13 October 2010
Safeguarding and Protecting Children Across the United Kingdom
Abstract, slides and audio of presentation
Edited transcript
The following audio presentation is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Family Studies as part of our monthly seminar series in which we showcase national and international research related to the family.
The seminars are designed to promote a forum for discussion and debate. They are open to the public and free of charge.
Seminar facilitated & speaker introduced by Elly Robinson.
Dr Sharon Vincent:
Thank you very much [Elly] and I also want to thank everybody here at AIFS for having welcomed me to Melbourne and having provided me a desk that I can use while I'm here. Actually on days like this, like [Elly] says, it's just like being in Edinburgh definitely.
So I want to talk today about safeguarding and protecting children across the UK. I just want to give you a little bit of background about what the University of Edinburgh and SPCC, Centre for UK-Wide Learning and Child Protection, actually do.
We were set up about three and half years ago in a unique collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the NSPCC. We conduct comparative analysis and critically assess developments in child protection policy across the UK, we conduct primary research to address gaps in existing child protection knowledge, we monitor and analyse the content and direction of UK child protection systems and we disseminate findings and contribute knowledge to inform the policy making process throughout the UK.
So our bread and butter, if you like, is about undertaking intra-UK comparative analysis of policy and I want to say a little bit about why we actually do that.
We were set up in the context of devolution, prior to 1999 there was some difference in social policies across the UK but there was a kind of an idea with devolution that this created new possibilities for all kinds of areas of social policy to diverge, but the area obviously that we've looked at in particular is child protection policy.
There's been little systematic examination of developments across the UK prior to 1999 and we were set up there still hadn't been any kind of look across the UK in terms of child protection. The UK tended to be seen, I think, particularly in terms of child protection, as a single unit of analysis and I would imagine most people here think of the UK protection policy they probably think of what's happening in England.
My first degree was in social policy back in the 1980s, the end of the '80s coming up to 1990, and it was all about what was happening in England but it wasn't until I moved to Scotland that I actually realised that there were parts of the UK that were doing things quite differently.
So we were kind of set up to look at the differences in child protection policy across the different parts of the UK and to see if things were diverging in the context of devolution. There were some people at the time that felt that devolution would actually bring greater policy innovation, you know, they thought maybe the devolved areas would introduce policies that could then be transferred across other areas. There was a kind of idea that they might be seen as policy laboratories and that you could have policy transfer and we could all learn lessons from one another. The idea of the children's commissioner, which was first set up in Wales and was then transferred to other parts of the UK, was an example that was given at the time.
So devolution, it basically challenged, I think, the whole idea of the notion of the UK welfare state and there's been a lot of people looking at devolution in the last few years, but there was nobody looking at the area of child protection and that's what our centre does.
I just want to say a little bit about the methodology that we use to undertake UK comparative research. As Leah Bromfield and Prue Holzer said when they were undertaking child protection policy, reviewing policy across Australia, existing methods for comparative research are completely inappropriate. It was quite refreshing to meet Leah Bromfield about two and a half years ago, when I first came to Melbourne, to find that the Australian clearing houses were grappling with some of the same issues around methodology.
It's really difficult to obtain cross-national indicators for child protection, particularly because Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are so small, if we look for example at child death rates across the UK the numbers are so small in the devolved nations that, for example, in the year Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children in a school in Scotland the numbers were just skewed out of all proportion. It's almost meaningless to look at these comparisons.
Referral data, we could look at referral data but different parts of the UK don't collect referral data in the same way so these figures just aren't comparable at all. We do compare, and we have compared, levels of registration, levels of re-registrations but there isn't that much difference in these figures and they don't actually tell you that much, we wanted to really get below the surface of these kind of statistical type analyses and to do some real analysis about how policy was actually different.
So we looked for other new types of methodologies and the study that Leah Bromfield and Prue Holzer did was really useful to me in the early days of the centre being set up we relied quite heavily on the methodology that they used. We also borrowed some of the new methodologies that were being set up by devolutionists from political science, rather than social policy, who were coming up with new ways of comparing policy.
