nurses and all of the other statutory agencies were represented in addition to a raft of charities and voluntary organisations from the NSPCC to Beanstalk a children’s literacy organisation. We also organised series of seminars by key organisations and we were delighted to welcome Carrie Grant from the BBC1 – One Show. Carrie has four children, one of whom is adopted and all of whom have a range of additional needs. She is a passionate and inspirational speaker who Next, in May, we launched In Safe Hands to our children, had a real impact on our parents and professionals alike. young people and families. Working together with She encouraged us to explore how we can work better another four local schools we held a fun-filled, family and more collaboratively. Reminding ourselves that event on our school field. While the children and young parents are ‘coming on to our turf’, that they may have people took part in graffiti, street dance and beat-boxing had a bad experience at school which affects their workshops and the little ones were being cared for in a perceptions. That if they have a child with health or crèche organised by our local Children’s Centre – the additional needs, if they are going through a relationship professionals set out their stalls for the parents and carers. breakdown, if they are battling an addiction or mental This was an opportunity to showcase our services, discuss health issue themselves that when they bring the children what support we can provide to our families and young to school in the morning – that in itself is a massive people in a non-threatening, non-judgemental, informal achievement. way. However, once again, the most powerful voice heard that day came from our families themselves. Mr Paul Cattermole, a parent at Meadlands, movingly described how he became ‘known to social services’ firstly due to the special needs of his youngest daughter and secondly when tragically his thirty eight year old wife died of breast cancer. His story highlighted that as a nation we have a preconceived and prejudiced idea of which families need help and that in reality, we all need help from the state at times. He also described how bewildering the ‘system’ can be even if you happen to be educated to degree standard, healthy of mind and body and free of any addictions or contravening issues.