Developing a culture of reflective safeguarding:

1. Developing a culture of reflective safeguarding: from compliance to learning and adaptingEileen Munro November 24th 2011

2. Outline • A systems approach • Analysis of previous reforms • Improving the work environment to support good practice • The role of LSCBs

4. Drivers of the system in recent years The child protection system in recent times has been shaped by five key driving forces: • social pressure to keep children safe • a belief held by many that uncertainty in child protection work can be eradicated • a tendency in inquiries to focus on professional error without examining the causes of any error • the undue weight given to proceduralization, performance information, and targets • a belief in simple, linear causality

5. A simple, predictable world

6. Workers create the problems ….

7. The person-centred approach • We analyze the causal sequence until we get to a satisfactory explanation. • Human error provides a satisfactory explanation. • Human error is blamed in 70-80% of all major accidents, including child abuse deaths.

8. To Reduce Human Error, We • Put psychological pressure on workers to perform better. • Reduce human factor as much as possible. formalize/mechanize/proceduralize. • Increase surveillance to ensure compliance with instructions etc.

9. Reforms “The technocratic view is faulty, not because it is incorrect, but because it is incomplete” Tinker A. & Lowe A. (1984) ‘One-dimensional Management Science: The making of a technocratic consciousness’, Interfaces, 14(2) 40-49

10. What is overlooked/undervalued? • Uncertainty • Requisite variety • Child’s journey • Emotion • Relationships • Influence of tools on practice

12. Creating the learning environment • Valuing expertise • Feedback • Regulation • Inspection • Management

13. Skilled workers

14. We need smart people who use tools NOT Smart tools used by unskilled people

15. Re-designing practice • Individuals are not totally free to choose between good and problematic practice because the standard of performance is connected to features of the tasks, tools and operating environment. • Improving practice involves maximising the factors that contribute to good performance and minimising the factors that contribute to problematic practice • Aim is to make it easier for practitioners to work well and harder to make mistakes.

16. The implications • Relationship skills are needed to engage other humans – using intuitive knowledge and emotions • Cognitive skills are needed to make sense of information and plan, using both intuitive and analytic thinking, and drawing on research • Critical reasoning is needed to check accuracy of fallible processes – supervision is essential

17. Feedback • Essential to know whether decisions and actions were good • From families – have we helped? • From all levels in organisation

18. Regulation • Working Together: • Rules are good for working together • Professional guidance should be owned by professions • Adopt police risk principles • Assessment Framework: • reduce to core principles

19. Inspection • Child’s journey • Evidence of helping • Evidence of learning

20. our collective challenge A responsible culture not a blame culture

21. Serious case reviews • Adopt the systems approach of health and other high risk work • Recognise individual is neither autonomous or a puppet on strings • Seek to understand why poor practice happened • Improve national learning

22. Management • Identify local needs • Design how to help • Performance management data as information not indicators • Feedback from front line and users

23. Sharing responsibility for the provision of ‘early help’

24. Sharing responsibility for early help: Recommendations • New duty for local authorities and statutory partners to secure provision of early help: • specify against local profile of need • set out access to social work expertise for those in other services • have clear arrangements in place to make an ‘offer of early help’

25. Developing expertise at individual level • Intuitive learning from experience, also needs feedback and reflection • Formal learning, also needs to be embedded in use • Emotional awareness, sensing and discussing

26. Developing expertise at organisational level • Users’ feedback • Front line feedback • Single loop and double loop learning • Peer review and inspection

27. Developing expertise at multi-agency level • Case reviews • Shared training • Shared review of effectiveness

29. What to aim for • a system that learns whether children are being helped, and how they have experienced the help, innovating in response to feedback • a system free from all but essential central prescription over professional practice but with clear rules about where and how to co-ordinate to protect children and young people • a system where professional practice is informed by research and evidence, competent judgement informing action when the work is too varied for rules • a system that expects errors and so tries to catch them quickly • a system that is ‘risk sensible’.