Continuous learning is critical to high-quality social work practice, but the demands of the job can mean time to carry out skills and knowledge development is squeezed out.

Community Care Inform has just launched the latest wave of its Learning Landscapes research, to shine a light on social workers and other social care practitioners’ experiences of learning.

We want to find out how much time you have for learning, how sufficient this is and what the barriers are to you receiving the development time you need.

We also want to understand how well supported you are to learn by your employer, what your learning preferences are and how far these are met in your workplace.

Our last survey, carried out in 2024, found that most social workers had less time for learning than they did 12 months previously, including because of high caseloads and vacancy levels, affecting their career development, confident and resilience.

We shared these results with sector leaders and employers to help them understand the realities of learning and development for their practitioners, in order to support positive change.

Community Care Inform is calling on practitioners to take part in this year’s research so that we can showcase – to employers and more widely – how things have changed since 2024 and promote improvements in learning and practice.

By taking part, you can also be entered into a draw to receive a £50 gift voucher from One4All.

Take part in the research now.

“Substantial work” is needed to improve the recording and reporting of data on family group conferences (FGCs,) ahead of an expected increase in their use on the back of government legislation.

That was among the conclusions of a study commissioned by Department for Education-funded evidence body Foundations into council approaches to collecting and analysing data on FGCs.

It comes with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill set to introduce a duty for councils to offer families a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting – an umbrella term for FGC-style provision – when they are considering issuing care proceedings.

On the back of the research, published this week, Foundations has commissioned charities Coram and the Family Rights Group (FRG) to collect data from councils, on a voluntary basis, on access to, and take up of, FGCs, as part of wider research.

Impact of FGCs on preventing children going into care

In a children’s services context, FGCs are family-led meetings, organised by a practitioner (the FGC co-ordinator), giving extended families the opportunity to make plans for children where there are concerns about their safety and wellbeing. They are generally in-house council services, though some authorities outsource the function.

Previous Foundations-commissioned research, published in 2023, found children whose families were referred to an FGC at the pre-proceedings stage were significantly less likely to be in care 12 months later than those whose families were not so referred.

The finding is one of the key factors behind the government’s planned duty, which is likely to lead to a significant increase in the use of FGCs.

‘Very little information’ on how councils record FGC data

The 2023 study found that, though the vast majority of English councils offered FGCs at the pre-proceedings stage, there was “very little information on what or how local authorities recorded or reported on [them]” and no routinely collected data on the extent to which they were offered and taken up.

As a result, it was not possible to know who was receiving the service and what their outcomes were.

The latest study, produced by Coram, the FRG, FGC provider Daybreak and sector data organisation Data 2 Insight, was designed to understand what data councils collected on FGCs, particularly  at pre-proceedings, the enablers and barriers to them collecting and reporting on data and how a national data collection may be developed.

It involved in-depth site visits to three councils, interviews with staff from 10 other authorities, two parent-carer discussions and analysis of previous work on FGC data collection.

‘Substantial work’ needed on improving data

The study concluded that “substantial work” was needed to improve both the recording and reporting of FGC data by councils.

Councils recorded a range of data, including on referrals, the planning of FGCs, conference meetings, including attendance, FGC plans and reviews and feedback from families and professionals at closure, including views on outcomes.

In some areas, almost all FGC information was recorded on the children’s social care case management system (CMS), often in a specific microsite, while in others, only limited information was stored on CMS, meaning they used spreadsheets “extensively”.

There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach, the study said. While services that predominantly used spreadsheets were able to create and adapt these easily to capture all the information they required, “data entry was manual and therefore required significant capacity”, the report said.

But while services that relied more on CMS required less manual data entry, it was difficult for them to customise FGC data collection, meaning they did not record all of the information they wanted. Also, CMS were much more difficult to adapt and change than spreadsheets, with FGC services sometimes waiting years for changes.

Variation in data quality

There was “substantial variation in the quality of FGC data and in data quality assurance processes”, the report said.

Some services were “quite limited” in what they did to quality assure their data, while others did regular audits of FGC data on their CMS to check for errors or inconsistencies.

Challenges for councils included recording FGC data for each child within a family where they each had separate records on the CMS, and situations when the child was not known to children’s social care and so was not on the CMS. The latter situation tended to result in data being saved outside the case management system.

Data reporting was largely focused on workflow and outputs, such as the number and origins of referrals, the proportion of referrals that resulted in an FGC, the number of FGC meetings and plans completed and details of who attended.

Limited analysis of equity of provision

While services often looked at why families did not take up an FGC, most did not carry out detailed analysis of the factors influencing refusal, such as the characteristics of the family and the point at which a conference were offered.

No council studied looked at equity of access or provision of an FGC, for example, based on the legal status of the child or family demographics compared to the wider population, mainly because of the lack of population-wide data.

“As a result, services were limited in their ability to look at access, especially in terms of equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the research report said.

There was also “limited data” reported on the content of FGC plans, other than to report that the plan had been agreed, sent to families and uploaded onto the CMS.

Lack of reporting on outcomes

While some services reported on satisfaction children’s families’ and professionals’ satisfaction with FGCs, this was stymied by low response rates to feedback, while there was a lack of reporting  on outcomes or impact because of difficulties measuring these.

And though some services looked at measures such as the legal status or living arrangements of the child six or 12 months after an FGC, most acknowledged that it was difficult to attribute these outcomes to an FGC given the many other factors that could have contributed.

