Joanna Nicolas - Practical Guide to Child Protection: The Challenges, Pitfalls and Practical Solutions

PRACTICAL GUIDE TO

CHILD

PROTECTION

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PRACTICAL GUIDE TO

CHILD

PROTECTION

The Challenges, Pitfalls and Practical Solutions

Joanna Nicolas

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

First published in 2015

by Jessica Kingsley Publishers

73 Collier Street

London N1 9BE, UK

and

400 Market Street, Suite 400

Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

www.jkp.com

Copyright Joanna Nicolas 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Nicolas, Joanna.

Practical guide to child protection : the challenges, pitfalls and practical solutions / Joanna Nicolas.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84905-586-4 (alk. paper)

1. Child welfare--Great Britain. 2. Child abuse--Great Britain--Prevention. 3. Social work with children--

Great Britain. I. Title.

HV751.A6N53 2015

362.70941--dc23

2015005196

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84905 586 4

eISBN 978 1 78450 032 0

Introduction

It would be hard to think of many things that are more important than protecting children in our country, and doing all that we can to stop them from being abused or even dying. It sounds so simple, but as those of us that work in this field know, it is hugely challenging and complex work, not just for social workers, but for all the other agencies that play a pivotal role in the work that we all do, trying to ensure that children are safe, protected and thriving. The aim of this book is to help those of you who are working tirelessly to do just that. It is exactly as it says on the cover a practical guide. There are many excellent academic textbooks informing and supporting practice. There are many books on social work theory, how social work has evolved etc. etc. This is not such a book. The purpose of this book is to help all of you who work in child protection deal with all the practical elements of the work that you do, the issues that you grapple with, every single day. I have also written it for those of you who work with adults we need housing officers, probation officers, mental health workers, drugs workers, domestic abuse workers, those in the voluntary sector and everyone else who works with adults to be thinking about the child. This book is for you, to help at a time when we all need all the help we can get.

What I want to emphasise is that I am not an academic and this is an individualistic book written by a practitioner with more than 20 years experience. Throughout the book there is consistent reference to research but much of what is written is my own view of what works and what does not work.

This book is also intended to help the police, teachers, childrens centre workers, health visitors and school nurses and all those working with children. Their day-to-day work includes child protection, but their training in this area during qualifying is minimal, if there is any at all. There are also many other professionals who work with adults that I have mentioned who are seeing, or know of, or should be thinking of, children who may be vulnerable whose pre-qualifying training may include nothing about child protection. For all these professionals, unless they work in specialist teams, or specialist roles, their child protection training post-qualifying may be negligible.

This book is here to help to fill that gap. There will be many references to social work and social workers because they are the lead professionals in all child protection cases, but they could not do the work they do effectively without the multi-agency professional network around them and around the child. As the saying goes, We are all in this together. Our best chance of improving a childs life and, in some cases, saving a childs life, will be if we all understand what our roles and responsibilities are, and if we all work closely together. In order to do that, we need to develop a much greater understanding of what good working together looks like, and why we often find it so hard to achieve. This book will help you do that, and it is here to help with challenges you are presented with every single day.

You may be asking, how do we know what the issues are that we grapple with every single day? Much of our learning comes from serious case reviews. It is a requirement of Local Safeguarding Children Boards to undertake a serious case review whenever a child dies or has been seriously harmed, and it is known or suspected that the child has been maltreated. There may also be a cause for concern as to how agencies have worked together. Serious case reviews are a rich source of learning. Since 2010, 393 serious case reviews have been undertaken. Up until 2011 all of them followed the same methodology. The data was brought together, analysed, and findings were published every two years by M. Brandon and colleagues. In recent years this important source of learning has been lost because Local Safeguarding Children Boards have been able to employ different methodologies when undertaking serious case reviews. This makes it more difficult for researchers to bring the data together to analyse it, although the coalition government did announce, just before the election, that they were going to reintroduce the biannual reviews, which is excellent news.