Taking Children into Care Inquiry
Item 2 is oral evidence in our inquiry into decision making on whether to take children into care. We have to date had a considerable amount of written evidence, so we now move to the phase of taking oral evidence. We published prior to the Easter recess an interim report that asked a number of particular questions of the Scottish Government. Over the coming weeks, we will take oral evidence from a number of witnesses.
I welcome to the committee Annette Bruton, who is the chief executive of the Care Inspectorate, and Lawrie Davidson, who is its head of inspection, criminal justice and young people’s services; Stella Everingham, who is head of integrated children’s services at Scottish Borders Council, and who is today representing the Association of Directors of Social Work; and Anna Fowlie, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Social Services Council. Good morning to everyone.
If you do not mind, I will begin with a question that has arisen from a number of visits that we have done and people we have spoken to—in particular, young people. At issue is the length of time for which they have been left before being taken into care. The majority of people we spoke to who had been through the care system expressed to us that although they had been identified as having been in neglectful situations, and social work and other support services had become involved—sometimes through schools and sometimes not—and despite identification of a particular problem, they had been left for many years with little or no improvement in their position. The reason for their eventual removal from the parental home was their behaviour rather than the neglectful situation in which they found themselves and in which they had been for a number of years. Can you please try to explain to us why that seems to be a common experience for young people who are going through the care system?
Annette Bruton (Care Inspectorate)
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to come along and speak to the committee. I do not know whether this will explain the situation—it certainly will not excuse it.
We have observed that one of the contributory factors in the length of time that it can take for a young person to be taken into care is often that there is a particular incident or episode in which there is an intervention by the professionals, and an assessment around that particular incident or episode, and when the intervention has laid to rest the perceived problem, there is a drawing back from the family again.
We have observed that where professionals—particularly multiprofessional groups—take a longitudinal view and look at the sum of the parts rather than just at the most recent episode—quite often the episode in itself is not enough to take a child into care—as children do themselves when they look back, the pace at which children are given the support that they need when they need it can increase. We have seen a bit of improvement in that sense and have observed that more holistic and longitudinal assessment can make a tangible difference.
Stella Everingham (Association of Directors of Social Work)
This probably goes to the core of how social workers work with families, because social workers focus on helping and supporting parents in their parenting task. There is in social workers quite often a sense of optimism that there is the capacity for families to make changes, and that the parents will make changes. Social workers work alongside families, looking for change; they will see some incremental change and improvements, and will keep working.
However, they are not necessarily, as is sometimes acknowledged in the profession, seeing enough of the all-round picture of what is going on in families. If they did, they might start to think “Well, maybe this isn’t good enough.” However, there are then difficulties about framing grounds for going to a sheriff on neglect, for example, which are much more difficult than incidental grounds—there is more clarity in respect of getting evidence around an incident. To get evidence around neglect requires consistent long-term assessment, which can be much more problematic.
There is also the tension between parents’ rights and children’s rights, because there is a focus on wanting to support the parent and on wanting to ensure that they can achieve. The parents themselves are quite often well intentioned, so it is about how we can identify whether their parenting capacity is going to be good enough. I think that there is a sense in the profession that we are quite often overoptimistic, because if we were not and did not really believe in change, we would not be doing the job that we are doing. However, that overoptimism sometimes lead us down the route of seeing change and thinking that it will stay, so we then move out of families—as Annette Bruton said—only to come back to them later and find that things have slipped right back, because we have not understood whether parents had the capacity to make a change permanently for their children.
You will not be surprised to hear that the phrase “overoptimistic social workers” is not new to us in this inquiry.
How can we change the system? How can it be improved and be made more akin to what young people who go through the system expect or have a right to demand?
Anna Fowlie (Scottish Social Services Council)
I will make a brief comment on that. It would be helpful to look at timescales from the child’s perspective. Timescales can feel to adults like just a short time; as we all know, time passes more quickly as we get older whereas, for a child, three months or six months is a very long time. We need to change people’s awareness so that they think of the child’s perception of time rather than about adults’ perception of the timescales of processes.
I agree; I am sure that that is true. However, the kind of timescales that we are talking about are not related to a child’s perception of time but to actual time. We are talking about four years up to more than 10 years between initial contact from professionals to eventual removal of children from the home. In all the cases that we have heard about—although this might not be the case everywhere—we were told that the reason for removal was the extent to which the young person’s behaviour had broken down. That is nothing to do with the point that you make. I put that on the record simply because it is an important point for us to address.
I will make a point that is linked to my first point. We have seen some practice that seems to be making a difference. When a child has been monitored for a significant length of time—they might be on the register, they might be being considered for the register or they might be being looked after at home—it seems to make a difference when the social worker who undertakes a case review takes a longitudinal view. When their manager reviews the case with them, that seems to create a bit of pace in the decision-making process.