FGC service representatives interviewed generally wanted a national data collection to provide benchmarking information, including to measure the impact they were having on social care outcomes for children and any potential cost savings.

However, they raised concerns about how this would work, including because of the differences in FGC services between areas and the difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Creating a national data collection

The study recommended a phased approach to creating a national data collection, which should be co-designed with the sector, account for variations between services and minimise burdens on local authorities.

It said this should start with a voluntary survey of councils to collect aggregated data, without details about individual children or families, which could pave the way for a national data collection of child-level information.

This is being taken forward by Foundations, as part of research it has commissioned from Coram and FRG on how FGCs are offered to families in England and the factors influencing their decision to accept or reject the offer.

National survey of local authorities

Coram and FRG are carrying out a voluntary survey of councils, which covers:

• What an FGC looks like in their area, the process is for making referrals, the number of children that were subject to an FGC referral in 2023-24 and information about them.
• The process around how FGCs are offered to parent/carers, the number of FGCs consented to in 2023-24, the number children in these cases and information about these children.
• The number of FGCs that took place in 2023-24, the number of children involved and information about the children, along with the the number of FGCs that did not take place in 2023-24 and reasons for this.

Data is being collected via an excel template, which can be obtained by emailing Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

The deadline for the data collection is Friday 4 April 2025 and returns should be emailed to Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

Data collection ‘critical’ for ensuring success of policy

Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne said the collection would “build a clearer picture of what is happening with FGCs across the country and support local authorities to ensure that they are not only accessible but also make a real difference for families and children”.

FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley stressed that the new research was “critical for ensuring the new national family group decision making offer and future policy changes will have real, lasting impact”.

By Professor Andy Bilson and Dr Matthew Jay

Our study using national data estimated that a quarter of all children in England became a child in need before their 18th birthday.

This means that these children, according to section 17 of the Children Act 1989, required services from children’s social care because they were disabled or would not otherwise reach a basic level of wellbeing.

The findings highlight the significant reach of social care interventions and raise questions about the systemic issues contributing to such widespread need.

The Department for Education’s (DfE) annual children in need census indicated that 3.4% of all children aged 0-17 were classified as “in need” on 31 March 2023. But this is an annual snapshot.

Estimating childhood rates of involvement

Our team took a different approach, using an anonymised version of the dataset to track children’s social care involvement over time.

As the DfE’s data doesn’t cover an 18-year period, we estimated cumulative incidences using three different birth cohorts, employing statistical models to ensure double counting of individuals was ruled out. In this way we produced a more comprehensive view of how many children interact with social care services throughout their lives, rather than just a yearly snapshot.

We estimated that 25.3% of all children would be identified as “in need” at least once before adulthood. Our findings are supported by earlier research by Professor Bilson, in which local authorities said that 14% of children in their areas had been a child in need before their fifth birthday in 2017.

Additionally, our study estimated that, before turning 18:

• 35.4% of children have been referred to social care services;
• 32.3% have undergone a social work assessment;
• 6.9% have become subject to a child protection plan.

Prevalence of abuse or neglect concerns

As a statistical study, we were not able to look at the quality or nature of the child in need services offered to children. Support may range from parenting assistance and home adaptations, under a child in need plan, to child protection plans or being taken into care, depending on the child’s circumstances.

However, a recent freedom of information request made to the DfE by Professor Bilson showed that, for 78% of all children placed on a child in need plan between 2015 and 2023, the initial need was either because of abuse or neglect or family dysfunction. The latter category refers to families where social workers consider that chronically inadequate parenting is impairing the child’s health and development “but for whom there is not yet hard enough evidence to invoke child protection measures.” (DfE Children in Need Census Guide).

Given our finding about the proportion of children who become involved with children’s social care, this suggests that nearly one in five children may be classified as in need, during their childhoods, because of concerns about abuse or neglect or inadequate parenting.

Higher rates of intervention in deprived areas

The Child Welfare Inequalities Project found that in England, the rate of children on a child protection plan (CPP) in the most deprived 10% of the country was 2.4 times the national average.

As noted above, we found that 6.9% of children were made subject to a children protection plan during their childhoods. If the deprivation ratio from the Child Welfare Inequalities Project holds for childhood involvement, this means that one in every six children in the most deprived 10% of areas would have been on a child protection plan before their eighteenth birthday.

Also, if we were to assume that the same ratio holds in relation to children being classed as in need, this would mean more than three out of five children in the most deprived 10% of the country would have been deemed to require services to achieve a basic level of wellbeing during their childhoods. And in most such cases, this would have been because of concerns about abuse or neglect or inadequate parenting.

Implications for policy and practice

The study’s findings have significant implications for social work practice, policymaking and resource allocation. The data suggests that children’s social care is not just an emergency intervention for a minority, but a service that touches the lives of many families, potentially a majority in the most deprived areas.

It also raises concerns about whether adequate support is in place to prevent families from reaching the point where their health or development is in jeopardy, particularly for those in the most deprived communities.

There were about 225,000 child protection investigations in England last year. Combined with the fact that the principal need for the majority of children in need relates to suspicions of abuse or neglect, it is likely that the focus of most such interventions would be investigative.

Need to tackle root causes of vulnerability 

With child poverty levels remaining high and public services under pressure from extensive government cuts, social workers and policymakers must consider how best to address the root causes of children’s vulnerability. Investing in community support and development and tackling the impacts of poverty at its core may be key to reducing the long-term reliance on social care services.

