Tales from the Trenches:
Despatches from the Front Door
of Children’s Social Care
Research Team: Prof Sue White and Dr Karen Broadhurst (University of Lancaster)
Prof David Wastell (University of Nottingham, Business School), Dr Sue Peckover and
Dr Chris Hall (University of Huddersfield), Prof Andy Pithouse (Cardiff University)
• Part of programme of ethnographic studies of
front-line practice and professional reasoning
• Multi-method ethnography
• 5 sites
• Micro-world simulation informed by ethnography
Real Problems: Poisonous Prescriptions?
Modernization and Metrics
• Reform agenda quickly rolled out (‘here’s
one I made earlier’?)
• Key indicators of performance in relation
to child welfare have been set supported
by systems of regulation,
proceduralization and metrics creating
new sources of accountability and blame
Is Policy ‘Informed’ ?
Twenty First Century Government is enabled by technology
– policy is inspired by it, business change is delivered by
it … Moreover modern governments with serious
transformational intent see technology as a strategic
asset and not just a tactical tool. So this strategy’s vision
is about better using technology to deliver public
services and policy outcomes that have an impact on
citizens’ daily lives: through greater choice and
personalisation, delivering better public services, such as
health, education and pensions; benefiting communities
by reducing burdens on front line staff …
(Transformational Government: enabled by technology,
Cabinet Office, 2005)
Dystopiary!!
5 Sites
• Metroville (London Borough)
• Westford (Metropolitan Borough)
• Shire (County Council)
• Seaton (Unitary)
• Valleytown (Wales)
Methods
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Observation 240+ days and ongoing
Interviews 60+
Focus Groups 10
File analysis – undertaken in all sites
Follows principles of rigorous qualitative work –
search for disconfirming cases etc…
Didn’t intend to specifically to study (and certainly
not to evaluate) ICS…
Negotiating Access
• Our first findings related to the difficulties
in negotiating access in this high risk, high
blame environment
• Impact of JARs
• Worries about performance targets
Classification in Restructured Services
Temporal dimension to teams – shift away
from generic locality based work
CRM - e-Government
• Is it a contact or a referral?
• Is it a ’47’?
• Is it an Initial or a Core?
• Does it need longer term work?
I suppose I have mixed feelings about it. I mean I think the concept of
a integrated data base which is accessible to all has tremendous
benefits and it is quite ground breaking really because you know
historically if you were on duty and someone was on holiday you
would have to try and find the paper file which could be anywhere
and could be locked away in a desk which you will not be able to
gain access to. So in those respects yes it is very useful and it tells
you whether a child is subject to a child protection plan, it tells you
their basic details, it tells you who all of the network members are,
if it has been set up properly and it does allow you to do some
pretty impressive things, it even tells you who they are related to, it
tells you all of their relatives are...
The downfall I suppose is that as with any piece of computer software
it has got vulnerabilities to become corrupted and I mean I would
really say over the last 2 weeks especially there have been
enormous problems with it. We have lost, some people have spent
all morning writing up a core assessment for example and then they
have lost it. Simple things like there isn’t even on automatic save
you know on the system, you have to do everything manually.
There isn’t a spell checker that works so you have to do it manually.
And those are relatively small things and I just find it quite
remarkable that we are paying so much money for a system which
doesn’t support us in the basic ways. And the way it has been set
up is quite cumbersome because the people that are responsible for
setting it up have never consulted with us as to how it would benefit
us and how it could work for us as opposed to making us work you
know to do more work for the system (Social Worker, long term
team).
Monday Morning in Erewhon
Findings: Taking Referrals and Assessing
Risk
• Social work managers operate in morally
precarious territory, where cases are packaged
as ‘high risk’ by referrers but the service must
be heavily rationed.
• There are several improvisational devices which
operate to translate enforced delay (“there is
nobody to see this case”) into the institutionally
legitimate rationality of strategic deferment (for
example, “I will seek more information”)
WORKFLOW, SCREENS AND TIME
SCALES
Team leader: There are 50 contacts in your
inbox . . . you are under pressure because
you have to clear them by the end of the
day . . . and the question of whether you
are more likely to close them in these
circumstances? Well yeah . . . so, really
we are looking to close cases not open
them . . . that’s why we work to the
highest thresholds.
IA ‘front and backing’
Ubiquitous in all sites – generated by performance
demands.
Sections seen as irrelevant – can’t ‘tell the story’ –
often very little history, or information - done on
basis of very brief visit.
System lags behind the work so ‘just get it done’.
Ad Hoc Heuristics….
Adolescents are difficult because they do not always get
the service they deserve. ….if they are breathing, fed,
clothed, got money in their pockets and a B and B, I will
say, “that’s it, see you in another life”. …. Really these
cases need more care…. The life skills they would have
got from their parents. But I can’t do that. I’ve got a
baby in a crack house. I’ve got to deal with that.