However, a practice that we have seen recently is local authorities and their partners bringing in independent people to chair case reviews. That seems to be making a significant difference, because it brings a fresh pair of eyes to proceedings. I agree with Stella Everingham that optimism is a positive thing, as well as sometimes being an inhibitor to social work professionals. It can sometimes help to get a fresh pair of eyes, in the form of an independent reviewer, to look at a situation from a different perspective long before the children’s panel stage. That is a piece of good practice that we have highlighted recently.
In some of the developments around getting it right for every child, real steps forward will be made in giving social workers the tools that they require. We have new risk-assessment tools that are very helpful, and which need to bed in. We are starting to use chronologies much more effectively. When we look at an issue such as neglect, chronology is extremely important and is to do with identifying all the issues in a child’s life. A chronology provides the longitudinal view that Annette Bruton mentioned. Instead of just saying, “There has been an incident today,” a chronology makes it possible to see that the same incident occurred the previous year or that the most recent incident happened in the context of what happened previously. That is helping us; social work is becoming much more conscious of the usefulness of chronologies.
I know that the committee has heard in evidence that health and education professionals often feel that they understand what is going on in children’s lives and try to tell social workers about it, but that social workers indicate that the thresholds are not met. The much more integrated assessments that we are starting to do are much more effective at bringing in such agencies’ perspectives. We might previously have taken the view that a particular incident did not reach the threshold. Perhaps it did not, but perhaps the life of the child concerned as seen through the eyes of the classroom teacher or of the health visitor is much more to do with the long-term eroding effect of the lack of nurture that we know is a consistent factor in neglect cases.
I genuinely think that the change that we are starting to see in the way in which people are doing assessments is having an effect. That change is not radical—multi-agency assessments have always been undertaken—but assessments are now much more integrated. They involve the various partners understanding one another’s views and taking a longer-term perspective of children’s lives. Although that will start to improve practice, it comes back to having skilled professionals who know what they see. We can give people the best risk-assessment tools in the world, but unless they are good professionals who know how to use them and who understand the nature of the evidence that they see, assessment will not improve.
I have a final question before I bring in Liz Smith. A difficult issue is particular factors that might be seen—certainly on the surface—to lead to neglect. I am talking about alcohol misuse, domestic violence and drug misuse. I know that we want to deal with all cases individually and to treat every child as an individual, but is it unreasonable to use such factors as part of the evidence when we consider whether we should go in earlier or more often, instead of ignoring them and dealing with every case on an individual basis? I know that that is a difficult question from the point of view of stereotyping people, but given the correlation between neglect and those factors, is it unreasonable of us not to take those factors into account?
In the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011, which will come into force soon, some of the grounds are very specific. For example, if a child is living in a family in which domestic abuse, drugs and substance misuse or alcohol abuse are potentially taking place, those things are viewed as factors and are grounds on which we can start to gather evidence.
10:15
As we said in our submission, every case is different. The ways in which alcohol impacts on families might differ, but that does not mean that we should not take that factor into account. If we see a multiplicity of such factors, we start to get really anxious. We will look at the situation and say, “We need some really good evidence that those factors are not having an impact”, rather than approach it the other way round. We would not do it by numbers—for example, adding up four of those factors so that they come to 10, and then taking the child away. That is not how we look at the situation, although we certainly view such factors as being significant.
When we inspect children’s services, we look at exactly how the risks are identified and whether they are taken into account. We believe that they should be taken into account in the decision-making criteria, although not by themselves.
In our submission, we have presented some of the findings from our second round of child protection inspections, which are due to be published in the next few weeks. One thing on which we will report is that, where professionals and experts are working with adults in a family to address drug and alcohol addiction, sharing information with children’s social workers seems to make a difference. However, we will also report that we are disappointed in how slow those two separate services have been in developing joint plans for families.
We believe that, although there is a much better attitude to information sharing in that area, there is potential for more joint working between the services that support parents with drug and alcohol addiction problems and the services for children. It is right that children and adults have separate social workers because they have different needs, but we would like to see a faster joining-up of those endeavours.
The ADSW states clearly in its submission—Stella Everingham has repeated it this morning—that such cases are enormously complex, and that if we are going to get the right answer we must deal with each case by addressing its own complexities. However, that highlights the biggest issue that the committee faces in handling the problem: a number of those who have given evidence to us, including local authorities, have said that they want much more consistency in the decision-making process throughout Scotland. The two things do not quite go together. Where should the balance lie? Should we focus on one particular aspect?
The two things are not mutually exclusive. If we train professionals to understand the nature of their task and what they are looking at, they should start to come up with similar answers when faced with instances of similar circumstances.
