Sarah Laue, a social worker in Wandsworth children’s services for eight years, has recently become a team manager. It’s a job she loves, but the workload is demanding: “Sometimes you have to reprioritise because you’re not going to get everything done. You have to be constantly thinking on your feet, which is a challenge, but it’s also one of the things that keeps us in it, because there’s never a day the same.”
In the coming year, however, Laue’s team of five social workers will take on new members. Wandsworth’s children’s services will adopt the family safeguarding model, a method for more effectively tackling the “trio of vulnerabilities” common to most child safeguarding cases: domestic abuse, parental mental ill health and parental substance misuse. Experts in each of those three areas will be shared across two teams, so that instead of referring a parent to an addiction service, for example, there will be a team member who can work with the family to tackle the problem immediately.
Family safeguarding was pioneered by Hertfordshire children’s services in 2015, where it was so successful that it is now used in other local authorities such as Bracknell Forest and West Berkshire. Wandsworth, supported by Department for Education funding, will be the first London borough to adopt the model.
So what prompted Wandsworth to change to this new way of working? Louise Jones, principal child and family social worker, says that, as in Hertfordshire, the majority of concerns Wandsworth deals with in interventions are linked to at least one of the trio of vulnerabilities. By putting in place multidisciplinary teams, with co-located professionals, it will be possible to deliver particular interventions to families in a “really rapid and timely way”. Domestic abuse is the biggest single reason that families come to her service’s attention, and the hope is that the model will result in a more robust approach to tackling the problem, which will reduce the number of police callouts to domestic abuse incidents.
As Laue points out, currently, if there’s a significant incident of domestic abuse, it may be several weeks before an intervention is possible. With a domestic abuse specialist as part of the team, it’s possible to intervene straight away. “Parents are more likely to be engaged in that moment than if they’ve waited 10 weeks for an intervention,” she says. This early intervention, Jones hopes, will ultimately reduce the number of children growing up in the care system.
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This has certainly been the case in Hertfordshire, which saw significant and speedy results. In the first year of implementation, the time children spent in the care system was cut by 39%. Even more remarkably, the benefits extended outside children’s services, with a 66% reduction in repeat police callouts to domestic abuse incidents, a 53% reduction in emergency hospital admissions for adults and a 36% improvement in pupils’ attendance at school.
A key feature of the approach is the use of motivational interviewing, a technique that requires social workers to listen to parents empathically and work with them to develop a plan for change. The idea is not to be judgmental, but to start work from parents’ strengths. Social workers throughout Wandsworth children’s services will be trained in the technique in the coming months.
Jones believes that the model will enable children’s services to provide more targeted support to families. Sometimes a social worker might want input from a mental health specialist and this becomes a conversation about thresholds for intervention. It can be frustrating if the social worker can see poor mental health affecting a parent’s capacity to parent their child. “One of the hopes is that the family safeguarding teams will be able to tailor specific interventions for those families, and they will not have to be preoccupied with referral criteria, referral forms, waiting lists, because they’ll be able to work with all these issues in their team,” says Jones. “They’ll be able to create a much more bespoke plan for that child and that plan will be focused on what we’re trying to achieve for that child.”
As well as bringing clear, measurable benefits for children and their families, the model also makes working life more immediately rewarding for social workers. Because teams are co-located, social workers will spend less time on making and recording telephone calls, meetings and visits. Escalation – such as applying for a child protection order – will happen less often, Laue points out, immediately reducing the huge workload associated with those processes, such as writing reports or giving evidence: “That then frees your time to be on the ground doing the work, being closer to children and families.”
Jones agrees. As well as a reduced workload, she says, social workers will have access to multidisciplinary thinking about how best to support a family and create a safe environment for children: “It would be any children’s social worker’s dream to be able to work in a team where they have ready access to those professionals without having to complete a referral form and arrange a meeting. They will all be sitting in one team and they will all be contributing to the work undertaken with the family.”
