Child criminal exploitation (CCE) and child sexual exploitation (CSE) are growing concerns nationally and have been described as a “hidden crisis” (Barnardo’s, 2023).

They include involvement in county lines drug dealing, gang violence, forced criminal activity, grooming and child sex trafficking.

Victims of exploitation have been neglected by different agencies for various reasons, but often due to the lack of sharing of knowledge and data.

With the addition of media interest in CSE country-wide, not only are victims forced to re-visit their trauma, but practitioners are also put under further pressure to ensure risk outside the home is minimised for the children in their area.

Most parts of England and Wales are affected by child exploitation and Northamptonshire is no exception.

The need for a change in the approach to exploitation in the county was identified by the Northamptonshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership.

In 2024, Northamptonshire Children’s Trust (NCT), together with Northamptonshire Police, developed a collaborative initiative to safeguard children and young people from exploitation – a new multi-agency hub.

The hub, based in the Criminal Justice Centre in Northampton, focuses on child exploitation across North and West Northamptonshire.

This initiative ensures a multi-agency approach is taken, as the police, health and other services across the safeguarding partnership are often involved in interventions to support children and young people at risk.

Laura Isherwood, team manager of the multi-agency exploitation hub

Laura Isherwood, who has many years of experience working in child exploitation, heads up a social work team that currently consists of six advanced practitioners.

The team shares the space at the hub with police officers and support workers from police teams involved in diverting young people at risk away from criminality and investigating missing episodes, with these staff having all had training in child exploitation and trauma-informed practice.

Different approaches

Laura and her team have a slightly different approach to traditional social work.

“A real focus of our work is developing resilience, supporting young people to develop strategies, critical thinking skills and harm minimisation,” says Laura.

“This is so we can support positive risk-taking at a stage in their life where independence is increasing and they’re spending less time with their families and more outside of the home.”

The practitioners in the exploitation team take a mindful approach, striving to make sure children are not criminalised. “We see the exploitation and vulnerability as opposed to just seeing children committing crimes in the community,” says Laura.

Working alongside police teams enables the social workers to collaborate and step in when needed.

Morgan, an advanced practitioner at the hub

Morgan and Rhian, both advanced practitioners, have been at the hub since its inception. They usually support other practitioners from NCT who have identified children at medium or high risk of child exploitation.

“The purpose of [the hub] is to be multi-agency and work alongside everyone to best support and safeguard the children and look at what’s happening in the community rather than just focusing on the child and trying to keep that child safe,” says Rhian.

“We can try and keep the child safe, but then other children can be impacted by the exploiters, and it’s just not going to end that harm really.”

Morgan’s previous training in systemic practice helps her to build trust with the children and families she works with. Often, parents can be overwhelmed and confused, so the team support them even if the child is out of a high-risk situation.

“Another positive of the hub is that we can be quite dynamic with how we offer support,” says Morgan. “Maybe it’s to the young person, but also it could be to parents, maybe it’s to grandparents, aunties, uncles or family friends who are an area of stability and a positive influence on them.”

Assessing risk

A multi-agency daily exploitation (MADE) meeting is held, and the advanced practitioner on duty that day will attend. Representatives from all the different teams participate and highlight any new incidents or concerns, as well as giving updates on existing children supported by the hub.

One of the main advantages of physically co-working in this way is that the exploitation team is alerted to children at risk before they are officially referred to them. This helps them to organise the appropriate type of intervention much faster.

The child exploitation and risk assessment framework (CERAF) was adopted by NCT and its partners before the hub went live.

The CERAF form is completed when there is an exploitation concern and ensures there is consistency across the different agencies. When the score is ‘medium’ or ‘high’, the child exploitation team at the hub will receive the referral.

Sometimes, practitioners in other social work teams might not always recognise when a child is being criminally or sexually exploited. The team can advise their multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) colleagues, who are also based at the hub, on recognising potential risks.

The child exploitation team also created a safety plan template to help practitioners. This was praised by children’s charity Barnardo’s, which requested that it be shared with local authorities.

The creation of the hub

Debbie Lloyd, the assistant director of children and family support services and youth justice service at NCT, says agencies have taken their time in creating the hub to ensure best practice and that all relevant partners are involved.