But I suppose probably the methodology that most explains what we've done is the idea of a cross-country case study approach. We felt that we really needed to get to know the different countries of the UK, I'm very familiar with policy in Scotland because I've been working in Scotland for a number of years. Most people in Scotland are relatively familiar with policy in England, because you tend to compare policy with England, but I knew far less about Wales and Northern Ireland so myself, and my colleagues, have really tried to immerse ourselves in these systems.
We've visited there, we've spoken to people, we've really tried to find out what's going on in these countries and I think this type of approach enables the researcher to tell a country specific story to get to know that particular country but then slowly you can get to see the different themes that emerge across the whole of the UK.
So the data that we've used has been documentary data, policy documents, guidance, these kind of things. It's like visits, we've visited these areas, we've spoken to a lot of people in these areas, we've conducted face-to-face interviews. We've also had a number of seminars where we've brought together policy makers and academics to discuss some of the issues and some of the comparisons.
There are a number of challenges, I think, with this kind of data. First of all documents, as Leah Bromfield has said, are about prescribed policy they're not actually necessarily about what happens on the ground. So we've also tried to do literature reviews, looking at policy evaluations, critical analysis, articles that have been published in journals, but this has been quite difficult, there's lots of things published on England, there's very little published about policy in the rest of the UK.
So there have been a number of challenges I think, it's also very resource intensive, it takes a long time to look at all these countries and to pull everything together. We've only got four main countries to look at, it must be even more difficult in Australia with a number of states and a number of territories.
So moving on to look at some of the differences across the UK, it's not actually possible to talk about child protection policy in isolation any more. All parts of the UK have an overarching children's policy framework within which child protection, plus all policies that are connected with children, fit together. They've tried to integrate all the policy for children into one document. This has been a relatively new phenomenon, the first country to do that was England and the reason behind this, this was followed the Laming's recommendations into the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié. Wales and Northern Ireland followed suit, they set up reviews of their practice following the Laming recommendation and they also produced overarching children's policy frameworks.
Scotland, while they took notice of the Laming recommendations, what's happened in Scotland, there was an audit and review of child protection followed by a three year child protection reform program, followed by an overarching children's policy framework called, getting it right for every child, which is shortened to GIRFEC, great acronym.
This was actually brought about by the death of a child in Scotland rather than the death of a child in England and it's quite unusual that I think the deaths of children in England, such as Victoria Climbié and baby Peter Connelly have been broadcast a lot in the media and I think you've probably heard of these cases in Australia. Whereas you're probably less likely to have heard of the cases that happen in Scotland and other parts of the UK. Kennedy McFarlane, Brandon Muir are the kind of cases that we've had in Scotland and they don't get the same kind of publicity I don't think outside of the particular area.
These policy frameworks are underpinned by national outcomes and all policy now has to be shown to - has to demonstrate that it can improve these national outcomes. The outcomes in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland are relatively similar. Safety is one outcome, amongst many, including health, education.
The outcomes in Wales are somewhat different. Wales, in comparison with the rest of the UK, they're policy has very much had a children's rights slant to it and this comes through in their national outcomes which are underpinned by the United National Convention on the rights of the child. But all policy across the UK and all of the countries is aimed at improving these outcomes.
Child protection policy is backed up by legislation, and we've had a lot of reform of child protection policy across the UK in the last decade, but the key legislation across all parts of the UK actually remains the Children Acts that were introduced in 1989 in England and Wales and 1995 in Northern Ireland and in Scotland. There was a Children's Act introduced in 2004 in England and Wales which made some amendments to the existing Children Act, but most of the key provision is still within the '89 Act.
The 2004 Act was mainly about structures, introducing new structures, in terms of children's services and it was about strengthening lines of accountability. Wales, until 2007, their legislation and pretty much most of the policy was identical, pretty much identical, to England. Since 2007 they've actually had new powers however to make their own legislation. They have to apply for something called a competence measure from Westminster.