We recommend that the government monitor the cumulative incidence of children receiving social care support and analyse data by measures of deprivation, with a view to addressing upstream health and social determinants of social work involvement.

As the sector continues to grapple with increasing demand and service cuts, these findings serve as a call to action for a more holistic approach to supporting children and families before social care intervention becomes necessary.

The research, published in the International Journal of Population Data Science, was led by Dr Matthew Jay (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health) with collaborators at the University of Edinburgh, University of Central Lancashire, the Fisher Family Trust and the University of Westminster.

By Naomi Russell and Lorraine Mighty

Waiting for a social care assessment is becoming increasingly common across the UK, causing frustration and distress to people with care and support needs and having a demoralising impact on frontline staff and managers.

In September 2023,  IMPACT, the UK centre for implementing evidence in adult social care, and East Midlands Association of Directors of Social Services (EMADASS) began a year-long project to co-produce resources that would help staff, carers and people who draw on care and support negotiate some of the challenges associated with waiting lists.

Understanding the impact of waiting

The proposed outcomes for the project included:

• better understanding of the impact of waiting lists on people, carers and staff;
• agreeing a regional approach to managing waiting lists;
• increased satisfaction for people who draw on care and support and carers;
• development of co-production expertise across the region.

Using surveys, online meetings and face to face workshops, the views of around 104 people with lived experience and 140 staff from across the East Midlands were gathered. These insights were analysed alongside an evidence review of relevant literature to identify common themes.

Frustration for people with lived experience and staff

People who responded highlighted staffing resources, lack of consistency, over-complicated systems and increasing demands as factors that contributed to waiting times.

People with lived experience cited stress and frustration, a deterioration in mental health and decreased independence as some of the impacts of waiting for an assessment.  Staff told us they experienced stress and frustration, low morale and feeling they were not doing a good job.

What needed to change

Based on this feedback, the following themes were used in workshops across the region to generate discussion about what needed to change:

1. Use of resources
2. Communication
3. Systems and processes
4. Working with other organisations

The workshop notes were carefully analysed by the Co-production Steering Group, which was established as part of project governance arrangements, and by EMADASS. This identified the need to develop guidance for staff, and an information and advice pack for citizens, on “waiting well”.

From April to July 2024, task and finish groups comprising staff from East Midlands local authorities, third sector organisations and IMPACT worked alongside people with lived experience to develop the recommendations. Work progressed well and the products were finalised in August 2024.

Guidance for staff and advice for citizens

The guidance for staff is designed to support and equip them to provide a consistently good response to people and carers across the East Midlands. This includes information and advice for staff on where to seek support if they are struggling with managing waiting lists.

The waiting well pack for citizens is designed to provide helpful information and advice about services that can be accessed prior to an assessment/conversation. It also explains how to contact the local authority if you think you need an assessment/conversation, and what will happen when you do.

Co-production in practice

Both IMPACT and EMADASS were committed to co-producing this project. The project team benefited from good practice around co-production across the East Midlands, and with support from social care staff in each of the ten local authorities, people with lived experience were identified to join the project steering group.

The regional workshops were well attended by carers and people who draw on care and support, who co-produced recommendations about what changes are needed.

Formal and informal contact was maintained with workshop attendees to establish good relationships.  As a result, the task and finish groups had a good balance of staff and people with lived experience.  People with lived experience became leading voices and strongly influenced the finished products.

Next steps

All ten local authorities have committed to using the regional templates for staff and citizens.

EMADASS invested additional funding beyond the IMPACT project to commission a consultancy to develop an implementation readiness tool. This enabled local authority project leads to assess and access the support needed for effective implementation of the products.

Each local authority is updating the templates with relevant community information and co-ordinating distribution.

The distribution of the waiting well pack will be monitored and evaluated by each local authority to gain an understanding of the impact of the information and advice for recipients. This data will be collated by the EMADASS improvement team to understand the regional impact of this project.

Developing expertise in co-production

Whilst it will take time to understand the outcomes from the distribution of the waiting well pack for citizens and the staff guidance, a key project outcome that has already been felt is the development of regional co-production expertise.

By demonstrating good practice across the region, this project has renewed confidence in incorporating co-production in strategic improvement work and has set expectations for future projects.

Naomi Russell is deputy demonstrator lead and Lorraine Mighty senior strategic improvement coach at IMPACT; they were project leads for the waiting lists project. IMPACT works across all four UK nations, drawing on insights from research, lived experience and practice knowledge, to make a difference to frontline services and the lives of those drawing on care and support and of carers.

Most social workers have less time for learning than they did 12 months previously, research for Community Care Inform, set out in a newly published report, has found.

The trend has been driven by high caseloads and team vacancy levels, and has affected practitioners’ career development, confidence and resilience.

The Learning Landscapes study also identified a gap between the time practitioners felt they needed for learning each week and the time they had available, leading almost a fifth (18%) to consider leaving their current employment.

The vast majority of practitioners had attended some training in the previous 12 months, with the average being five days. However, over half had had to cancel at least one day of training during that time due to work commitments.

The findings of Learning Landscapes have now been published in a whitepaper.

Cancelled training a key issue

Workforce leaders who have seen the findings said they chimed with their experience of the pressures on staff to make time for learning.