The social work resource in the hub was commissioned by both North and West Northamptonshire councils as NCT serves both, highlighting support and buy-in from all.

This is not a child exploitation single service. This is a collection of officers, within the trust and outside of the trust, and practitioners that come together to support this initiative. It’s all built on trust and working relationships”, says Debbie.

Positive impact

Although the hub is in its infancy, the child exploitation team has had many successes already.

One example is Chloe* who was already in care and was referred to the team after having repeated missing episodes. While the team were working with Chloe, who was a victim of exploitation, she expressed an interest in a career in security.

The exploitation team facilitated work experience and CCTV training for her. This ‘disruption and diversion’ technique gave Chloe aspiration to look to the future more positively, and through this support she has had a reduction in missing episodes.

Another example of the positive impact the hub has had is Miles*.

Miles was also having missing episodes, including kidnapping, and had an allocated social worker from the safeguarding team. He was referred to the exploitation team, and when his advanced practitioner met him, he was very open about being exploited to sell drugs.

After conversations about safety, risk and consequences, it was clear that Miles wanted to break free and move away. Police teams were also involved in investigating the perpetrators.

The team helped to move Miles out of his home town, which kept him physically away from the exploiters, in line with what he wanted. A safety plan was put in place and currently his social worker visits him weekly to support him. Miles is settled and focused on joining the army, and will return to his family when he is ready, and it is safe to do so.

Colin Foster, chief executive of NCT, says: “The hub is a really positive step forward in improving how agencies across Northamptonshire work together to safeguard and support children and young people who might be coerced or exploited.

“We are already seeing the huge benefits of having partners co-located together, making it more effective to create a team of support around that child or young person, and the impact that this is having. I feel privileged to work with such an incredible group of professionals who are driving this forward.”

*name changed for anonymity

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Neglect is the most common reason for a child to be on a child protection plan or register in the UK, accounting for half such cases in 2020 (NSPCC, 2021).

It was also found to be present in three-quarters of concerning the death or serious harm of children in England from 2017-19).

But despite its continued prevalence, responding to neglect in a timely way that provides children with the support they need remains a complex and challenging task for practitioners (Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, 2021).

Neglect remains challenging to identify and conceptualise. Whilst in its broadest sense, it can be understood as a child’s needs not being sufficiently met, there are narrower definitions in legal, policy and organisational contexts.

Neglect also varies across time, space and cultural contexts, making it more challenging to classify compared to other types of maltreatment, such as physical or sexual abuse.

In addition, it is much more challenging to evidence the absence or omission of something in a child’s care, rather than identifying an act of commission, such as physical chastisement.

Understanding neglect

Our understanding of neglect is also often rooted in our individual experiences and perceptions, such as our:

• experiences of being parented;
• experiences of being a parent;
• professional training;
• personal and professional experiences;
• awareness and recognition of inequalities and poverty; and
• cultural biases.

These points are critical for unlocking access to sparse resources, in that our understanding underpins our ability to articulate concerns effectively and clearly evidence levels of harm (or risk of harm) in line with local authority thresholds for intervention.

Our perceptions of neglect can make it difficult to classify concerns, and often create obstacles for practitioners identifying neglect at the earliest point possible.

This means it is more difficult to get the right support to families and address issues before they escalate and become critical, as emphasised in the final report of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. (MacAlister, 2022).

Whilst it can be beneficial – and perhaps reassuring – to be guided by specific assessment tools, the use of scales and tools for assessing neglect has its limitations, as these are often based upon the practitioner’s own beliefs, biases and judgments.

The value of reflective discussion

There are, however, some approaches that can help us examine and unpick our understandings of child neglect, such as reflective discussion. Engaging in reflection is central to achieving shared conceptions, and can be applied within peer, team or organisational supervision.

These spaces and places can assist professionals to articulate and evidence their thoughts, observations or intuitions, and reveal the potential for personal biases and experiences to occur.

These spaces provide opportunities for individuals to challenge themselves by asking: ‘Where does my knowledge come from? What prejudices may I hold? What do I know about individuals with this particular cultural background? What personal or organisational norms do I take with me?’