So they've now begun to introduce primary legislation, they've got a new vulnerable children's measure and they're at the moment looking at consolidating all of their legislation around children into a new children's measure.
Northern Ireland recently a new Safeguarding Bill is currently going through the Northern Ireland Assembly and they're going to be making similar sorts of changes to those that were made under the Children Act 2004 in England and Wales.
Scotland has - the SMP government, which came into power a few years ago, has a whole kind of new relationship with local government and policy is actually made in quite a different way now in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK. The Scottish Government make policy very much in partnership with local government and they've very much had the line that they won't introduce new legislation unless it's absolutely necessary, they much prefer non statutory guidance to local authorities than they do legislation.
I think that's quite a different way in Scotland of working with local government compared to the rest of the UK. They are, however, introducing a new Children's Hearings Bill which is currently going through the Scottish Parliament. This won't make too much change to the Children's Hearings System in Scotland, the whole philosophy will remain intact, it's more about bringing up to date really the Children's Hearings System. For those of you that don't know was introduced back in 1971 and some of the grounds and things are becoming quite outdated now.
The Children's Hearings System was about all children can be referred to the Children's Hearings System if somebody thinks they're in need of compulsory intervention. It doesn't separate those children who have committed an offence from those children who are in need of care and protection so any child can be referred to the Children's Hearings System.
I want to say a little bit about thresholds. The thresholds for intervention have remained exactly the same, they're still those that were in the original Children's Acts. So across all parts of the UK if statutory services have reasonable cause to suspect a child is suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm they have a duty to make child protection inquiries.
Significant harm has never been very well defined, either in legislation or in the guidance, which has been updated a number of times. I was really interested actually, when I visited New South Wales last week, to discover that they have actually just changed their threshold from one of risk of harm to one of risk of significant harm. I was really interested to see, that not only do they have definition of what significant harm is, they also have a working tool for mandatory reporters so that anybody who has a concern about a child can actually use this tool to decide whether or not the child is at risk of significant harm. I have no idea how well this works but it's quite surprising to see that they have a very fixed definition of what significant harm is.
If a child isn't at risk of significant harm, there may still be a duty to provide services if he or she is a child in need. This threshold has also been around since the original Children Acts. So even back in 1989 you couldn't entirely separate child protection, there was always a duty on local authorities to provide services for children in need as well.
The threshold for referral to the Children's Hearing System is different to that for other services. The threshold is if the child is in need of compulsory intervention and there are a number of grounds that are set out in legislation and these include things like living in the same household as a schedule one offender, non attendance at school, being out without parental control, there's a whole range of grounds that are set out in the Children's Hearings Legislation.
As I said, interagency guidance for professionals underpins legislation, so all parts of the UK have a publication which is for anybody working in child protection and they're expected to be familiar with this guidance.
The reason I've put page numbers on this slide is because Working Together to Safeguard Children has been updated a number of times in England, it was most recently updated this year following the Laming Inquiry following another inquiry into the death of Peter Connelly. It is now 390 pages long, which is a really lengthy documents for professionals to have to get to grips with. There's also 10 volumes of supplementary guidance that the reader is actually referred to, which is another, I think it's like, 424 pages in total. So people working in child protection are expected to be familiar with all this guidance.
I think, particularly in England, there's been a huge increase in the amount of guidance that has been produced. There was a lot of criticism of Working Together and the length that it now is. When the document was first introduced in, I think, 1974 it was seven pages long and this really kind of - Nigel Parton has pointed out - that this really is indicative of the approach that the English Government has taken about producing more and more guidance for professionals and is this in the interests of children really?
The other parts of the UK have their own guidance, the Welsh guidance is also fairly long, the guidance in Northern Ireland and Scotland is far shorter and I think, particularly in Scotland, there's certainly been the intention of the Scottish Government is not to overwhelm professionals, they've deliberately made this decision not to keep producing more and more guidance and to overburden people. There's new national draft guidance, that's out in Scotland for consultation at the moment, that's likely to be introduced next month.