Gemma Durrant, head of learning and development, children’s services, at Hampshire County Council, said it had a 26% cancel on-the-day rate across all of its courses.

She said cancellation rates had been much lower for a course on implementing a new case management system, which she attributed to greater senior management buy-in.

Tackling non-attendance at training

At Birmingham Children’s Trust’s attendance was very high for social work training, said Sophie Gilbert, head of its learning academy.

One potential factor in this was the fact that, when a person did not attend a course, the learning and development team emailed their manager to ask why.

For Surrey County Council, cancellation rates had fallen by 50% after it started charging teams for non-attendance, said principal social worker in children’s services Kasey Senior.

She said that, while she and learning and development colleagues did not want people to feel blamed, the charging policy had led assistant directors and service managers to think more about decisions to cancel training.

Making a reality of protected time

As with Inform’s 2022 survey, giving practitioners protected time was respondents’ favoured way for organisations to support learning, being cited by 53% of respondents to the 2024 research.

Workforce leaders polled by  said their organisations offered protected time, but very few said that these policies worked in practice.

Hampshire offers all social workers five days’ protected learning a year, but Gemma said the council did not monitor take-up.

“It’s about personal responsibility – some people say, ‘that’s what I’m doing’, others are not bothered and [some] get overwhelmed,” she said. “I don’t want to say to people, ‘it needs to be this number of hours per month’, as that may not work for everyone.”

Supporting experienced practitioners’ development

Kasey said there was a gap in the provision of protected learning time for practitioners who were four-plus years’ qualified.

“[Their ] learning is based on their relationship with their manager,” she said. “If that’s working, fine. But we’re not monitoring it.”

If you are a principal social worker or workforce lead, or work in practice development, and are interested in finding out about the Learning Landscapes study, please email rebekkah.tabern@markallengroup.com for more information.

Councils have been handed a guide to what works in supporting kinship families, according to the current evidence base.

They have been urged to offer carers specialist support in navigating services and financial allowances, to help support permanency and reduce placement disruption, along with providing parenting programmes to support the wellbeing of carers and children.

The practice guide, from what works body Foundations, is the first in a series of Department for Education-commissioned publications designed to provide councils with evidence-informed guidance on meeting the outcomes in the DfE’s children’s social care national framework (see box).

The kinship carer guide was based on a systematic review of the evidence of what works in improving outcomes for kinship carers and children in the UK and similar countries, and of what UK carers value in the support they receive.

‘Limited but growing evidence base’

The Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), which conducted the review, found that the evidence base around how best to support kinship carers was “limited but continuing to grow”.

Photo: Fotolia/aquarious83men

The research was strongest in relation to so-called kinship navigator programmes, which provide carers with specialist practitioners and information to help them access the support to which they and the children they care for are entitled. These are widespread in the US but have not been formally introduced in the UK, though the Kinship Connected programme, run by the charity Kinship, is similar, said the CEI.

The US studies analysed suggested that navigator programmes had small but significant impacts on the likelihood of children being placed in kinship care where a decision was made to remove them from the family home, and also on reducing the likelihood of placement disruption thereafter.

There was also some evidence, from two studies, of navigator programmes helping children to move into permanency, whether through reunification with their parents, adoption or guardianship.

Evidence for navigator programmes improving child safety and carers’ wellbeing, parenting skills and knowledge of services was more limited.

Navigator programmes ‘should be rolled out in UK’

The CEI concluded that the navigator programmes approach “holds promise” and should be rolled out and evaluated in the UK.

Based on this, Foundations’ practice guide says councils should “offer kinship carers specialist support to learn about, navigate and access the support that they are entitled to”, on the basis there was “good evidence” that this worked.

The CEI also found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

However, it said the small number of studies meant this finding should be interpreted with caution, stressed the different context for permanence in the UK, compared with the US, and argued that more evidence was needed to examine stability and child wellbeing outcomes, along with legal permanency.

Call for councils to offer financial allowances

Based on this, the practice guide says there is “promising evidence” for councils to offer a financial allowance to kinship carers “to increase placement permanency, reduce the likelihood of placement disruption and improve the likelihood of permanent guardianship”.

Photo: Gourmet Photography/Fotolia

Currently, in England, the only kinship carers entitled to a financial allowance are family and friends foster carers. Those caring for a child under a special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO) may receive a means-tested payment, though this is discretionary, while no specific provision from children’s services exists for informal kinship carers.

In its kinship care strategy, published in December 2023, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25. The Labour government is yet to confirm whether it will take this forward.

Impact of parenting programmes

The systematic review also found positive impacts from parenting programmes for kinship carers on their wellbeing and that of the children they were caring for, along with on the children’s behaviour. However, the CEI urged caution based on the fact these findings were based on small sample sizes, while it found no evidence of impact on carers’ parenting and their relationships with children.

The CEI called for more “rigorous evaluations to be able to understand the efficacy of these programmes and other approaches for kinship carers and the children in their care, especially within the UK”.

In the light of this, Foundations recommends that councils offer parenting support to kinship carers when a child or young person is demonstrating behaviours that challenge their carer on a frequent basis, based on “promising evidence”.

Providing CBT, peer support groups and self-care training

The practice guide makes three further recommendations for authorities, also based on promising evidence.

Picture posed by models: Photo: Nullplus/Fotolia

It says authorities should make cognitive behavioural therapy available to kinship carers assessed as in need of therapeutic support due to, for example, the child displaying behaviours that challenge the carer, in order to reduce these behaviours.

