A child in Blackpool is nearly eight times more likely to be in local authority care than one in Wokingham, Berkshire. A child in Wakefield is almost nine times more likely to be referred to social services than one little more than 30 miles away in York.
These differences, to be found in Department for Education statistics and highlighted in a new National Audit Office report, are stark. Yet our understanding of them is still limited.
Quite why a single care system, as in England, or similar ones across the UK produce such contrasts is the subject of a major academic inquiry involving seven universities that will be reporting interim findings at this week’s National Children and Adult Services conference.
Read through the ringbinder folders thick with referrals, assessments and court judgments that pile up once a council has applied to take a child into care, and you will soon start to form a pretty accurate idea of the family background in which that child has been living. But none of this rich contextual data is centrally recorded, says Paul Bywaters, professor of social work at Coventry University and leader of the inquiry. There exist instead just a few, bare facts about each year’s cohort of looked-after children, such as age, gender and ethnicity.
This means, Bywaters explains, that neither policy-makers nor researchers have been able to get a handle on the economic and social circumstances in which the families of these children come to the attention of social services.
And so, unlike in health and education – where he says there is “a strong understanding that there are deep inequalities relating to deprivation and ethnicity, and successive UK governments have adopted policies to reduce them” – those interested in improving child protection policy and practice have, until now, been working blind. There has been no robust, comparative information on how a range of inequalities affects the way vulnerable children and families in the child protection system are treated by the state.
This is despite the fact that there are what Bywaters calls “profound inequalities” in the proportion of children on child protection plans or being looked-after in care, depending on their social background, their local area and which of the four UK countries they happen to live in.
To take one example, the research team has calculated that, excluding those placed in their own homes, the proportion of children looked after in Scotland is about 70% higher than that in Wales and more than twice as high as that in either England or Northern Ireland.
Arriving at such conclusions is no easy task for the team, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation: each of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland has its own system of benchmarking deprivation, for example, so the team has had to construct its own index. It has then linked the index to council data broken down to small neighbourhoods of some 1,600 residents a time.
Bywaters believes two broad, interacting factors lead to inequalities in the rates at which children are placed on child protection plans or removed entirely from their families: the level of abuse and neglect in society; and the framework of law, policy and services designed to tackle child protection.
The former – the “demand” side, as he puts it – is “powerfully affected by family economic circumstances”. Parenting is obviously far harder when you have an inadequate or insecure income, or debts, or poor housing, or if you live in a difficult neighbourhood.
The latter factor in the inequalities equation – the supply of supportive services, which influences decisions taken about families – is affected by national and local policy priorities; where and how scarce money is allocated and spent; professional and societal anxieties about risk; and the quantity and quality of staffing of services meant to help.
This is research that’s intended to make a difference. When the findings are published – the study is due to conclude next March – Bywaters hopes they will “prompt the whole child protection system to pay much more attention to a family’s economic circumstances”.
Dez Holmes, director of Research In Practice, a consultancy that advised on the initial phase of the research, urges policy-makers and professionals to recognise the pressures that poverty, compounded by austerity, places upon parents. “We need to acknowledge the interaction between poverty and other factors associated with child maltreatment, such as domestic abuse, mental ill-health and substance misuse,” she says. “When we ignore the role that poverty and, importantly, inequality play, we can find our discourse slips into blame, allowing us to distance ourselves from these ‘bad parents’ rather than recognising the wider responsibility we all have in preventing child maltreatment.”
Bywaters hopes the research will offer social care professionals and policy-makers building blocks to help understand the interplay between a family’s specific difficulties, the help – or lack of it – from society and the deeply inequitable outcomes for children that can result.
“I want the whole child protection system to pay much more attention to a family’s individual circumstances,” he says. “In order to be able to respond properly to people’s material lives, there need to be resources available. They need much more help in practical and financial ways, such as getting advice they need on benefits, debt, avoiding housing evictions – services that are increasingly rare around the country now.”
He also wants frontline workers to take full account in the assessment and decision-making process of “just how stressful it is on an hour-by-hour basis” to be living in acute poverty. “Assessment tools and time limits tend to militate against that,” he observes. “Because instead of there being awareness of inequalities affecting a family’s situation, the focus can be all on a decision about risk.”
Public attitudes on how best to protect children who do face significant risk in their homes may be shifting somewhat. The latest annual NSPCC report, How Safe are our Children?, shows that although 31% of the public believe the most important response to neglect and abuse should be to remove children from the situation, 29% say more should be done to reduce poverty – an increase of nine percentage points since 2013. Bywaters believes there is an urgent need for a similar shift of attitude at the top.
“In the [social care] sector, in England, from government downwards, I think there’s been a reluctance at policy level to recognise poverty and deprivation as central factors in child protection,” he says. “That’s one reason we’re pleased there has been so much interest in our work from policy-makers and managers to frontline practitioners.
“But the more we learn from our research, the more we realise that an inequalities perspective raises fundamental questions about many aspects of child protection systems: law and policies, data systems, funding mechanisms, staff training, assessment and decision-making processes and inspection measures. Child protection is extremely complex, but these questions compel us to examine inequalities in the system so that children and their parents have a better chance of living less damaging lives.”
An accident of birth?
Kate Morris, professor of social work at the University of Sheffield, is leading a team scrutinising both professionals’ decision-making and outcomes for children in a variety of comparable neighbourhoods. Participating in the first wave are one Scottish and two English councils – the second wave will focus on another three councils.
“We are developing a detailed understanding of each of those sites in terms of referral rates and the probability of children ending up being assessed or looked after,” says Morris.
The researchers ask focus groups of social workers and independent reviewing officers in each local authority a set of questions about how they would react to events in a case study family’s life. This is an attempt to establish “how poverty and deprivation is understood and responded to by social workers in the frontline of child protection”, says Morris.
The researchers are also embedded inside children’s services departments, undertaking practice observations, sitting in on case conferences and listening as duty calls are taken and reacted to. “We are seeing how the chances for families of being assessed and entering the child protection system are different across those local authorities, and seeing the differences in the ways that poverty is described, discussed and the weight that’s given to it,” Morris explains. By raising awareness of their findings, the research group hopes to make local authorities conscious of the scale of variation that exists in child protection.
As well as looking at the professionals’ point of view, researchers will be working with some families who have been subject to referrals, to examine their experiences of the system.
