Munro Review Response to Consultation Questions 01

Response to Munro review consultation

January 2011

The questions

Reducing bureaucracy

1. What prescribed procedures and forms do you feel are unnecessary, overly time consuming or cause you to duplicate work? (Please be as specific as possible – we need to know the name of precise forms and procedures and why they are unhelpful). 2. What factors prevent you from forming relationships with children and families, hearing and understanding their problems and offering appropriate help or interventions?

Performance and accountability

3. What child protection data do local areas need to collect to enable them to compare their results, be publicly accountable and drive their own improvement? 4. How can we create a system for learning from practice which counteracts blame and allows for critical professional reflection? How can Government most effectively support this? 5. What are the main barriers to child protection professionals, particularly social workers, and those who represent them, working effectively with the media so that their work is better understood? How could these be overcome?

Early help and support

6. What expertise is needed locally in universal services to identify children’s needs and support their assessment? What would the practical impact of developing this expertise in universal services be? 7. Would it be better if assessment was an ongoing activity rather than being defined by set points with set timescales? What would the practical implications of this be? (Assessment should be taken to include the common assessment and assessment that is undertaken as part of the statutory framework for children in need (initial and core assessments) 8. Some local areas have introduced social-work-led, multi-agency locality teams to help inform best next steps in respect of a child or young person, including whether a formal child protection intervention is needed. Do you think this is useful? Do you have evidence of it working well? What are the practical implications of this approach?

To answer any of the above questions please email Professor Munro at [email protected] and write ‘Munro Review Questions’ in the subject header. Please make sure you include the number/s of the question you are answering and indicate your role or your interest in the review. The closing date for responses is Monday 24 January 2011.

Performance and accountability

6. What child protection data do local areas need to collect to enable them to compare their results, be publicly accountable and drive their own improvement?

Early help and support

9. What expertise is needed locally in universal services to identify children’s needs and support their assessment? What would the practical impact of developing this expertise in universal services be? 10. Would it be better if assessment was an ongoing activity rather than being defined by set points with set timescales? What would the practical implications of this be? (Assessment should be taken to include the common assessment and assessment that is undertaken as part of the statutory framework for children in need (initial and core assessments) 11. Some local areas have introduced social-work-led, multi-agency locality teams to help inform best next steps in respect of a child or young person, including whether a formal child protection intervention is needed. Do you think this is useful? Do you have evidence of it working well? What are the practical implications of this approach?

To answer any of the above questions please email Professor Munro at [email protected] and write ‘Munro Review Questions’ in the subject header. Please make sure you include the number/s of the question you are answering and indicate your role or your interest in the review. The closing date for responses is Monday 24 January 2011. Our responses

3. What child protection data do local areas need to collect to enable them to compare their results, be publicly accountable and drive their own improvement?

The Fatherhood Institute is chiefly concerned with monitoring the impact of fathers and father- figures on children and mothers through reviewing the research evidence base and evidence on ‘what works’ in engaging with them. We regularly audit social care and other services on the extent and timing of their engagement with the men in children’s lives.

In social work and social care and in the less acute and universal services which may feed into these, data on the men in children’s lives is regularly missing or incomplete, especially when the father is non-resident. Systems need to be set up to gather this data routinely, with workers understanding the legal position in relation to, for instance, obtaining the details of a man who does not present; supervision needs to look at this issue and work with staff who are not gathering men’s details; revised social work and CPD training need to look at the issue of workers’ engaging with men, since they are woefully untrained to do so and harbour all kinds of beliefs about men and fathers that inhibit engagement – the prime culprits in their failure to gather data on men (see below for more on training and support).

A repeated observation in Serious Case Reviews (including the recent high profile case of Baby P, and the OFSTED serious case review summary) and in other research (e.g. carried out by the Family Rights Group) is that men in contact with or salient to vulnerable children have often not been addressed directly by professionals and therefore go unnoticed as risk to the child, or unheeded as possible sources of information, concern or care. This contributes substantially to abuse and even deaths. Failure to engage with such men also means that networks of potential support or risk attaching to them (family and friends) are discounted. This lack of attention means that often basic information on men’s identity and contact details are omitted from social services’ records and abuse - or concerns about it - can go unnoticed. Furthermore, the negative and damaging behaviour of dangerous men can go unchallenged, leaving them free to continue offending even when no longer in contact with the family where concerns were originally raised.. We draw the review’s attention to the recommendations we provided to the Lamming Report (2008).