I just want to say a little bit about how individual cases are actually managed in the UK. Although there's been a lot of reform in recent years, the actual way that individual cases are managed has actually not changed that much. The experience, if you like, for a child and for a family is likely to be almost the same as it was even before the Children Act quite possibly.
These outline the various stages that an individual case goes through and they go through all these stages in all parts of the UK. So the first thing that will happen is somebody, a professional, a neighbour, a family member, will raise a concern about a child. If they have a concern they will then possibly make a decision to refer to statutory services. So they'll refer to Children's Social Care in England, Social Service in Northern Ireland and in Wales, Social Work Services in Scotland, the police are an agency that you can refer to across the UK, the NSPCC you can refer to in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and a children's reporter in Scotland.
We don't have mandatory reporting at all in the UK, but the guidance specifically states that a number of different professionals do have a duty to refer. So although we don't have mandatory reporting, in a sense we do, it's not so much different from here I would say.
If, once a child's referred to one of these agencies, there'll then be some kind of period of investigation and assessment and this occurs across the UK. There are also emergency protection measures if an agency decides that the child is in immediate danger and these are measures that can be used either to remove the child or, in certain circumstances, to actually remove the perpetrator from the household.
If following investigation and assessment agencies decide that the child is at risk of significant harm - it's very much, as I said, a matter of professional judgement because we don't actually have a working definition of significant harm - then they'll call an inter-agency case conference and anybody who works with the child will be represented at this case conference. The people there will look at whether the child's at risk of significant harm and if they are then they'll decide to formulate a child protection plan for them. All the agencies that are involved in the children will be part of this plan and sign up to this plan and will have some kind of role in protecting that child and promoting their welfare.
The child may then be registered on something called a Child Protection Register, that's the case in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, England and Wales recently got rid of their actual Child Protection Register but the child is still registered in the sense that they're recorded as having a child protection plan so you can still compare numbers of registrations across the UK.
Once a child's registered and has a child protection plan there may be further assessment that goes on so that professionals can see how to meet their needs. The case is then reviewed at various stages, the first review is in six months and at some point the child will be deregistered. They may still of course receive services as a child in need even though they're deregistered.
So basically these stages that I've outlined can be seen across all parts of the UK, they're fairly similar.
I want to say a little bit about language and about definitions. There's been a change in the language that's used within guidance and within legislation, there's been a change in language from that of child protection which people see as a very narrow focus on particular cases of high risk. So something called safeguarding, this has been in England, Wales and Northern Ireland use the term safeguarding, and safeguarding has been about widening the net so that you don't just look at children who are at high risk it's about protecting all children, about making sure all children are safe.
Scotland hasn't tended to use this language of safeguarding but I think, having talked to people in Scotland, that there's been the same change although they don't use the language of safeguarding there has been a change from looking at those cases where children are at particularly high risk to looking at the safety of all children.
There's also been a change in policy in that I think it's become much more child focused, it talks far more now about need, meeting all of children's need rather than risk, there's a huge focus on need within policy now. As I said at the beginning, this doesn't necessarily translate through to what's actually happening on the ground because policy, this is prescribed policy, but certainly policy by looking at policy has become more child focused and it's really about promoting all of children's needs.
Despite this kind of change and focus the interagency guidance still refers to the original categories of abuse and neglect, so it still refers to physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and emotional abuse. If a child has a child protection plan agencies have to make a decision about which category of abuse the child actually is at risk of harm from.
In Scotland actually the new interagency guidance has proposed that these categories will be removed, that professionals, rather than identifying whether the child's at risk from one of these particular types of abuse, will actually look across their whole range of risks and needs. They'll be able to identify that they've got education needs, that they have health needs. This kind of approach is much more in line with the getting it right for every child approach of starting from the individual child and looking holistically at their needs.
