Performing Social Work and
Child Protection Practice
Professor Harry Ferguson
Harry.ferguson@nottingham.ac.uk
The Munro Review Conference
London, 19th September 2011
Munro: The challenges
• Reform the child protection system from
being over-bureaucratised and concerned
with compliance to one that keeps a focus
on children.
• ‘The centrality of forming relationships with
children and families to understand and
help them has become obscured’ (p.8).
• We must ‘enable social workers to
exercise more professional judgment
[…and] improve their expertise’ (p.8).
• ‘Helping children is a human
process. When the bureaucratic
aspects of work become too
dominant, the heart of the work is
lost’ (p.10).
My focus / questions
• What happens when the heart is put
back into social work?
• What kinds of skills, knowledge and
evidence are needed to support
effective heart-felt practice?
• What does it mean to form deep,
helpful relationships with children and
families and involve actually doing?
Towards child-centred practice
• ‘the evidence shows that children are
not being adequately included in child
protection work’ (Munro, p.25)
• Not being seen enough on their own
• Yet evidence also shows that children
voice ‘the importance of being heard
separately from their parents and
being listened to’ (p.26).
Why?
• Impact of case recording, ICS etc
restricting time for quality practice
(White, et al 2010)
• Deficits in skills & confidence
(Lefevre, 2010)
• More evidence needed of what
actually happens when social workers
are face to face with children?
The struggle to relate to children
• Social workers not getting into the
home
• Or, getting in but not properly
engaging with, moving towards,
seeing, hearing or touching children –
when in their presence in the home
• Ms Walhstrom’s record of the children’s health and
welfare was that “all three appeared well and happy.”
Before us, she amended that phrase to “calm and
collected.” The grounds for those generalised words are
not apparent. … we find that on that day Jasmine was
recovering from a fracture of her thigh and would have
walked with an abnormal gait. Since she did not perform
any purposeful act of mobility, her healing bone fracture
would not have been noticed. Ms Walhstrom also
explained to us – and we accept her description – that
Beverley Lorrington was waving her arm about so that
Jasmine was partially obscured from sight, Miss
Lorrington standing between the two of them in the
playroom. If Ms Wahlstrom had carried out the
elementary task of walking with Jasmine, or talking to
her, even in her mother’s presence, the fact of child
abuse would have been all too apparent.
(The Jasmine Beckford Inquiry Report, 1985, p.126)
• Much greater attention needs to be
given to the places where children are
seen and their implications
• Most often seen on the home visit
• Must protect children while on the
move
• How can SWs get close enough to
ensure safety – ‘intimate practice’
(Ferguson, 2011)
• What is the lived experience of such
practice?
Researching child protection
practice ‘on the move’
• Research needed to get as close as
possible to practice
• Shadowed practitioners in the car, on
home visits, in schools
• Observed & recorded their
encounters with service users (with
their consent).
Getting in: Doorsteps
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Social worker knocks on the door
No reply
2 minutes later knocks again
No reply
SW asks me: “Did I knock hard enough?”
Knocks again
Mother comes to the door…
Inside the home
• “It’s like stepping into another world”
(social worker)
• We need a language adequate to
describing these experiences
• Feelings of fear, anxiety, disgust
shape what is & is not done
• Get ‘stuck’, immobilised by the home,
hostility, atmospheres, smells, dogs…
• (Re)gaining composure in the chaos &
disorientation requires a highly skilled
performance
• All practitioners admit to some avoidance
of doing things they know they should
• The intolerable feelings the work brings up
• Can I bear to ask the hard questions of
mothers? To go after fathers?
• Or to go into the depths to understand
what this child’s life is really like? To get
that close to the child?
• Significant variation among practitioners
about how close they get to children &
enter their intimate spaces
• Some confusion about what it is ethical to
do – how ‘intrusive’ to be
• Why do social workers avoid touching
children?
Reasons for avoiding touching
• Organisational - “I don’t have time”
• Fear – “I’m afraid of being accused of child
sexual abuse”
• Personality – “I’m not a touchy-feely kind
of person”
• Culture – “I don’t touch because I’m
English”
• Disgust – “I don’t like snotty children”
Where best to see children alone?
• The child’s bedroom is a popular place for
SWs to relate to children alone
- to check on the home conditions
- to use the child’s possessions as a
means to communicate with them
- their possessions as evidence of their
role in the family & the amount of love
and nurture they receive.
• But some practitioners rely too
heavily on the home & seeing
children alone in bedrooms or other
rooms
• Because it saves time – which they
feel they have too little of
• Or they do not understand the
dynamics of power in such spaces
• Children too inhibited to speak the
truth - fear their parents are listening.
• I’d only had the case for 19 days, but I
spoke to the children alone in their
bedrooms and I should have spoken to
them in school. But the case was
transferred [to a long-term worker] and
one of the children has now disclosed
quite a horrific amount of abuse at home
and I didn’t pick up on it because I spoke
to the children at home and not in school.
… in their bedroom with the door shut and
they obviously didn’t feel comfortable to
disclose.
(Social worker)
• ‘remove the distinction between initial and
core assessments and the associated
timescales in respect of these
assessments, replacing them with the
decisions that are required to be made by
qualified social workers when developing
an understanding of children’s needs and
making and implementing a plan to
safeguard and promote their welfare’
(Munro, 2011, p.10).
• Munro recommendations require a
different state of mind:
• that goes with the flow of the child
and their readiness to communicate
and keeps going back to see them
until it feels like everything there is to
know about them & keep them safe
has been achieved. All done in full
awareness of what are the safest
places for them to talk openly
• Including the car.
Social worker: I do try with the children I work with that are a bit
older, like these boys, to take them out somewhere, because they
chat a lot in the car; they never chat much on the actual outing but
they chat going along in the car, quite a lot. … Because you are
not looking at them, not direct sort of face to face, and it’s the
motion of going somewhere maybe taking their minds off things,
just like you’re doing [giggles, because I am interviewing her while
she is driving a moving car] and they can just look out and just, its
not that confrontational type. I mean [the 14-year-old young
person] who we just met there on the home visit, she chatted all
the way to [the hospital where her mother is] in the car and of
course I can’t take any notes because I’m driving; she said some
really quite profound things that day going along in the car, more
so than she has on any visits I’ve done really. … All sorts of quite
profound stuff. I mean we were chatting about other things, about
clothes and that. She said a lot in the car.
Organisational supports
• Good practice necessitates being
reflective
• Becoming aware of & working
through feelings, attitudes that cause
detachment from children
• But Munro is right, this is not just an
individual responsibility, it requires
organisational support & leadership.
• From ‘risk averse’ to ‘risk sensible’
• Learning cultures led by senior staff
who co-work cases, teach key skills,
coach on home visits
• Managers & supervisors who
understand the challenges, conscious
and unconscious dimensions
• Who create ‘emotionally informed
thinking spaces’ (Ruch, 2007)
• Supervision that gives space to
think, be still, process feelings,
get to know your experiences
• Relating how or if you moved,
touched, got close enough to
ensure child safety and wellbeing.
• Ferguson, H. (2011), Child
Protection Practice,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.