• Local authority Children’s Services departments should comprehensively review the way services are structured to support fathers (particularly non-resident fathers) to be appropriately involved in their children’s lives.

• Local authorities should have accessible, published policies and procedures setting out how social care services should involve fathers, including non-resident fathers.

• Local authorities should monitor the attendance of fathers (resident and non-resident) at child protection conferences and at all meetings that plan and make decisions about children.

• Children’s Services social care staff should be specifically trained to work effectively with both fathers and mothers. Staff should have a clear understanding of the law as to how it affects the engagement of fathers.

• Local authority children’s social care services should always try to involve the child(ren’s) father, unless it is assessed as unsafe (and even then alternative ways of working may be feasible). • The local authority should be routinely inviting fathers to planning meetings about their child, monitoring their attendance and ensuring they receive minutes and decisions. The evidence from the research indicates that if invited, the majority of fathers will attend.

• Social workers should allow sufficient time to engage with non-resident fathers when carrying out assessments, in particular core assessment.

• They should explore the child’s views about their relationship with both parents, but also about whether there is any other adult whom the child values as a father figure.

• Social care workers’ fears and concerns when working with violent or threatening men, should be acknowledged and effective supervisory structures and support should be in place.

7. What expertise is needed locally in universal services to identify children’s needs and support their assessment? What would the practical impact of developing this expertise in universal services be?

Following on from the recommendations above, and noting the recommendations in the first Munro report that universal services should be facilitated to feed in effectively to the child protection system (para’s 3.3 and 3.4), we recommend that Children’s Centre, Health Visitors and other relevant staff should receive targeted training and tools for audit to address the extent to which their services are father-friendly and father- inclusive (and the changes required to make them so). Further, specific staff members should be trained to assess children at risk competently and confidently, including being able to work with all family members, i.e. fathers as well as mothers; non-resident fathers as well as resident ones; birth fathers AND father-figures. Scourfield (2006)1 and others identify staff attitudes towards men and confidence in engaging with them as the major barriers to engagement, rather than lack of time. What is clear, is that there is generally no need for ‘special services for men’ – e.g. ‘fathers’ groups’. Although provision of specialist services to address, for instance, men’s use of violence, may be required, the best way forward is for men in families to be engaged with alongside the mothers and children, by the same workers or by, on occasion, an additional worker (woman or man) working with the family.

Most members of the children’s workforce are not aware of the evidence relating to the impact (both positive and negative) of men and fathers on children and mothers. Their training does not equip them to approach men, and from common social work and other texts the figure of the ‘father as a resource’ is almost entirely lacking. Furthermore, such family professionals tend to make particularly negative appraisals of men, including men they have never men, based on mothers’ reports and their own personal histories, in which abuse or difficult relationships with their own children’s fathers often feature. The feminised settings in which they work compound negativity towards and lack of confidence in engaging with men. Thus it is not sufficient to ‘tell them to engage with men’: social work pre-registration training and CPD need to incorporate this as core competencies, with managers also understanding how crucial this engagement is, having high expectations that their staff will address this, and putting appropriate support in place. Key to successful engagement is ‘finding the fathers’ early on, by registering their names and details as soon as a child is registered in universal and other services. Currently, staff usually only meet men when they erupt, often with violence, into the child protection process. The Fatherhood Institute has developed several successful information and training programmes to meet these deficits and hopes to

1 ‘The challenge of engaging fathers in the child protection process’ in Critical Social Policy 26(2), 440-449 contribute to the discussion as to how best to deliver skills in father engagement more widely. There is also a case for ensuring that frontline staff in universal services (notably health visitors, Children’s Centre staff, midwives, early years professionals) are not only comfortable engaging with men, recognise the importance of doing so, and build this in to their day-to-day practice, but are better trained to identify and discuss the related topic of couple relationship issues with both men and women, referring on as appropriate. This would ensure that effective support reaches families earlier in the process of relationship conflict and breakdown.

Twin training in father engagement and couple support (together with basic conflict resolution skills training) would enable children’s needs to be met more effectively by obtaining a fuller picture of all the relationships and family processes which impact directly on their well-being. Risk would be earlier and better identified and addressed; and wider sources of support would be available to children and their families. Further, service professionals would have the skills and confidence to deliver a truly holistic family support service.