This was based on a single study, which found a positive impact of CBT for carers on children’s behaviours. While this had a “fairly large” sample and low risk of bias, the CEI said further research was needed to replicate the finding.

The practice guide also calls for councils to provide cares with access to peer support in order to improve their wellbeing. The two relevant papers in the systematic review suggested a positive impact on carer wellbeing, but one had some concerns for risk of bias and used a fairly small sample and the other did not report effect sizes, said the CEI.

The practice guide also recommends offering kinship carers training in self-care to support their emotional health and wellbeing. This was based on three papers, for which the CEI found “some evidence of
promise”. However, it did not report high confidence in the findings because the strength and significance of the results varied significantly across the studies.

What kinship carers want in their support

The systematic review also looked at UK carers’ perspectives on the support they needed. While it said there was a limited research base for this in the UK, it found the messages for practice were clear and distilled  them into 10 statements, five of which it had “high confidence” in:

1. An intervention’s distinction from statutory services is perceived to facilitate engagement, favourable experiences and positive outcomes. The CEI found kinship carers felt more positively about support from non-statutory services due to prior negative experiences with statutory provision, including “a closed-door approach” and “sporadic and unreliable” from social workers.
2. Providing carers with access to a network of peers enhances an intervention’s acceptability and usefulness. Carers reported finding solace, understanding and practical support within these groups.
3. Carers value specialised support due to their unmet needs and the gaps in statutory services. Carers reported that social care and other services frequently underestimated the severity of their needs, lacked appropriate services to address them, or imposed eligibility criteria that families found challenging to meet. They expressed a strong preference for interventions tailored specifically to address the unique challenges faced by kinship families.
4. Carers value recipient-centred programmes. The studies found that carers appreciated support that was collaboratively designed, tailored and flexible.
5. Targeted interventions for kinship families were perceived as beneficial by both carers and practitioners. They reported that this benefited carers’ wellbeing and parenting skills.

Good practice principles

Based on the statements, Foundations’ practice guide sets out three key principles for working with kinship families:

• Support for kinship carers should take into account the specific needs and strengths of kinship carers.
• One-to-one relationships and high-quality casework should be at the heart of support for kinship families.
• Kinship families need to be made aware of the support they are entitled to, and local authorities should actively work to address barriers to accessing support.

Implementing the guidance

Alongside the practice guide, Foundations published a reflective tool, to help local authorities implement it. This advises councils to assess their current level of provision for kinship families, identify gaps and support and make plans to fill these, act on these plans and then review the impact.

In a blog post, the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, Isabelle Trowler, said that Foundations would be working with a small number of local authorities to embed the guide’s recommendations and generate learning that can be shared more widely.

The guide also follows last week’s publication by the DfE of statutory guidance for councils on kinship care, which is an update of 2011 guidance on family and friends care.

The statutory guidance calls on councils to provide kinship families with a “local offer”, which “should be based on evidence of what works”, drawing on the practice guide.

Financial offer to carers

The local offer should set out the eligibility criteria for financial carers, the process for applying for this and circumstances in which means-testing will apply, while councils should draw up written agreements setting out the level and duration of any support given.

In response to this, Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith said: “The guidance provides for each local area to design its own financial support offer. ADCS has advocated for these payments to be made via the benefits system to reduce our involvement in family life where there are no ongoing concerns or needs.”

National ambassador role

The publication of the practice guide and updated statutory guidance also follows the appointment of adultification bias expert Jahnine Davis as England’s first national kinship care ambassador.

National kinship care ambassador Jahnine Davis

One of her roles is to support and challenge councils to improve practice, which Trowler highlighted in her blog post about the new practice guide.

The self-reported rate of disability among care leavers is double that recorded by councils, research has found.

Meanwhile, recorded disability rates among children in care and care leavers differ widely between local authorities, according to the report, published this week by Coram Voice.

The charity also found that leaving care practitioners had limited data and information on disability and felt it was not always well understood within their teams, while disabled young people reported it was difficult to get the support they needed.

Coram Voice said its findings showed that the “under-recording of disability” meant young people’s needs were not fully understood, and there was too little information to plan support for them and monitor its effectiveness.

Dearth of data on care experienced disabled people

It carried out the study to address a dearth of information on disability among care experienced young people. For example, the Department for Education (DfE) does not collect information from local authorities about young people’s disabilities in its annual dataset on looked-after children and care leavers.

The charity sent a freedom of information (FoI) request to all 153 English councils on their total number of children in care and care leavers, alongside the numbers who had a disability, broken down by type, receiving responses from 133 authorities. This revealed that:

• 11% of children in care were recorded as having a disability, the same proportion as in the general population, as measured by the government’s family resources survey.
• 13% of care leavers were recorded as disabled, below the 15.6% recorded by the Office for National Statistics for 16- to 24-year-olds nationally in 2020.

Self-reported disability rate double that recorded by councils

The figure for care leavers was half the rate recorded by Coram Voice for care leavers self-reporting a long-term health problem or disability (27%) through its Bright Spots research programme from 2017-24. This was based on responses from 8,245 care leavers across Britain, with the rate increasing from 22% in 2017-19 to 32% in 2023-24.

Coram Voice also found significant disparities between councils in reported rates of disability, which ranged from 3% to 32% for children in care and from 1% to 36% for care leavers.

