System shift 2: Gaining the trust and consent of families to participate in early support more often
Beyond this, leaders engaged in this work pointed to wider systemic opportunities in the adults services system. They observed that eligibility criteria across adult social care, public health and NHS services can often leave ‘gaps’ for adults with needs not getting support and resolving this would be part of the solution to ensuring more adults have their needs met. A lot of parents are unwilling to accept their own trauma… they don’t realise how what they went through impacts their parenting.” Care experienced young person Case study: In one local authority, a practice was introduced of systematically reviewing the needs of every child and family starting a child protection plan, and capturing this data in a way that meant automatic referrals and co-ordination of the right multi-agency team for the family was enacted. Subsequently the composition of this team was continuously monitored as the work progressed with the family, with the same data led approach to organising that team. Additional work was undertaken to increase the capacity of specialist services through efficiency improvements, to help ensure that the support required by parents was available. This particularly included Domestic Violence, Edge of Care and Family Group Conferencing and services within the local authority’s children’s social care department. As a result of these changes, the council saw a 20% reduction in the rate of children who escalated in to care, with some neighbourhoods seeing reductions as high as 30%. Alongside this, due to there being less ‘drift’ in cases, the total child protection caseload also reduced by 20%.
When engaging with senior leaders across the sector regarding these findings, they reflected that gaps can often exist between eligibility thresholds across adult social care, public health and NHS commissioned services for many adults, including parents. This was noted as a particular concern in relation to mental health support. For example, Care Act eligibility is high; does not take into account whether an adult with needs is a parent; is consent based; and has complicating factors such as application of Mental Capacity Act best interest assessments. Summary: This evidence indicates that although the needs leading to children entering care are frequently the needs of parents, parents are accessing the specialist support they require in only half of cases. This suggests a gap between what families need and what the current system as a whole (including health services specifically) typically delivers. What could be done differently? The well-established Family Safeguarding Model demonstrates the benefits of having practitioners who specialise in meeting adult needs embedded within local authority children’s social care teams. However, the implementation of this model is variable nationally and, in principle, is reliant on adult support commissioners and providers in local systems to contribute the resource needed to operate it. Leaders engaged in this programme often acknowledged the wider pressures on the adult support system that can create difficulties in supporting this model of specialists embedded in children’s safeguarding teams. One route to enable this model, that has been adopted by some local authorities, is to develop child-level data capture of family needs and using this to draw in the right specialist support in to the team around the child so that constrained specialist resource can be allocated in a more targeted way across a service.
What does the evidence show? The most common factor that would better enable earlier preventative or reconnecting support, as identified by local practitioners when analysing 100+ cases of children coming into care, was the ability to gain the trust and consent of or engagement with parents in receiving support. Senior leaders engaged through this work spoke of the existing systems in place to carefully consider when to override consent, given the damage this can cause to relationship-based work with the family. However, they also acknowledged this complex area is one they would recognise as having opportunities for improvement across the children’s social care system. Figure 4 shows the prevalence of parental engagement and trust as the most significant issue constraining the provision of preventative support.
Parents immediately think if social workers are involved, they’re going to take the kids away… there needs to be a way to demystify
the role of social workers.” Care experienced young person
My father… was not willing
to engage with any support because in his mind nothing was wrong at home. How dare anyone
suggest he needs help?” Care experienced young person
Figure 4: What would have been the biggest enablers to providing effective support to families? What would have been the biggest enablers to providing effective support to families?
34%
E ective cross-agency working Other Successfully engaged parents
49%
28%
to specifically work with parents who have experienced domestic abuse; providing support earlier; and helping to reduce the mental load on parents.
When looking at the most common enablers that practitioners identified could have helped with gaining consent from parents, the most frequent themes related to greater awareness and trauma-informed approaches
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