Inter-professional practice has long been acknowledged as a sizable and persistent challenge across all social work settings.

Agencies’ roles, funding streams, language and understandings of what collaborative working entails unite to create a perfect environment for misunderstandings and miscommunications to arise.

When we are required to work together across organisational boundaries, processing concerns or worries about children who are being neglected in a clear and systematic way is crucial.

Good recording practice

Keeping clear and accurate multi-agency chronologies is one simple, yet effective, way for practitioners to compile an overview of a child’s circumstances and experiences over an extended period of time.

They can be used as a tool to record events and concerns and build a bigger picture to monitor or identify patterns in a child’s care or lack of care. Key points for good recording practice include:

• the child’s voice;
• telephone and face to face contacts;
• observations;
• parental attitudes;
• failures of parents to take the child to appointments;
• evidence of non-compliance and/or resistance to intervention;
• being concise and factual.

However, the challenges of responding to child neglect within a multi-agency context are likely to be accentuated by the proposed revisions to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

Concerns over lead practitioner role

The 2023 Department for Education (DfE) consultation proposes that the ‘lead practitioner’ with responsibility for management of child in need (section 17) cases may be drawn from a wide range of professional backgrounds, such as family support workers, drug and alcohol practitioners, domestic abuse workers and youth workers.

This is a significant shift from existing practice where designated social workers manage section 17 interventions under the Children Act 1989.

This raises concerns about the quality of assessments for children living with neglect. It would mean non-social work qualified workers holding the responsibility for effective identification and conceptualisation of neglect at the earliest point possible. They would also be doing so with the added challenge of working and communicating across differing professional understandings and backgrounds.

There would be further challenges if lead practitioners were based outside the local authority.

Whilst the consultation specifies that a social work qualified practice supervisor or manager must have oversight of key decisions made, it is not clear whether or not lead practitioners’ will be employed by the local authority.

The proposed change to Working Together is part of the DfE’s ambition to create family help services – merging current targeted early help and child in need provision – to improve the quality and timeliness of family support.

As set out in the DfE’s draft strategy on reforming children’s social care, Stable Homes Built on Love, published earlier this year, family help teams, though led by councils, would “incorporate support from universal, community and specialist services”.

Risks of moving case responsibility outside of councils

If lead practitioners were based in such services within the community, this would introduce a supplementary interface between the practitioner’s and children’s social care.

Our understandings of neglect are often connected to our disciplinary training and personal experiences. Having lead practitioners outside of children’s social care manage section 17 cases – where the sharing of information is limited to parameters of consent – serves only to increase the opportunity for misconceptions to occur across different fields of responsibility and organisational boundaries.

Social workers have access to the wider contextual knowledge held by children’s social care in relation to any previous statutory support families have received or historic or current concerns shared through multi-agency safeguarding hubs (MASH). They are also conversant with the application of their agency’s statutory thresholds for intervention in neglect.

It is not clear how social work managers would provide supervision for support, approval of assessments and any review of section 17 cases managed by lead practitioners outside of the local authority.

Guidance on neglect

Whatever the outcomes of the consultations on Working Together and Stable Homes, Built on Love, practitioners will continue to face significant challenges in relation to neglect.

To help, we have written Working with children who have experienced neglect, a new good practice guide, published by CoramBAAF.

The book provides detailed guidance and helpful strategies on identifying and responding to neglect in a range of relevant practice contexts, and gives particular focus to working effectively with other agencies.

It draws upon empirical research conducted by Sharley (2020) to set out a range of strategies to promote critical thinking and improve inter-professional communication, and thereby enhance relationships between practitioners and across services when working with neglect.

Victoria Sharley is senior lecturer in social work with children and families at the University of Bristol, and Alyson Rees is professor of social work at Cardiff University

A major aspect of social work, whatever field you are in, is working with professionals from different disciplines. Meetings and relationships with other agencies – teachers, health staff, drug and alcohol services, mental health services, housing, probation and so on – are about working together in the best interests of the child and their family. However, and perhaps inevitably, different professional backgrounds (and the training, culture, values and priorities that go along with those) can lead to friction.