“Child protection” is a key area of past success for the CRCF which is being expanded with a focus on:
1. Serious case reviews – Policy and practice for children at risk in their families and communities continue to be influenced by lessons learned from enquiries into cases of child death and serious injury. The requirement for Local Children Safeguarding Boards to hold a serious case review (SCRs) in such instances and for these to be collectively reviewed biennially has led to four consecutive DfE funded projects 2003-2011. Led by Marian Brandon, the Centre seeks to develop recommendations for policy and practice and has created a database containing over 800 cases.
2. Children’s participation and child protection - A further message from the serious case reviews was the importance of listening to the child’s voice. Cossar and Brandon were awarded funding by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) to explore this key issue by undertaking a study of children’s views of child protection procedures. This led to the publication by the OCC of Don’t make assumptions (2011) and was the foundation for another successful bid led by Jeanette Cossar for a broader study (2011-13) funded by the OCC on children’s perception of risk, which included child researchers in the project team.
3. Family Intervention - In parallel to the present and previous Governments’ concern to learn lessons from serious case reviews has been a concern to develop interventions in the community that could tackle the difficulties of ‘troubled families’ before children need out of home placement. June Thoburn was funded by London Borough of Westminster to conduct an evaluation of their Family Intervention Project (FIP). The project used ethnographic and other data to understand the multi-agency intervention strategy, but also to highlight the significant challenges of work with complex families and to raise concerns about payment by results approaches. In addition an economic analysis was conducted by Sara Connolly who estimated the costs of the intervention using a ‘bottom’ up method based on time spent on each family using work logs.
4. Child Sexual Exploitation - A project (2012 -14) directed by Jane Dodsworth, funded by BASPCAN, focuses on young people at risk of grooming and sexual exploitation. This is an area of great current concern and this project will engage young people at risk in sharing their experiences in order for guidance for professionals (social workers but also community workers and police) to be better informed.
5. Partnership by Law? The pre-proceedings process for families on the edge of care proceedings - Jonathan Dickens and Julie Young from the CRCF worked with colleagues from the School of Law at Bristol University on an ESRC-funded study of the ‘pre-proceedings process’. This is used when a local authority is considering starting care proceedings on a child. Provided it is safe to do so, the authority should send the parents a ‘letter before proceedings’, outlining their concerns and inviting them to a meeting to discuss them. The parents are entitled to attend the meeting with a lawyer. The aim is to avoid going to court, or, if that is not possible, to narrow the issues in dispute so that proceedings can advance more swiftly.
The process was introduced in England and Wales in April 2008, so the aims of the research were to investigate how it was being put into practice, whether it diverted cases from court, or for those which did go, whether it had any impact on what happened in court. The study ran from 2010-2012, in six local authorities in England and Wales. It included a case file survey (207 cases), observations of 36 meetings and interviews with more than 90 key informants, including parents.
The full report is available here and the summary report here.
