| 15 minute read | DSLs and Safeguarding Teams |
John Woodhouse is a founding director of Safeguarding Network having previously worked as a senior local authority social care manager leading Looked After young people services and Child Protection services for a local authority, run a safeguarding training company and been a chair of governors.
Problems with referrals
The first role in the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) job description in early years settings, schools and colleges in Keeping Children Safe in Education is to “refer cases of suspected abuse to the local authority children’s social care as required” (p97). The history of the DSL role is rooted in communications with children’s social care, recognising the need to have a named senior leader who has the lead responsibility to share concerns and work with risk to children with partner agencies.
There is a recognition in this that sharing responsibility with other agencies is a vulnerable point in the process. Do both agencies share the concern? What happens if there are differences in view? How is information communicated? What administrative errors may affect the process? Who is left ‘holding the baby’ if things go wrong?
The Social Care Institute for Excellence reviewed 38 Serious Case Reviews in 2016 and gathered further information from panels of professionals. They identified fourteen themes, including ten issues relating to referrals and information sharing:
- Disagreement about use of early help assessment
- Confusion about ‘referrals’ and ‘contacts’ in children’s social care (CSC)
- Not making a referral after bruising to non-mobile babies
- Not making a referral when young people disclose sexual activity
- Unresolved disagreement about the need for children's social care involvement
- Not convening strategy discussions
- Confusion about interpretation of medical information on cause of injury
- Incomplete information sharing by schools in child protection
- Misinterpretation of Police decisions not to pursue a prosecution
- Euphemistic language in reports and written records
This remains a current issue – 14 of the 33 Case Reviews recently published on the national case review repository in 2020 included issues around referral or information sharing.
Attempting to involve children’s social care bring many dilemmas, from our personal feelings and bias through to the enormous impact of austerity on statutory services. We’ve written previously on the reducing availability of services for children in need and at risk of protection in the context of rising need. While staff in schools and local authority children’s services may strive to keep children’s best interests at heart, they do this within the context of strained systems and limited resources, of IT systems that often do not communicate effectively and of unconscious aspects of professional dangerousness that cloud judgement and decision-making.
The advent of electronic safeguarding files (such as MyConcern or CPOMS) in schools and colleges supports better recording, organisation and communication and some areas are trialling direct access between education settings and social care. There is also a growing recognition that children’s safety underpins effective learning, for example in the 2019 Government response to the Review of Children in Need and much greater priority has been placed on the needs of vulnerable learners, including those who have had a social worker.
Quality of information shared
The detail shared in referrals is important. Many areas have a Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub or similar which share information across a number of agencies and combine their knowledge to make safer decisions. Sometimes this can lead to long referral forms. This should be highlighted with Children’s Services as it can dissuade professionals from referring but needs to be balanced with the need for some of this information to help identify information on other agency database, for example with the Police or Housing Services.
Your referral should not be a narrative of all the concerns you have had, but instead set out:
- The reason for the referral and the nature of the concern
- What the child’s needs appear to be
- Full information for MASH wherever possible
- Previous concerns (summative chronology, not narrative) and interventions
- A full and honest risk assessment rooted in the family’s strengths, capacity and partnership
- The family’s agreement, or the reason for over-riding this
- Whether the concern involves abuse or neglect
- What you want to happen next
- Whether there is a need for urgent action
We will explore some of these areas in more detail. You might also be interested in attending our training on Writing Effective Referrals.
The context of threshold
In a survey by the NCB for the All-party Parliamentary Group for Children “70% of … social workers [report] the threshold for helping ‘children in need’ had risen, … while half said the point at which a child protection plan was triggered had gone up” (NCB, 2018:3).
It is easy to understand why. The National Audit Office found a 124% increase in child protection concerns dealt with by local authorities from 2006 to 2016. In an article on ‘Shrinking Services, Growing Needs’ last year we highlighted this rise combines with a 24% rise in children with special educational needs and disability and growing budget deficits to create a ‘perfect storm’ for children’s services.
In the wake of the pandemic it is unlikely to get easier. With over £280 billion spent in 2020, predictions of a challenging winter and tax revenues falling there will be a need to balance the books. The Government are aiming to increase local authority central funding and council tax revenues (including a social care precept of up to 3%), but there are many competing priorities in such challenging times. Some local authorities are on the brink of bankruptcy. Croydon Council has issued a s114 notice prohibiting new non-essential spending which will include much ‘child in need’ activity pending an emergency budget. Local authorities cannot refuse their duty to undertake child protection work, but this will further erode their ability to exercise their powers to support ‘children in need’, accelerating the demise of local authority funded ‘early help’ services which had already reduced 71% from 2010 to 2020 (Action for Children, 2018).
This context creates significant dangers for young people and fuels rising numbers of children in care – also up 28% in the last decade. These high cost placements further reduce the funding available for preventative work in a vicious cycle of escalating risk. Such a context risks conscious and unconscious pressures on everyone to deviate from clear analysis or procedure and engage in defensive practice , fuelled by anxieties of “fear, blame and mistrust” within which the child becomes invisible.