I hope that there would, if we were to have a room full of experienced social workers working on a case study, be a high level of consistency among them on the issues on which they were focusing. I think that we can move forward with that approach.
The lack of capacity for keeping experienced, qualified social workers on the front line bedevils most of what we do. People who have a number of years’ experience and are prepared to stay are like hens’ teeth. In my authority, we are currently facing a real struggle to get people who have been qualified for a number of years. We get newly qualified workers who are very enthusiastic, but they do not have the appropriate level of expertise. People need to work through a number of cases to begin to understand—as was mentioned—the level of consistency in what they are seeing.
We can give people tools to do that. For example, we have a tool in the Scottish Borders—I am sure that a lot of other authorities have similar tools—that focuses on keeping our children safe. It outlines the thresholds at which social workers undertake certain interactions—there are thresholds for child protection and for concerns about wellbeing. Development of that nationally would be helpful so that we can work together. However, if we want consistency, we need to train people to a very experienced level, with more emphasis on national training programmes. There is a child protection certificate that people can work towards, and there should perhaps be an emphasis on getting people to do that so that there is a consistent approach.
Your written evidence mentions that there being insufficient experience is
“influenced by the fact that there is no professional or financial advantage for social workers to remain in this field”.
What must we do to ensure that that can be reversed?
That is a difficult question. Many local authorities had opportunities to do that, but through single status they found it a real struggle to identify people along a scale of doing different things, because we are talking about the sort of consultant social worker who remains on the front line. If we look at job evaluation schemes, they do not come out very well from that. The changing lives programme was very clear that we should look at the autonomous practitioner and at being able to develop people who can stay on front-line practice. Maybe a discussion needs to take place with ADSW on how we can influence our local authorities on understanding that.
There are other factors. It is a very demanding and difficult job to stay on the front line, with the nature of cases such as we have been talking about and the distress that people deal with. Publicity in the media is not helpful. When the baby P issue hit, social workers took a real blow. We lose people from the profession and people in the children side of social work say that they do not want to stay there and will go and do something else that is not quite so much in the front line. I am not sure where in social work they would go where they would not be so much in the front-line, because that is becoming much more of a factor.
The support that can be given to the profession and children and families social workers is a factor. In Scotland, that support has been much more effective, up to this point, than it has been in England, although more could be done to support the profession. It is certainly helpful when there is political support behind what is being done.
To go back to Liz Smith’s point about consistency, Stella Everingham, as someone from the Scottish Borders Council, is probably familiar with the argument that I get in relation to Orkney, which is that as a smaller council it is not that you are not dealing with many of the same issues, but that you are not dealing with them at the same level. Is there a consistency issue that is more a reflection of the size and scale of councils and social work operations than it is a reflection of the individual decisions that individual social workers make?
I have worked in Shetland and London; the issues are the same, although the scale might be different. Scottish Borders Council might have fewer resources than, perhaps, the department in Glasgow; our office might have two child protection cases coming in on an afternoon, and I have only one social worker, but in Glasgow there might be five or six cases coming in and they have three social workers. What we see is very similar.
Some bigger authorities can support workers more effectively because they have better structures. On the balance of whether volume will overwhelm, there are critical factors about resources. Cities can sometimes develop better resources—for example, families can walk to a volunteer drop-in centre. If I have got somebody up a track in the Ettrick valley, they are not going to be able to do that. There is an issue about how people can access services.
The development of services has to be based around the nature of the community and what we can do. That does not have a massive impact on decisions about when a child comes into care. There are individual practitioners whose thresholds will be developed by working in particular environments and that is why good supervision is required to ensure that people are constantly checking out how they make decisions.
The message that I get from some constituents is that were they in Edinburgh, Glasgow or even Aberdeen or Inverness, they would be less likely to have come to the attention of social work than is the case in Orkney, simply by dint of the fact that they are in a community of 20,000 as opposed to one of half a million.
Communities have different tolerance levels, so one community might see something and expect agencies to do something about it. However, all children go to school and have general practitioners, so the nature and coverage of which professionals are going to be seeing children and raising concerns are very similar. Communities will be different because of visibility.
I want to ask the panel about training issues. The centre for excellence for looked-after children in Scotland recently described a lack of understanding and assessment skills displayed by social workers in decision making. How can we improve training among social workers in those areas?
I cannot avoid answering that question, because the SSSC regulates training of social workers. The social work degree will have been in place for 10 years next year, and we are about to review it. The review will address consistency in decision making, which we have just been discussing, and which was one of the drivers for reviewing the degree. One key element is around assessment, with measurement and quality assurance against the standards in social work education that the Scottish Executive introduced in 2003.