For both groups, the most common types of disability recorded by councils were learning (35% of care leavers and 32% of children in care), autism (32% of care leavers and 31% of children in care) and ‘behaviour’ (31% of care leavers and 24% of children in care). Coram Voice said the latter category included ADHD.

The councils’ data did not include a mental health category, despite this being the second most common area of disability self-reported by care leavers in response to the Bright Spots research (20%), behind autism (21%).

Poorer outcomes for disabled care leavers

The Bright Spots research found disabled care leavers reported significantly worse outcomes on average than non-disabled counterparts across a range of areas:

• 12% said they hardly ever or never felt safe at home, compared with 6% of other care leavers.
• 35% always or often felt lonely, compared with 16% of other care leavers.
• 42% reported low wellbeing, compared with 24% of other care leavers.
• 29% said they found it difficult to cope financially, compared with 18%of other care leavers.

However, a workshop with over 100 leaving care practitioners and managers held by Coram Voice revealed significant issues in services’ response to young care leavers.

Practitioners ‘lack data and knowledge’ on disability

They acknowledged that services didn’t tend to record or ask young people their views on disability and that there was limited data and information on disability in leaving care services.

Staff reported gaps in knowledge, a lack of confidence in some areas and uncertainty about referral pathways and systems in relation to disability in leaving care teams, while there was a “disconnect” with adults’ services, eligibility for which was “unclear and fluid”.

This chimed with findings from Coram Voice’s advocacy service about disabled young people’s experience of transition, which included a lack of planning, failure to listen to the young person, frequent changes of staff, disputes between agencies about who funds what and a lack of suitable provision.

Disabled children in care and care leavers ‘invisible’

In conclusion, the charity said: “Our work exposes how invisible disabled children in care and care leavers are in our national statistics – underestimation and under-recording of disability means that individual and collective needs and experiences of disabled children in care and care leavers are not fully understood.

“Currently there is little information available to plan and monitor the effectiveness of support.”

Charity urges improved data and training

On the back of the report, it made 19 recommendations, including that councils:

• Support professionals, including social workers and personal assistants, to develop confidence, skills and knowledge of disability by providing training to address existing gaps,
  practice tools and opportunities to discuss issues in supervision.
• Record children and young people’s self-reported experiences of disability and long-term health conditions and use this to inform individual care plans and service development.
• Collate and review disability data regularly to effectively plan and monitor service delivery for children in care and care leavers, and provide team managers and practitioners with this information.
• Ensure services for children in care and care leavers are accessible and supportive of children and young people with disabilities, including by listening to young people about the state of existing provision.
• Provide disabled children and young people with access to advocacy to safeguard their rights.

It also called for the DfE to publish disability data already collected as part of its child in need census in its annual looked-after children and care leaver statistics, and urged government and research funding bodies to commission further studies to better understand the experience of disabled care experienced people and what works in supporting them.

By Bill Bows and Ben Fraser, National Children’s Bureau

Children with social work involvement are more likely to be refused access to CAMHS, despite it being well established that they are more likely to suffer mental illness than their peers.

That was the striking finding from an analysis* of more than 71,000 children’s health records from a London mental health service, published last month by researchers at Cambridge University and the National Children’s Bureau (NCB).

The findings, which were welcomed by the Children’s Charities Coalition (comprising Action for Children, Barnardo’s, The Children’s Society, NCB and NSPCC), shed light on the links between children’s mental health, social care and deprivation.

Children with social workers ‘considered too unstable’ for treatment

Consultations with practitioners, clinician interviews, and analyses of health records indicate that the finding on refusal of access may be because the circumstances of children with a social worker are considered too “unstable” for mental health support.

These young people’s lives can be highly unpredictable, whether that’s because of poor parental mental health or being at risk of harm or abuse, or due to more practical issues like lacking the funds to take public transport to appointments.

But the net result is that these children may never get the support they need

However, existing evidence suggests that some treatments can be helpful, even when a child experiences “instability”.

The experiences of children accessing CAMHS

This week, the findings of a subsequent study** of data from over 20,000 initial risk assessments from the same mental health service, provides unprecedented detail on the adverse experiences of young people as recorded by CAMHS professionals.

Until now there has been little understanding of the volume and nature of these experiences, or risk factors, including how they relate to one another. These risk factors may be linked to a child’s mental health need or independent of it.

Around 15-20% of the young people assessed by CAMHS in the study, which was published by Cambridge University, NCB and partners as part of the Living Assessments collaboration, were at some point identified as having received protective interventions from children’s services.

This indicates that social care experienced young people represent a significant portion of the population assessed by CAMHS.

What a dedicated CAMHS pathway should look like

Together, the findings suggest that a dedicated pathway for children with social work involvement to access CAMHS would be a real step forward for a group of children who desperately need more help. This should focus on three key areas.

1. Mental health assessment: Any child in contact with social workers should be offered a specific assessment to understand their mental health needs. This should be co-designed with young people and families.
2. Expertise in both social work and mental health needs: Co-locating more social workers within CAMHS teams and vice versa would help ensure understanding of the unique needs of young people with all forms of social work involvement at CAMHS intake and assessment.
3. Joining up services: Services should use a single, consistent identifier for all young people. This would promote joined-up working across health, education and social care, support information sharing and make it easier to identify what works for young people.