But I know this is something we should be able to
provide a service to. This is my next generation of
parents’.
Workarounds…
Social worker: ... so if it [the referral] comes in on Tuesday and it’s
allocated to me, if I’m not on duty till the Friday, I wouldn’t go out
until Friday, because you have to have time to send the letter.
Basically they ‘outcome’ it the day you see the child, not
when you’ve done the assessment [emphasis added] so if I
see that child the following Tuesday, it would be outcomed that day,
signed off as complete that day
Researcher: so it’s signed off the day you see the child, not the day
you complete the form?
Social worker: certainly not the day I complete the form because
that could be 3 weeks later ... because actually that keeps it within
timescales, if they sign it off on the day that you’ve seen the child,
because they’re putting the visit in, within the seven days you’ve
seen them, then that’s when it is
Getting worse?
It’s worse since Baby P. I used to tell my social workers to
get the work with the family right and then recording
lags behind and screens are red, but I’ve been told I’ve
got to stop that. So, I’ve had to say, cut your visits
down, keep to 45 minutes and don’t write so much.
We’ve always resisted but we’ve come to the point
where we’ve got to compromise practice, to devalue it
because of the fear of spot inspection. I don’t know why
managers don’t say it’s wrong. They’re scared (Team
manager, qualified 20+ years – stable team).
‘If a social worker can find a way to miss out
a process they’ll do it, so we’ve made sure
they can’t’ (Integrated Children’s System
IT provider)
Inflexibility in practice….
It’s much worse since ICS. Like when you’ve got a child in
need and you need a conference, you can’t get to the
conference without going through strategy discussion
and ‘outcome of section 47’ forms which populate from
the strategy discussion forms. You used to just be able
to write like half a side on the strategy discussion but
now you’ve got these terrible forms. You have to do one
on each child, so if there are 5 children that’s 10 forms
and they are nothing to do with the work. They are not
difficult, they are just pointless and get in the way
(Team manager).
Forms ….
So there is a big difference, it is not that the
electronic system is bad, it is the way they have
designed the forms forcing you to repeat yourself
over and over again.
I feel like a robot, because you feel you’re just like
splurting it out … you’re just putting information
on a form, I doesn’t feel like you are actually
being required to provide your professional
opinion in a holistic kind of way, it doesn’t really
help I think…
Forms …
The worst is, parents can’t understand them (child
protection plans). They are broken into domains
and dimensions ‘parent needs to keep child safe’
‘child needs to be kept safe’. Repetitive, loads of
boxes. I have to apologise to parents. We do
our own old fashioned child protection
agreement in Word and give them that to sign,
so they can see what we expect them to do.
Reading the forms
'The government want us to improve our game, get to
know each individual child better- but it's an absolutely
impossible task, there are some many different people
working with the child now and so many changes of
worker that it's impossible to get a feel for what's going
on with the child- it's all chopped up- and ICS - it's a
complete nightmare,- impossible to find the story- I've
a caseload of 130 kids- you are telling me that I can get
to know each child individually and read my way through
that lot- it's a joke!‘ (Independent Reviewing Officer –
focus group)
Rational behaviour….
Figure 1 has been compiled from nationally-reported audit
data for the financial year ending 2007
Each datadata-point represents an individual local authority social services department.
department. The yy-axis shows
the relative proportion of Initial Child Protection conferences (per 10000 children) to Initial
Assessments (percent of all referrals). This ratio can be taken as a crude proxy of the local
priority given to childchild-protection as opposed to general family support.
The progressive increase of the ratio indicates that, as work volume
volume rises, child protection work is
accorded increasing priority, with the proportion of referrals leading
leading to the completion of an Initial
Assessment steadily falling away.
Figure also points up the folly of relying on single performance indicators, rather than
modelling and studying the relationships between multiple variables!
This is underscored by the example of Blackpool. In terms of the percentage of Initial
Assessments carried out, it falls in the bottom 10 nationally. However,
However, we can see
from the figure that such “performance”
performance” is far from anomalous in terms of the overall
behaviour of the child care system. When its very high referral rate is taken into
account, Blackpool is behaving identically to other authorities in prioritizing child
protection cases. Projecting a line from the rest of the datadata-points, far from being
abberrant, we see that Blackpool more or less sits exactly on this
this extrapolation.
Microworld Simulation
If errors are hard to observe in the “blooming,
buzzing confusion” of real work, it is
nonetheless possible to contrive errors within
an artificially constructed reality’.
Realistic (external validity) but
controllable (internal validity)
Micro-worlds are medium-fidelity
computer-based simulations (models) of
real-world work ecologies
Can manipulate independent variables and contrive work
scenarios, including rare events (emergencies, errors)
By simulating something of the complexities,
tensions and pressures of this professional
world in the tractable, measurable space
of the laboratory we are able to
interrogate institutional “common sense”,
to treat its contents and its historical
nature as topics in their own right