Assessment is absolutely key. People are trained in assessment while they are at university. They get the tools, the knowledge and all the stuff around assessment. Then, they go to a practice placement and they have to operate in that world. They are assessed during the placement on their assessment skills. When they return to the learning environment, they are encouraged to reflect on that. The degree process involves assessment skills, reviewing skills, gathering evidence, risk management and all the stuff that goes together to inform a good assessment. Assessment is one of the key strengths that social work brings to the multidisciplinary context of child protection and looked-after children’s issues.
As Stella Everingham mentioned, and as we have just been discussing, the assessment process and the decision-making process are not just down to social workers, although they play a key part. Increasingly, other people’s assessments are being integrated into the process. Psychologists, teachers and early-years professionals—who, until recently, were never considered as part of the process—are now very much part of it. Children and parents are also contributing. It is important for all those people to be heard.
The social worker is the one who is best trained—usually—in using assessment skills, which are included in the degree. The degree has been in place only since 2004, and a lot of work is required with people who have been in the profession for longer so that they can maintain their skills. Councils and other employers of social workers carry out that work regularly.
Supervision forms a key part of assessment. It involves talking to people regularly about why they have made decisions and why they have arrived at their views in the assessment process. Reflection is an important part of learning, and it is particularly embedded in the social work profession. Referring to the decision-making process, it is needed for children’s panel members, too. They are not doing assessments, but they are assessing assessments, in effect. They need to understand the process and the importance of speedy, good decision making.
We cannot underestimate the impact of children’s panel members, and I suspect that, when local authority representatives were discussing inconsistent decision making, they were referring to panels and sheriffs. Work needs to be done with those people, too—although that is not my territory, so I will not stray into it.
I will pick up on one point that Anna Fowlie has just made about assessment needing to come not just from social work professionals. They have key skills in assessment, as Anna said, but teachers, for example, are giving better assessments than they gave in the past. Traditionally, teachers would have said something about the child’s attendance and behaviour, as a minimum. As part of our children’s services inspections, we are raising the bar on what we expect to see from the teachers, health professionals and community learning development workers who work with a family. It is a matter of their contributing and discussing their experience of the child’s wellbeing; it is not just about the things that are easy to measure. Potentially, that makes the assessment process more complex, if also potentially richer. That goes back to the convener’s question about how we can speed up action where it needs to be taken.
The point about social workers being good at assessment is well made, but that in itself will not do. In our inspections, we will be looking to see that everybody is contributing effectively to the assessment process and not just holding in their head the things that they think are broadly relevant; normally, for example, teachers would just comment on behaviour and attendance in schools.
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I think that there is a consensus that increased and improved training is needed in those areas, but we know that multidisciplinary decision making is varied across the country. Obviously, lots of professionals are involved in the decision-making process in relation to children in the system. Is there a need for improved training broadly across the spectrum or should it focus on any specific areas or professionals? For example, does a health visitor need as much increased training as a teacher?
Before that question is dealt with, I will read out a quote from this week’s Times Educational Supplement.
Is that from me?
Yes. On the training of social workers, you said:
“We don’t have the kind of standards you would get in a Scandinavian country, but we are ahead of the rest of the UK in relation to enforcing qualifications and trying to drive up standards.”
I was referring not only to the training of social workers but to the qualifications of people working with children in care.
Given that quote and Neil Bibby’s questions, perhaps you could expand on that.
We are the only part of the UK that is looking at qualification-based registration for the whole of the social service workforce. Wales and Northern Ireland also have, for example, qualifications for residential childcare workers, but we have led the way on that and we are developing, as commissioned by the Scottish Government, a degree-level qualification for people working in residential childcare. All the evidence—it is why the decision was made as a result of the national residential child care initiative a few years back—is that children who are with people with qualifications have better outcomes. The qualification makes a difference, whether that is in early years services, residential childcare or wherever.
Our register is based on that approach—having qualified workers means having skilled and confident workers, too. Obviously, we are not involved in other areas or professions that were mentioned. However, there is a clear need—it has been recognised, I think, through the work on the common core skills, GIRFEC, integrated assessment and all the work that has been going on for years—for all those professions to have more and better training, particularly on child development, and on assessment and decision making.
The common core skills will make a difference, but we need more multidisciplinary training so that the words used mean the same in the same context, because the language that is used is different for different professions. People have different tolerance levels and expectations and they come at it from a different world view. The more people are training together, the more that separation of world views can be broken down. That is important.
I have one last question. The SSSC’s written evidence referred to the proposal to move from two Scottish vocational qualification awards to one. Why do you support that? Obviously, I understand the reasons behind merging the two, but is there a danger that, by moving from two specialist awards to a general one, that specialism is being diluted? Is that a concern?
