Social worker Robert Russell went to work in Perth, Australia, in 2008 as a child protection manager. He was lucky enough to arrive at a time when the Signs of Safety model, developed by Andrew Turnell and Steve Edwards in the 1990s, was being adopted by children’s services throughout Western Australia. Russell became one of the first cohort of Signs of Safety practice leads in Perth, tasked with rolling out the model across child protection services and partner agencies. He also worked closely with Turnell to train other frontline practitioners.
Signs of Safety takes a radically different approach to child protection. Traditionally, efforts by children’s services to protect at-risk children have involved a “them” and “us” approach, in which social workers tell parents what they are doing wrong and what they must do to improve. Signs of Safety, in contrast, is about helping a social worker build a partnership with both parents and children in cases of suspected child abuse, while still protecting the children effectively. “The basic principles are about building relationships, building trust, being open and transparent and being clear about what needs to happen to make things better, because we’re working together,” says Russell.
In Perth, much of his caseload involved Indigenous Australian families. In the past, social workers had gone “straight in with a deficit model”, says Russell, telling families: “If you don’t do this, then these are the consequences.” Families would come out of meetings with a huge, unrealistic set of actions and throw them in the bin. “That’s the start of the deterioration in the relationship – barriers came up, defences came up.”
The Indigenous Australian community suffers from a “shocking” degree of deprivation, says Russell, and its children are vastly over-represented in the criminal justice system: only 7% of young people are from Indigenous communities, but they make up 54% of those in youth detention. Initially, he says, they did not want to engage in any kind of service from children’s services, “because they thought they would remove the children, like they did in the 1960s and 1970s”.
Using the Signs of Safety model, Russell and his colleagues began visiting Indigenous families in their own communities, rather than expecting them to come to the city. It turned out to be a remarkably effective approach. “They were quite shocked,” Russell says, “because we were saying: ‘We’re not here to take your children, we know you’ve got problems and that’s why we’re here, but we also recognise that you’ve got lots of strengths.’ And then, slowly, you could see the relationship starting to repair and there was a little bit of trust building.”
An important part of the model is to use simple, accessible language rather than jargon. So instead of referring to a child’s “emotional wellbeing”, families are encouraged to identify whether a child is “angry” or “anxious”. Once the problem is identified, the parents are asked what they think needs to happen. “More often than not, the parents and the families would know what needed to change. And by them being part of the process, they were more likely to take ownership of the plans and do what they needed to do.”
Russell came back to the UK in 2016, joining Coventry children’s services a year later as the child protection conference chair. The authority had already embarked on a five-year programme to implement Signs of Safety, but it wasn’t being consistently applied. In 2018, he was appointed the Signs of Safety implementation manager and tasked with creating a training programme to embed the model throughout children’s services.
One of the great strengths in Coventry, he believes, is that partner agencies, such as the health services and schools, are also committed to the model. It’s already starting to make a difference. Parents say that, whereas the previous approach made them defensive and angry, now social workers are working with them and respecting the strengths they have. Responses from the young people in the Voices of Care (VOC) council are equally positive. Outcomes for children are starting to improve – over the past 12 months, the number of children subject to child protection plans has dropped significantly. This, says Russell, is the result of practitioners feeling “a lot more confident about safety planning and keeping children within the family”.
Russell gives an example of a family with two children who had been on child protection plans for more than 18 months, with little progress. But when a Signs of Safety practitioner went to see the family, she scrapped everything and started again. Using a pen and paper, she drew a map of the family’s strengths. “The family’s facial expressions changed completely, because they were used to being told what they were rubbish at,” says Russell. The practitioner then engaged the other professionals, and between them they formed a “really good collaborative professional working group, all working from the same model”. The family was able to agree with the actions they needed to take to be stepped down from the child protection plans. Within a few months, the family had reached that point, and the case was closed.
The Signs of Safety model is here for good, and Coventry will continue to use it, making sure that it is applied across different services. “People are consistent in using the same language, so when the health visitor or community midwife goes to visit a child or a mother and they talk about what’s working well and what needs to happen, the family understands what they’re talking about,” says Russell. “The outcomes only get better the more we embed it.”