Mental health services ‘should be beacon not barrier’

As Taliah Drayak, an adult with experience of being supported by social workers and mental health services as a child, who worked on the first of these two studies, says: As a child you can’t access what you need without support. When the adults in your life become barriers to accessing what you need, the message that you write upon your heart is, ‘I am not good enough, I do not deserve, and I am the problem’.

“Instead of first being a barrier, and then teaching children to be our own barriers, children need mental health services to be an inclusive beacon of hope and support.”

* A call for change: tackling inequalities in access to mental health support for children with social work involvement and those living in poverty was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the NIHR School for Primary Care Research, as part of the NIHR Three Research Schools Mental Health Programme, in conjunction with the British Academy, Foundations, and the Wellcome Trust.

** This study is part of the Living Assessments research project, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Bill Bows is communications officer and Ben Fraser policy and public affairs officer at the NCB

By Brid Featherstone and Kate Morris

We have been involved in a research project for over two years now the state of knowledge about domestic violence and abuse (DVA) in child protection (Rethinking domestic abuse in child protection: responding differently – Nuffield Foundation).  Our research in three case-study sites has interrogated:

• The data that is gathered about prevalence and dimensions of the problem.
• Manager and practitioner understandings of causation, typologies and alternative modes of response.
• How intersecting inequalities shape experiences and responses.
• Family members’ understandings and perspectives on professional responses.

Debate over coercive control training

We were, therefore, very interested in the findings from the recent study by the BBC highlighting the lack of specific training on coercive control on more than a third of social work courses and the large variations in content on the remainder.

According to the authors, this lack of training was of particular concern as coercive and controlling behaviour is recognised as underpinning all domestic abuse. The BBC research led the Domestic Abuse Commissioner to call for such training to be made mandatory

In response, a spokesperson for the Joint Universities Social Work Association (JUSWA) argued that initial education does not claim or have a remit to prepare newly qualified social workers to be “thrown into the deep end” of what should be regarded as highly specialised practice.

We welcome the opening up of conversations about the training and role of social workers but worry that both ‘sides’ are in danger of making assumptions about the robustness of the current knowledge base and, in turn, what service responses should be.

Findings from child protection and domestic abuse research

We offer the following findings from our research not only as a contribution to troubling such assumptions, but hopefully to help promote further discussion:

1. We found that we are simply not collecting the kind of data that helps us understand what is going on in families’ lives in relation to domestic violence and abuse. This means that statements about prevalence must be treated with caution and there is an urgent need for the Department for Education to pay attention to how best to capture robust data in order to inform commissioning and services.  For example, the current categories, being used in the children in need census do not provide the data needed for effective responses. Moreover, practitioners are not being supported to understand why collecting robust data matters and why it might improve practice responses.
2. Crucially, the data being collected cannot help us to understand the impact of intersecting gender inequalities. Furthermore, the international literature on intersectionality is not well known in practice. Therefore, the risks and vulnerabilities attached to those living in poverty, from differing minority ethnic groups, abilities, ages and sexualities are not being fully addressed.
3. While there are pockets of excellent practice in this regard, overall, there is little knowledge about the literature that explores the differences between types of abuse and violence and consequent risks. Moreover, practitioners are not being supported to have empirically grounded conversations about ‘what’ and ‘why’ with all those impacted. This results from, and contributes to, practice cultures dominated by reductive terms such as, ‘there is dv in that family’, or, ‘coercive control is present’. This use of non-specific generic descriptors feeds a generalised sense of fear and impotence among practitioners and means the lived realities of those impacted are rarely captured.
4. Individualised case work is being relied upon to tackle what is generally recognised as, including by all involved in the research, a problem that needs action at multiple levels across society.
5. Multi-agency working is the routine response to calls for service improvement, but we found limited evidence of multi-agency working that utilised the expertise of family members and communities. Given that many respondents were concerned about levels of distrust among families and communities towards services, this reliance on multi-agency working seemed rather curious and concerning, especially given the well-documented issues for minoritised communities.

The challenges of doing things differently

It is important to note that we found many attempts to ‘think and do differently’ in relation to domestic abuse and a number are offered here to highlight some of the challenges that emerged that need to be acknowledged if change is to become a widespread reality.

One area had developed a very well-evidenced and robust specialist service, which engaged with the literature on different types of abuse, developed responsive approaches to the women, children and men concerned and was doing groundbreaking work on community engagement. However, this was not becoming embedded in frontline practice despite recognition of the need to do so. The lack of time to build meaningful trusting relationships was cited as a key barrier here, as was workforce instability and churn in a landscape dominated by the impact of austerity on an impoverished local authority.

Another area had sought to involve family members and move away from more punitive formal interventions focused on mothering.  However, the constraints of addressing a complex social problem within the confines of a narrow risk-focused child protection system curtailed imaginative and holistic approaches, especially in relation to working with men.

The limits of individual casework

Overall, we found that, despite sterling attempts by amazing practitioners and managers, they were often trapped within approaches that relied on individual casework and risk management. This, in turn, translated into the outsourcing of safety and protection responsibilities to those most vulnerable and least able to respond (often impoverished mothers).

Daring to ‘think and do differently’ in child protection in relation to domestic abuse requires the opening up of conversations about the status of our knowledge and the expansion of who gets to contribute to those conversations.

The training of social workers is very important as part of such endeavours, but it is part of a bigger story that must involve multiple storytellers, with all those who are impacted at its heart.