We will take that into account and ensure that that does not happen. The proposal is about breaking down silos, so that, for example, people who work in early years services are not looking at education rather than children and that people who work in other services who are looking at the social or health aspects of a child, look at the child as a whole. That is important. Therefore, the SVQ should cover all those aspects. People have to meet a level—there is no way that the qualification would be diluted to the extent that you would be fearful of. They must meet specific standards and we will ensure that they meet those standards.
I want to tie up Liz Smith’s question and what Neil Bibby has been pursuing with the attrition rate that Stella Everingham referred to. Is there any indication about whether the training that is done through the current or revised qualifications will address the attrition rate, or does more need to be done on continuous professional development to deal with that problem, rather than up-front or multidisciplinary training?
The route for social workers beyond their qualifying training is not as well defined as it should be. In the ADSW, we quite often discuss how we get experienced professionals who can develop their skills.
Risk assessment and assessment are grounded in understanding not only the use of evidence and information but child development. There are many added things that social workers cannot necessarily get in their degree course. They get a lot but, when they graduate and start to practise, they realise that it is complicated. The course is much more generic and then they focus in on a particular area.
In Scotland, social workers can do a certificate, a diploma and various other things, but not everybody gets the opportunity to do them. We are not consistent enough in ensuring that social workers get those opportunities. We need multi-agency training, but we also need confident professionals who are able to know what they see.
In Scottish Borders Council, we try to ensure that all social workers who have done two years get to do the child protection certificate. We do not particularly go beyond that, so we are not paying for many people to do the diploma. That is a real shame, because there are people who should go on and develop.
A much stronger pathway for post-qualification development would help.
I will ask about training, support and guidance from Government. A number of key skills are listed in the “National Framework for Child Protection learning & development in Scotland 2012”. The list includes the ability to analyse, appraise, identify, evaluate, reflect and review. The skills that the Government identifies are good, but do social workers have time to reflect on and review cases before the next urgent case lands on their desks?
They do not necessarily always have that time. In the social work profession, one of the skills that people learn is to juggle lots of things at the same time, prioritise constantly and see what is important. Social workers have their cases, as they are called, in which they try to work consistently over a long period, but urgent things come in. That is the balancing that social workers do.
You will have heard about the mystical process of supervision. Supervision is critical. It is the period in which social workers stop doing all those things and, with their managers, reflect on where they have got to, think about the decisions that are being made and talk about their ideas. If you think about human behaviour, you see that we are all subjective. Social workers are trying hard to take similar decisions in each case and not think, “I don’t like that case.” It is about being able to apply certain principles to cases, so supervision is critical. Of all the things that social work needs to protect, the most important is the capacity for social workers to take time to reflect. However, there is no doubt that, on busy days or in busy offices, it is extremely difficult to create that space. That is why social workers sometimes get exhausted.
Social workers constantly have to meet all the demands that I mentioned. They have people on the phone saying that they need to do a certain thing, families in distress and people from head office asking them to fill out some form, for example. They are constantly balancing all those things and asking what the most important thing that they do is.
What is the general picture throughout Scotland on resources for social work departments? Tell me if you are not able to answer. Are resources going up or down? How is that impacting on a social worker’s ability to create space to reflect and review?
I am not in a position to answer that. In Scottish Borders Council, some of our resources will go down. I imagine that that will be the case in most of the authorities because of the public sector finances. However, I cannot answer the question.
If resources go down, will that impact negatively on the ability to reflect and review?
We must adjust to what we have. Things change. Whether that will be negative is a good question, because other things come along. One of the thrusts that is coming through under GIRFEC is a change in how we use universal services and how sensitive such services and early intervention are.
I am genuinely hopeful about early intervention. I have not necessarily been hopeful in the past, but real progress is being made on catching issues earlier and on other professionals being able to deal with them if they are given support from social workers. Professionals are not feeling left alone in dealing with some things that, in the past, they would simply have handed over to social workers. They are now saying, “Yes, perhaps we can deal with this much more effectively.”
You commented a moment ago on when a social worker would have the opportunity to discuss cases with their line manager, or a senior social worker. The Care Inspectorate highlighted the importance of strong line management. The only way in which I can get an answer to this question is to ask it directly: how good is senior social work management in Scotland?
Again, I cannot answer that. I think that some senior managers are wonderful and some are struggling. In the social work profession, someone comes in as a new social worker and works through all the processes and gets some experience in very complex cases. The hope is that they will stay on the front line for a number of years so that, when they get their first line management post, they have the expertise to deal with it. Unfortunately, as we have said, lots of people leave the profession, so there is a narrowing or tapering of the number of people who will come in as managers and they may not have a lot of experience. We may employ people sometimes who do not have the experience. We think that they can develop, but they have not necessarily got the required level of expertise. However, the position is variable in that regard and I genuinely believe that the profession has some very good people and that there are some very good line managers.
