Coventry Safeguarding Children Board

1. Coventry Safeguarding Children Board Workshop Keeping the Child at the Centre Managing resistant and uncooperative parents / carers Shirley Heath & Amy Weir

2. Coventry Safeguarding Children Board Safeguarding Disabled Children Conference February 27th 2012

3. Why is this a focus for practice? • Well evidenced that Disabled Children are more vulnerable to abuse and neglect • Recent high profile child protection cases nationally have raised concern about ‘resistant’ families who do not change despite intervention • Coventry LSCB management review has highlighted this as an area for practice improvement particularly for disabled children

4. What is resistance? Ambivalence Denial/Avoidance Unresponsiveness to treatment Violence/Hostility

5. Research on effectiveness

6. Challenges related to families • Practitioners are able to describe behaviours and circumstances that pose challenges to their practice including: • Inability to contact parents • Families’ lack of motivation/commitment • Families that are in constant crisis • Threats of and fear of Violence • Focus on parents’ need for support to care for disabled child • Lack of expertise to comunicate with disabled child • But, they lacked confidence distinguishing between families’ active engagement in treatment vs. false compliance

7. Challenges related to working with Disabled Children • Communication needs may not be appreciated • Parent may seek to speak for the child • Illness or developmental difficulties may be ascribed wrongly to the disability rather than to parental / carer abuse or neglect • Expectations of outcomes for disabled child may be too low

8. Challenges related to practitioners • Practitioners involved in complex cases may lose focus on children when: • Parents’ needs eclipse needs of children • Parents turn the focus away from maltreatment allegations • Parents make it difficult for practitioners to see children alone • Practitioners do not have sufficient experience/training to help parents understand how their behaviour is harmful to children • Men, grandparents and siblings are often left out of equation

9. Challenges related to agencies • False dichotomy between ‘in need’ and ‘at risk’ categories – and the threshold between them • Practitioners feel pressured to close cases quickly and balance heavy caseloads • Practitioners frustrated with long waits for or lack of available specialist services • Poor quality (and fragmented) assessments – leading to flawed decision-making

10. Implications

11. Effective Assessments • Importance of good, in-depth assessments cannot be overestimated • Regular and clear Inter-agency Communication and Information sharing • Assessments should not be ‘one-off’ snapshots of families’ behaviours and should include: • Observations – particularly, parent-child interactions • Understanding of families’ histories • Inclusion of the whole family unit • Information from all agencies • Assessments should be sustained to ensure cases do not lose momentum

12. EffectiveInterventions • Focused, long-term plans and services appear to achieve better outcomes for children than episodic intervention. • • Services that seem to be effective include practical help for families, families’ involvement in their treatment and social support. • • Agencies and practitioners may display resistance of their own, and strategies need to be in place to detect and overcome this. • • The attitudes and behaviour of individual practitioners have a major effect on whether families engage or not and more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which they interact.

13. Effective supervision • Most evidence mentions the importance of management and supervision to safeguarding practice, but few lessons on what works • Circumstances where good supervision is essential include when practitioners: • Are overwhelmed/lacking confidence • Experience violence • Are acting out their own strong emotions • Have less experience of particular needs such as disability

14. Implications for practice

15. Collaborative learning It is important therefore that a wider range of learning mechanisms are developed. Munro 2011 • a clear understanding that protection of children is a shared responsibility between agencies and professionals; • recognition that all workers in all agencies need to be supported by strong leadership making decisions underpinned by full and unambiguous rationale; • the development and examination of decision-making processes in full partnership with each other; • the value of sharing potential indicators of abuse or neglect and sharing such observations at the earliest stage; • regularly reviewing the outcomes of actions or information with partners as part of the shared responsibility;