Brid Featherstone is emeritus professor of social work at the University of Huddersfield and Kate Morris is professor of social work at Sheffield University. You can find out more about Brid’s work by reading our interview with her for Community Care’s 50th anniversary.

Researchers have proposed a definition of safer and effective staffing levels within social work to inform legislation on the issue in Northern Ireland.

The definition, based on practitioner feedback, is believed to be the first of its kind, and covers both staff sufficiency and practitioners having access to “regular supportive, reflective supervision”, “compassionate line management” and a “supportive team”.

The research team carried out 10 focus groups with social work teams from all five health and social care (HSC) trusts, interviewed over 20 practitioners and analysed time diaries that they provided.

It also analysed workloads across children’s services and older people’s teams in Northern Ireland’s HSC trusts, which identified both caseload sizes and vacancy levels.

The research was commissioned by the Office of Social Services (OSS) within Northern Ireland’s Department of Health (DoH) and is designed to inform the development of safe and effective staffing legislation for the region’s health and social care services.

It was carried out by a team of academics from Ulster University and Queen’s University Belfast led by Paula McFadden, professor in social work at Ulster University.

Analysis of social work workloads

The team collected staffing data from 249 teams across the five HSC trusts, dated to February or March 2023.

In family intervention teams – long-term children’s services teams – the study found that the ratio of social workers to allocated cases was 1:18, while when unallocated cases were included, this increased to 1:20.

While the report did not make recommendations around caseload size, the 2022 Setting the Bar report, commissioned by Social Work Scotland, recommended a limit of 15 in children’s services.

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

For our 50th anniversary, we’re expanding our My Brilliant Colleague series to include anyone who has inspired you in your career – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Photo by Daniel Laflor/peopleimages.com/ AdobeStock

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by either:

• Filling in our nominations form with a letter or a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.
• Or sending a voice note of up to 90 seconds to +447887865218, including your and the nominee’s names and roles.

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

Impact of high vacancy levels

The situation was driven in part by high vacancy levels, with 22.4% of posts in family intervention teams being unfilled at the time.

Were these posts filled, the case ratios would have fallen from 1:14 for allocated cases and 1:16, once unallocated cases were added.

Children’s social workers interviewed for the research reported that both the complexity and urgency of cases, and administrative burdens, had increased over time.

Working conditions were better, the research found, when there was camaraderie and positive relationships within the team, with a supportive manager who promoted shared risk-taking, and there was regular formal and informal supervision.

Meanwhile, in older people’s community teams, the research found there was one practitioner for every 48 allocated cases, while the ratio was 1:55 when unallocated cases were included.

Again, this was partly driven by vacancies, with 12.6% of posts in the teams being unfilled. Filling these would have resulted in ratios of 1:42 for allocated cases and 1:49 when all cases were taken into account.

Social workers’ views on their caseloads

However, social workers who took part in the research suggested that the ideal caseload in an older people’s community team was 35.

“There was wide agreement that a ‘safe’ and ‘fair’ volume of cases for each social worker should consider time, travel and case complexity, acknowledging that complexity can fluctuate over time, alongside the level of liaison with other professionals and services required for each case,” the report added.

Most social workers who took part in the research perceived their caseloads to be high and, in many cases, unmanageable, while researchers also found that practitioners’ health and wellbeing were being “increasingly impacted by workload pressures”.

Like children’s services colleagues, older people’s social workers also highlighted the importance of their line manager, a supportive team and regular supervision in promoting safe staffing.

The report was published against the backdrop of significant concerns about social work staffing in Northern Ireland that has led to several rounds of strike action by the main union for the profession, NIPSA.

Chief social worker ‘recognises challenges facing staff’

In a foreword to the research report, Northern Ireland’s chief social worker, Aine Morrison, who works within the DoH, said she recognised “the significant challenges social work services NI face currently and the pressures this puts on staff”.

“There is a complex interplay of factors affecting current staffing levels including population factors causing increased demand for services, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, funding shortfalls and the resultant impact on staff wellbeing,” she added.

“While defining what safe staffing means is complex and brings many challenges, I believe that it is essential that we set some standards for what we believe to be reasonable workloads.”

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) Northern Ireland, which contributed to the study, welcomed the proposed definition of safer and effective staffing.

‘We need more social workers’

“We need more social workers, that is beyond doubt,” said BASW NI professional officer Noeleen Higgins.

“However, the safer and effective staffing report is helpful in highlighting that achieving safe staffing is not only about having enough staff. It correctly focuses on the importance of supporting and developing staff to have the right knowledge, experience and skills.”

The report will be followed by a further study that will make recommendations for caseload sizes and models and tools for calculating these.

The chief social worker added that both reports would inform DoH guidance on safe staffing levels in social work.

Consultation on safer staffing

The DoH is currently consulting on the content of its legislation on safe and effective staffing, for which it has proposed:

• Introducing guiding principles for health and social care staffing in Northern Ireland that the DoH and health and social care trusts must have regard to.
• Placing the DoH and the health and social care trusts under a duty to carry out evidence-based workforce planning.
• Requiring health and social care providers to take all reasonable steps to ensure suitably qualified staff in such numbers as are appropriate for the health, wellbeing and safety of patients and the provision of safe and high-quality care.
• Placing the DoH and health and social care trusts under a duty to take all reasonable steps to ensure there are sufficient numbers of specific staff groups, including social workers.

The consultation closes on 14 October 2024.