I asked the question because the Care Inspectorate said, in effect, that it is very important that there is strong management to support strong decision making by front-line social workers. If the position is variable and there is inconsistency across the country—I do not deny that there are very good people out there doing a tremendous job—it is of concern that individual social workers are doing their best but do not have back-up from their line management. Are you concerned that that is the position across the country, or is there no more variation than you would expect in any profession?
In the discussions that we had when preparing our submission—they are probably the best evidence that I have, because we do not always sit around discussing such matters in a way that would allow me to respond to you other than anecdotally—there was a level of concern that, because people do not stay in the profession, it is hard to keep good people in as managers. Some may stay in the profession but not in children’s services, moving perhaps to mental health or adult services, or they move to the voluntary sector rather than stay in local authorities.
I certainly think that there is a case to be made for having post-qualifying support for the role of supervisor of cases, which involves a very different process from that for a social worker undertaking cases. I always used to think of it as being like doing social work with oven gloves on, because we do not necessarily have the family in front of us or have all the evidence, which we have to tease out from the social worker. That is a different process that involves facilitating, helping and supporting somebody else to do the task that the supervisor might have been quite good at. However, they may not be very good as a supervisor, so there is some testing out as well.
Given that it was the Care Inspectorate that made the point about management, what is your view and Lawrie Davidson’s view on the issue?
Lawrie Davidson may want to talk in a minute about how management looks at front-line services. However, we made the point about management because we found in the first round of child protection inspections that, where there were weaknesses in services, management was often a critical point because supervision was loose or not sufficiently robust or timeous. When we went back to reinspect councils about which we had concerns, we saw improvements where the situation had been highlighted. We therefore think that there is evidence that there has been some improvement in that regard over the past six years. Having said that, I think that the position is still variable.
Stella Everingham described the juggling that social workers do, but their social work managers are often juggling as well. That leads to the very episodic types of assessment to which I referred earlier and which are counterproductive and not holistic for children. We believe that supervision and the view of a supervising senior social worker are critical to not missing things, ensuring that the pace is picked up and helping with social work practice. We think that there has been some improvement but that there is still quite a lot of variability across the country.
10:45
Lawrie Davidson (Care Inspectorate)
In measuring, we now use quality indicators in the inspection of children’s services. That includes looking quite closely at management and leadership in those services, and reporting on that. We know from service-led inspections that the quality of a service is very much dependent on the quality of the management and leadership in that service, and there is no reason to believe that that would not be the same for the authorities that commission services for children.
In management and leadership, it is key to have an overview of both the implementation of the training, ensuring that it has the best impact and outcomes for children and families, and the strategic responsibilities of the authority, the social work department and perhaps the services that are being used to support children and families. Management and leadership are very much a key issue.
We are doing quite a lot of work to develop leadership and management pathways, but we are conscious of the fact that people are focusing primarily on leadership at the moment while the “and management” part gets a bit lost, although it is really important. We are doing some work on pathways for people as they move through their careers, giving them tools that they and their employers can use to plan their development of those skills. Supervision comes up in just about every context, and social work has a good model of supervision that other professions could learn from. Having the time to do it properly is crucial, as is having those skills, as Stella Everingham said, so, in the coming six months, we will do quite a bit of work on supervision and trying to develop those skills.
In the course of our inquiry, we have spoken to care leavers and an issue that has come across strongly is their dissatisfaction with the number of moves that they have had during their childhood and the inappropriate moves that they have had—say, across local authority boundaries—when they have been separated from siblings. The Care Inspectorate has also told us, in its written evidence, that permanency planning is still not good enough although there are some examples of good practice. Where are those examples of good practice, and how can we move more quickly to proper permanency planning?
Who would like to start on that?
That sounds like a question for the Care Inspectorate. We are very much aware of the delays in permanency for children. In our joint inspections of children’s services, we are seeing an improvement that comes back to the issue of management, leadership and supervision. Where authorities are performing better in that area, it is because they have established new posts in the fostering and adoption services and front-line staff are getting support in looking at the blockages and working towards undoing them to move forward with permanency for children.
Out-of-authority placements are not just an issue for fostering or permanency for children; they are also an issue when children are separated from their families and siblings to go into residential childcare. The Care Inspectorate is keen to work with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, for example, on the journeys that children make and the impact on them of those journeys. That will help us to better establish what interventions currently take place and how they can be improved for the future.
We see good and speedier practice where local authorities have invested in specialist staff in fostering and adoption. Social workers play a number of different roles, and, where there are specialists who can support the children’s social workers, that can move the process along more quickly. We also see better practice on keeping families together and moving the children to permanency more often.