Although the guidance still refers to these original categories of abuse and neglect, it also talks about a whole new range of risks and every time the guidance has been updated the list of different risks that have been identified gets bigger. The guidance now talks about - these are just some of the examples - fabricated illness, risks posed by ICT, forced marriage and honour based violence, the list is endless, it's almost as if - and I think this is particularly the case in England - that policy makers have tried to find every possible risk to children and have produced guidance to try and tell people how to deal with these risks.
This slide explains some of the key structures for protecting children in different parts of the UK. England have really - their policy has been about integration as in the rest of the UK, but what they've done is they've kind of forced local authorities to actually restructure their departments and to actually physically integrate education and children's social care.
So local authorities in England now have to have integrated departments, they also have to appoint a director of Children's Services. The aspiration was that they would bring together all areas of children's policy into children's trusts and that includes health policy. Some of them have done that but not all so far.
They've also replaced non statutory area child protection committees, this statutory local safeguarding children's boards, so in England it's been about forcing local authorities to restructure, kind of forcing integration if you like, and doing things through statute.
Wales has also replaced their area child protection committees with statutory safeguarding children's boards, but they haven't gone for the same kind of physical integration of services at a local level. The Welsh Assembly Government were very clear that they didn't want to tell local authorities how to organise their children's services, they did however stress that they had to appoint a director of social services who had ultimate responsibility.
Northern Ireland are quite different, they've always had integrated health and social service boards and trusts, they don't organise children's services at local authority level. They are replacing their area child protection committees with statutory safeguarding boards under the new legislation that I talked about earlier.
Scotland, as in Wales, have not told local authorities how to organise the structure of how they deliver services, so you have some integrated education social work departments, most of them have not been integrated, they still have directors of social work. Scotland still has non statutory child protection committees and the Scottish Government has no intention of making these statutory. However, although they haven't gone down the same statutory route and they haven't made local authorities integrate, I still think they've kind of achieved the same level of integration and the same kind of improved accountability without actually enforcing this on local authorities.
A big part of the move towards integration has been around integrated assessment and all parts of the UK now have their own integrated assessment frameworks. England and Wales have something called the framework for the assessment of children's needs and their families, this was introduced back in, gosh I think it was back in 2000, and this is for children who are referred to children's social care. So it will be child protection cases it will also be for children in need, it's not just for those in need of protection.
They've also introduced, in England much more recently, something called the common assessment framework and this is very much about assessing problems at a very early stage and it's been used very much within education, by health visitors who identify problems very early on, it's not about problems that emerge at a much later stage. The common assessment framework is actually used as the referral form that's sent to children's social services.
The idea behind these integrated assessment frameworks is that the child and family should only undergo one assessment, everybody that's involved with the child will be involved in undertaking this assessment. They will each produce their own bit of it and then it will come together as an integrated assessment and it's very much been backed up by evidence from research and it's really supposed to be focused around the child and it's about meeting their needs.
Unfortunately, however, in England and Wales there's a performance indicator around having to do an assessment within a certain amount of time and if you talk to people within agencies now it's become very much about undertaking the assessment within the timeframe, it's about meeting the performance indicator rather than about meeting the needs of the child. I think that's quite unfortunate because the intention behind these integrated assessment frameworks was actually really good.
I think Northern Ireland and Scotland they don't have performance indicators related to their assessment frameworks so I think they've actually been much more successful about looking at the child holistically and thinking about how each agency can meet their needs.
Unfortunately however in Scotland, originally the idea was that there would be one GIRFEC practice model and the assessment framework within that is something called the my world triangle, there's also a resilience matrix, so all the professionals involved with the child come together and use these tools to think about what the children's needs are.
But practitioners, for some time, have been asking for a separate risk assessment model, they're quite worried that this new assessment model won't actually pick up on risk and so the Scottish Government are now actually now developing a new risk assessment model. I think this is a shame because it kind of dilutes the whole idea of integrated assessment of risk and need having a separate add-on risk assessment.