The responsibility on early years settings, schools and colleges is to be analytic in their approach, “to make fewer, more appropriate referrals” and to rigorously pursue and resolve professional differences to avoid externalising risk to the young person and their family. The concept of early conversations between agencies and early help offered to families, identifying sustainable family strengths and engaging in preventative work at an early stage is crucial to preventing concerns escalating into child protection issues.
Analysing risk
Our approach to risk assessment is often markedly poor. Rating risk as high, medium or low might seem a sensible approach, but we each have different perspectives, different thresholds and make different judgements. Try asking a dozen people to rate common risks such as driving a car as high, medium or low. You are likely to get three different answers.
Adopting a deficit led approach where we focus mainly on problems reduces optimism and hope in families (and professionals) and can lead to anxiety-based relationships with inaccurate conclusions and limited potential for change. In this approach risk assessment can be “used capriciously to legitimise decisions” (HSE, 2019), retrospectively justifying personal judgements that in effect have already been made.
Understanding the risk of abuse or neglect is complex and an unstructured approach to risk assessment can lead to dangerous errors. Research has found basing judgements on conversations with parents is “only slightly better than guessing”: professional judgement should be combined with standardised and actuarial tools to improve accuracy.
Tools such as the Graded Care Profile 2 or the family questionnaires and scales developed with the assessment framework give a useful starting point. Some local authorities have specific approaches to working with families (such as Signs of Safety) or of assessing neglect or child exploitation, among other areas. Safe Lives have a risk checklist and guidance and Brook publish an excellent traffic light tool around sexual behaviours. You should ensure the tool is properly validated and anyone utilising these approaches is suitably qualified where relevant or that the approach is within their competence.
Threshold tools
Keeping Children Safe in Education sets out schools’ responsibilities in the context of Working Together. This statutory inter-agency guidance sets out the definitions of abuse and neglect together with the procedures to follow. The guidance sets out that “safeguarding partners should publish a threshold document, which sets out the local criteria for action in a way that is transparent, accessible and easily understood” (para 16).
Most local authorities have such a document in place. They are locally devised and set out to explain the process for early help assessment, criteria for child in need, child protection and accommodation and the local area’s child protection procedures. They are helpful documents to help structure reflective discussions between agencies (Sharley, 2020), to gauge the likely response of a local authority and in judging how to proceed with a referral, but there are significant inconsistencies between local areas described as a “postcode lottery” by the all party parliamentary group for children in 2018.
A few local authorities, such as Leeds, have (with the express assent of the DfE) stepped away from threshold tools to continual assessment supported by inter-agency conversations, seeing the tools as deficit-led and mechanistic, easily swayed by local pressures. Schools and colleges must continue to follow the established local procedures, but the principles of conversations between families and professionals, shared decision-making and a strength-based approach that fully captures the complexity of the family situation and risk to the child are valuable in any assessment.
It is possible to go further. In her recommendations for interagency practice Vicky Sharley stresses the need for leaders to “cultivate understanding around the barriers which impede successful inter-agency collaboration”. The potential to bed social workers in schools feels a useful direction of travel for local authorities and schools with strong benefits highlighted in the What Works for Children’s Social Care evaluation in 2020. In the interim, building trust in one another’s judgements and assessments, understanding the context of each agency and what is achievable for families, and the creation of formal and informal opportunities (interagency training, informal visits or secondments) to learn about how agencies approach abuse and neglect all reduce barriers to understanding and are likely to lead to us making better judgements together and, wherever possible, alongside families.
Family partnership
Often seen as a barrier to making referrals, speaking to families before making a referral is a crucial step in almost all circumstances, unless there is evidence to do so would place a child at risk or interfere with the investigation of serious crime. Examples of this include intrafamilial sexual abuse, fabricated or induced illness, organised abuse, forced marriage and any form of abuse where there is evidence of threats being used to silence the child. You should understand the law around GDPR, as specified in Working Together.
However, this is about more than compliance with the regulations. It is at the heart of properly understanding what is happening and how best we can support children. Using the Johari window model, the following chart highlights information that is visible and invisible to professionals trying to protect the child:
Avoiding engagement with the family limits your assessment to observed issues, things you have seen or believed you have seen. If we manage to get alongside families (possible in perhaps two thirds of cases subject to child protection plans) we open up so much more information: you learn what information is shared and can share observed information you might understand as a professional but has not been seen or perhaps understood by the family. The family have the opportunity to challenge your observations, and there is the potential to build trust in the relationship and for the family to reveal some of the hidden information, or even together to begin to decipher unknown information.
This is hugely important in making safe decisions for children and young people, but exploring the potential to work together reduces barriers and can avoid feelings of betrayal and anger if we can share the level of our concern and perhaps make a referral to children’s services together. It can be difficult to talk to parents and preparing for these conversations through safeguarding supervision, or seeking advice from an education safeguarding or social care consultation line can help build the confidence and clarity of purpose to initiate supportive, curious conversations that provide the best chance of eliciting partnership.