We keep coming back to the point about moving away from episodic assessment and actually taking a view, but it is relevant to Ms McAlpine’s well-made question about why it is taking so long. If we move more quickly to take a view when it is necessary to take children into care, we can begin to plan for permanency right away. That can be quite tricky with younger children and siblings, although there is another difficult, vexed question about older children and getting them into permanency. However, a combination of specialist staff and early action following holistic assessment is making a big difference, and children are telling us it is making a difference to their lives.
Joan McAlpine’s question is a huge one as it covers a range of different things. I think that that is why I was slightly thrown by it. I will take a couple of areas and see whether I can offer some comments on them.
One critical area is to try to get work from an early point on planning for permanency. In some cases, we know that children are not going to be able to make it in their families, if you like. There will be families from which a number of children have already been removed and the parents have not changed, and in such circumstances the child will be removed. We need good pre-birth planning so that we start before the baby is born. That involves working with people to understand what they will be able to offer as parents, and we need to try to work with some consent around that.
We are seeing some good examples of such work being done across Scotland. In those examples, babies are being placed with carers either at or just after birth, and there are some quick processes. We have a team in the Scottish Borders and we have seen examples of babies being adopted by eight months. That is phenomenal. It is a year earlier than before. It involves a lot of work and they are exceptional cases, but there are more of them. We can do more of that work. It is really helpful if we can identify them pre-birth. That requires good connectivity with midwifery services, because that is sometimes where difficulties in families are identified. A lot of work is being done across Scotland on early identification, and there is a move to that.
There are some difficult things in the permanency process. Some of our legislation is a bit convoluted and a number of steps in it are creating blocks that are slowing things down between the children’s hearings system and sheriffs and what happens around that. There would probably be some benefit in looking at that. Also, the court system itself sometimes slows things down. There is what we call a revolving door of assessment whereby we have already assessed a family and we have an opinion but we feel the need to go round and assess them again. Sometimes I ask my workers, “Why are we assessing this family again?” That relates to the point about overoptimism. The lack of confidence that people will have sufficient evidence when they appear in front of the sheriff and the belief that they have to redo it is slowing things down.
Once children get to a certain age—I will not say which age—it is difficult to find permanent families for them. People are often looking for younger children. Sometimes we get people who are looking for older children, but it is much more difficult to place them. When children get to a certain age, their chances of getting a permanent placement start to drop with their age. That is very hard for them. A distressed, unhappy child can push the boundaries and carers can feel that they can no longer cope with them. In some cases, we see children start to move. Once they have moved once or twice, they start to feel rejected and there are difficulties with their capacity to engage with parents and accept another family. They push against the boundaries and we see them move on again and again, which is not what should be happening.
Authorities are struggling to recruit enough foster carers in the right places and for the right ages. In the Borders, we have difficulty in getting carers who will take adolescents, who are seen as much more problematic and difficult, although sometimes they are not.
There is a whole set of things that build in difficulties. A piece of work needs to be done in Scotland on permanency. It needs to look at the barriers and at the court processes, because social workers can only do so much. Sometimes we cannot speed things up. We need to look at some unnecessary kinks that the legislation has put back into the system—some permanency professionals are much more au fait with the issue, but the profession is encountering that problem and we could do something to speed things up.
There is a tension between the rights of parents and the rights of children, because removing a baby from someone for ever is a huge issue in respect of the rights of the parents. People are very circumspect about making such a difficult decision.
Notwithstanding the legal difficulties that the witnesses outlined, you all said that there are examples of very good practice and areas where things are not working well. How can we ensure that there is good practice throughout Scotland? If things are being done right somewhere, why cannot we roll out the good practice, so that more children benefit?
In our supplementary written evidence to the committee, we provided links to examples of good practice. In our capacity as the Care Inspectorate, we can certainly draw attention to good practice. It might be possible to issue new guidance or guidelines in relation to permanency, so that we build on good practice, as Stella Everingham suggested.
There is nothing to stop social workers and other professionals—all the professionals need to be involved, including those in health and education—looking at good practice and trying to adopt it. Not all practice transfers, but if we can identify critical success factors in more than one place, we might feed them into the review or guidance on permanency that the committee might be seeking to get out of this inquiry.
The convener mentioned the care leavers whom we visited, who talked about their experiences. Often, a trigger for their removal from their families had been the behaviour that they were displaying, which brought them to the attention of other agencies. They expressed concern that younger siblings were often left behind and that those siblings’ outcomes were no better than theirs were—in some cases, tragically, their siblings’ outcomes were much worse. Has the approach changed? The witnesses talked about taking an holistic view; is it an holistic view of the family? Is the experience of the older children reflected in decisions about the younger ones?
That is a very good question. There are tensions at work: we want to try to keep siblings together, but sometimes we make decisions based on the children as a group, to the detriment of individual children. We sometimes find that an individual child’s needs are not met because we are seeing the children or the family as a group, rather than as individuals. A child in a family might have additional support needs that are different from their siblings’ needs. Every child needs an individual plan.