Just because this is my main area I'll just say something very briefly about child death review processes across the UK. All parts of the UK have processes for reviewing deaths where children have died and abuse or neglect is suspected to have a played a part. But also of serious cases where a child may not have died but there may kind of issues for the involvement of agencies.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland all have, or are making, these processes statutory. Scotland, again, has made a deliberate decision that it will not make its processes statutory, it believes that local authorities are already undertaking these reviews and that there's no need for compulsion.
Also in England and Wales, England recently, under the 2004 Act stated that local authorities should have child death overview panels and these are also statutory and they don't just look at specific cases from abuse or neglect, they look at all child deaths and they actually have to report to central government around these deaths that there's a data set.
They also have to decide which of these deaths actually could have been prevented and this has caused quite a lot of discussion because, again, the definitions are quite loose and different LSCB's have different definitions about what could be seen as preventable.
Wales decided not to go down the same route as England, they felt we were too small to have local responsibility for looking across deaths. So they've actually been piloting an all Wales child death review process. This is very much in the early days and I'm going to look at this in more depth when I return to the UK, but it seems to be that it's much more along the New Zealand model of looking across all the deaths at a national level and having a national database.
So I want to pull out some of the key themes from having looked across all of the processes across the UK. I think what we've seen in the whole of the UK, there's been a lot of reform but I think what it's been is more a refocusing of children's policy rather than a radical overhaul. Most of the actual processes, particularly around child protection, haven't changed that much. As I said before, the experience for children and families, who actually go through the children's child protection process, is unlikely to have changed very much.
The change that has been introduced has been around making - improving accountability, about integrating services together and it's been around prevention and early intervention, there's been a lot of emphasis on prevention and early intervention to try and prevent problems escalating down the line. What there has been, I think, is a change in policy direction, as I said earlier, policy in the past was about protecting a very small number of children from abuse and neglect and that has changed so that the direction of policy now is about safeguarding and it's about promoting the welfare of all children.
This will only work, however, if services are available and are effective and the UK is currently going through a period of huge retrenchment in public services and I wonder whether this approach can actually continue. It's telling that Eileen Munro, at the moment, is doing a review of child protection, not of safeguarding. I hope actually, although Eileen Munro has been very critical of a lot of the guidance, the performance indicators, some of this policy, I think, has actually been really good and I hope we can maintain the good bits and get rid of the bad bits.
So the UK, different parts of the UK, do do things somewhat differently, but I think basically their approach to child protection policy is broadly similar. All parts of the UK have retained the core elements of a forensically driven child protection system, although we've moved towards prevention and early intervention we haven't actually changed the role of the police, the role of the court, that has remained intact and we still have that child protection system where children are referred to the system and they go through a forensic type system.
So we've spent three and a half years looking at the differences across the UK and we've found that different parts do things fairly similarly, I think what we need to think about now is, so what? Had we found that policy had diverged considerably, would this be a good thing or not? Does it matter if different parts of the UK do things differently? I'd be really keen to hear from people here, whether this matters in Australia, is it accepted as a good thing if states do things differently or is there a role for the centre in setting national standards?
We need to look, I think, far more at whether devolution's led to different outcomes across the UK, although as I said earlier it's very difficult to measure outcomes for data isn't available. I do think however we could do a lot more longitudinal research to measure outcomes.
We certainly do need to know, I think, whether children and families are getting the same level and quality of service across the country. A child ought to be able to go through the system and be able to get services wherever they live in the UK.
But to me, I think, a lot of the change that's occurred has been in response to things that have gone wrong, whereas actually a lot actually goes right. In most cases children are protected and I think we need to do much more about identifying and sharing good practice. It was really refreshing, a few weeks ago I attended the child protection breakfast at which Robyn Miller spoke and she'd actually showed a publication that had been produced here that was good practice examples across the state of Victoria and I think we need to do more of that kind of work. It's great for practitioners involved in services, it's also really needed, we need to know what works and we need to be able to share that information.
Thank you.
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