While barriers around information sharing must never inhibit the making of a referral should you suspect abuse or neglect, it is still good to be up front with families and this is where the greatest opportunity to sustain your relationship lies.
The legal and guidance framework
The local authority provides assessment and support under two main sections of the Children Act 1989 – Section 17 and Section 47. Section 17 is a power the local authority may exercise to provide services to ‘children in need’. These services are most affected by the budgetary reductions as the local authority is not duty-bound to provide them. However, they underpin much preventative and life-changing work and a reduction in s17 provision often correlates to a rise in child protection activity.
While perceptions of threshold have changed, the arbiter of a judgement about child protection, Section 47 of The Children Act 1989, has remained largely the same for over 30 years and is the defining threshold in deciding when a local authority must investigate abuse or neglect:
| Where a local authority has… reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives, or is found, in their area is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm, the local authority must make enquiries or cause enquiries to be made. |
Note the threshold for action is suspicion, rather than belief. Belief is established on the ‘balance of probability’, but having a reason to suspect abuse or neglect is a lower threshold, yet sometimes it feels we have to prove a child is at risk of harm to a much higher standard.
For example, sometimes we are told a risk of child exploitation ‘does not meet threshold’ as there is insufficient evidence to convict the offenders. This draws on a third threshold – proof beyond reasonable doubt. It is important to secure evidence and actions against the correct threshold.
Significant harm is not defined in the Children Act. ‘Harm’ is defined as “ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development including, for example, impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another”. What is significant has been resolved across case law, but can be summed up in Appendix A of Working Together in the definitions of physical, sexual or emotional abuse and neglect. For example, if considering a referral in respect of emotional abuse we should be considering whether the evidence we have gathered gives us reasonable cause to suspect the persistent emotional maltreatment of a student is likely to cause severe and persistent adverse effects on their emotional development.
This gives us a better approach to deciding when threshold is met but places challenges on education settings to ensure they are robustly recording observations and interventions so as to evidence persistent maltreatment, together with analysis adjudging the likely impact on the child’s future development.
The criteria can be presented as the following table, linking the risk assessment undertaken to the required actions. In this example we have aligned these to the levels in a typical threshold tool:
| Likelihood | Impact |
|
|
Too many referrals are narrative and unstructured, telling a story and leaving the local authority to decide how to respond. Taking a planned approach to referral writing, drawing on relevant tools and structuring your analysis against the legal criteria will ensure your referrals to children’s services are warranted and significantly improve the chances of them being accepted.
Referrals are a process, not an outcome. It is important to think through what you expect to happen as a result of the referral. Where this does not happen the local authority will reach a view and you are then left in a position where you might disagree with their decision. Setting out your professional opinion clearly, supported by evidence and sharing your expectations (for example to “request the local authority convene a strategy discussion within one working day to consider whether the Section 47 criteria are met”) then places the onus on the local authority to set out its reasons should there be a difference of opinion and decreases the likelihood of poor decisions being made on incomplete or misunderstood evidence.
This approach also helps clarify where differences of opinion may lie to improve the chances of resolution should you need to challenge a decision.
Escalation & dispute resolution
Every organisation (p55) and Safeguarding Children Partnerships (p79) are expected in Working Together to have processes in place to resolve professional differences of opinion. They are typically very sensible documents that encourage reflection through supervision followed by open and honest discussions between those involved. This is a much better approach than waiting for a further incident to re-refer, or coordinating multiple referrals across a number of agencies, as these approaches serve only to add to the workload of everyone involved and leave the young person exposed to the risk in the meantime.
If, following discussion, an outcome that keeps the child safe from abuse or neglect cannot be agreed the dispute resolution documents generally support escalating the concern through managers and senior leaders in each organisation until ultimately the Safeguarding Children Partnership itself takes a view.
Any individual or agency can follow this process but is infrequently used, despite the dissatisfaction with children’s services referrals, approximately a third of referrals being declined and 61% of referrals/assessments with no further action being subsequently re-referred (AfC, 2018).
Some local authorities encourage discussion if there are differences of view, recognising that aspects of the concern may have been lost in the communication or that better understanding of when the local authority will become involved will lead to improved use of the referral process in future. Where you disagree with the outcome of a child protection referral always follow the procedure, discuss in supervision and actively consider your local escalation or dispute resolution process.
Summary
There’s no silver bullet here, nothing that will radically change the systemic barriers surrounding the referral process at present. However, by following these steps you can be clear you have approached the situation analytically and where appropriate have created a robust referral that has the best chance of success, hopefully in conjunction with the family.
Should you find yourself stuck, seek support. Use your supervisor, seek advice from your local authority, consider the Safeguarding Children Partnership escalation or case resolution policy. Members can contact Safeguarding Network for free initial safeguarding advice.
It is difficult, exposing, even risky sometimes to stand for what you believe, but all the more so if you are the young person involved. They are lucky to have you involved.
Suggested actions
|