I recognise what you are saying, and you are absolutely right. What you said is something that practitioners hear from children all the time: a child’s behaviour tips them into a situation that is sometimes better for them, but they are deeply conscious that they are leaving siblings behind—the child is often the oldest in the family and very often the oldest boy in the family. I am not sure that I know the answer, but we know that there is a tension between seeing children as a family group and necessarily meeting their individual needs. I do not think that I have an easy answer to your question, Ms Adamson.
It has gone slightly dark, but we will carry on. The microphones are still working. Does Clare Adamson want to ask a follow-up question?
No.
One or two key points are jumping out at me. The Care Inspectorate and the ADSW both raised issues to do with training and variable practice. For example, the Care Inspectorate referred to
“variability amongst staff making recommendations”.
The centre for excellence for looked-after children in Scotland has expressed concern that
“As well as demonstrating a lack of knowledge about all child development, not just attachment ... social workers were often unable to exercise any analytical or critical thinking skills.”
Again, according to the inspectorate,
“Performance inspections ... found that two thirds of assessments in children’s records were of a good or better standard.”
I would not say that two thirds represents a particularly good proportion; moreover, I ask the Care Inspectorate to define the term “better”, because it does not sound like it equates to “good”. In that respect, the real pass rate might be less than two thirds.
The tendency is to look on the enforcement of compliance as a police action. To what extent does the Care Inspectorate contribute to the learning side of things, which, according to a number of sources, is clearly substantially deficient?
11:00
On your first question, our inspections are based on a six-point scale ranging from “Unsatisfactory” to “Excellent”. “Good” is the fourth point on the scale, which then goes to “Very Good” to “Excellent”. Two thirds of the assessments are at least good, but some of them will also be “Very Good” or “Excellent”. What we are saying is that a third of the assessments are only adequate or worse; in other words, they are not passing muster.
Your second point is very well made. The Care Inspectorate seeks—and, indeed, the three previous bodies that came together as the inspectorate sought—to bring together both strategic inspections and the inspection of regulated services. One of the pieces of work that it has been asked to carry out by Scottish ministers and which in fact it has been instructed to carry out by our board is to focus more effort on the improvement agenda, which I think is what you are asking about. Having gathered up all this learning and put together all these reports, we are seeing at first hand where the good practice lies, and our three-year plan, which has just been approved by the cabinet secretary, proposes that we spend more time on focusing on supporting improvement and unlocking for the profession some of the learning that we have gathered. That represents a significant sea-change for our organisation both in the way it carries out its role of evaluating the impact of services on children’s lives and in the fact that we will be putting more effort and resources into supporting improvement. In that respect, we will obviously need to work very closely with other public sector partners, particularly the SSSC. In any case, over the next three years you will see a significant change in the inspectorate’s efforts to support improvement.
With regard to your process and in light of CELCIS’s comments about social workers’ skills, to what extent do you assess social workers’ professional judgment in the course of inspections? For example, do you observe their interaction with clients?
In our strategic inspections of children’s services, we examine a statistically relevant number of individual children’s cases—in other words, a number from which we could draw conclusions—read the case files, speak to social workers, the children, their families or foster carers and attend review and panel meetings in an effort to follow the pattern of an individual child’s experience and examine how effectively their needs are being met and whether they are getting interventions when they need them. From the 50 or 60 cases that we might look at if we were inspecting, say, the Scottish Borders, we then extrapolate certain lessons that we might learn from them. Although our strategic inspections do not look at every single child who is receiving an intervention, we look at a reasonable number, follow the process from start to finish and interview the children involved.
We are also looking at methodologies that help children to tell us about their experiences in a more effective way; after all, it is not easy for children to sit down with an inspector whom they have never met. Some looked-after children are working with us on, for example, a computer game that will allow them to express what their life is like and which we will use as part of the inspection methodology.
We are also trying to understand the child’s perspective through recruiting—very successfully, I should say—young people with experience of care, who come on our inspections and act as young person inspectors. That is making a significant difference to our perspective in inspections.
Do you believe that your current process—the sampling and so on—allows you to have an overview of social workers’ professional judgment?
I do not believe that it allows us to comment on each individual social worker’s professional judgment, but if we see poor practice it would be reported to the SSSC as a matter of course. What we can do is look at the impact of that judgment overall on the group of children that we sample as part of the inspection.
I thank the witnesses for what has been a very interesting opening oral evidence session in this part of our inquiry. There will no doubt be a number of questions—I can think of one or two already—that we would like to follow up in writing, so we will do so if the witnesses do not mind.
11:05
Meeting suspended.
11:07
On resuming—