Exploring drivers of demand for child protection services in an English local authority

Abstract

This paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year.The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with practitioners and managers (n=25) from statutory services and Early Help. The findings identified a combination of long-term and short-term drivers of demand.Long-term factors emphasised the impact of rising levels of deprivation combined with cuts to community-based services for children and young people. Short-term factors ranged from a more proactive approach to child neglect to more effective multi-agency partnerships and joint decisionmaking. The interaction between these factors was found to be accentuating an underlying shift to 'late intervention' across the sector. The findings are contextualised in relation to contemporary debates about the crisis of demand for children's social care and the complex relationship between prevention and protection.

Austerity, Poverty, and Children’s Services Quality in England: Consequences for Child Welfare and Public Services

“…The former might include specific interventions like parenting programmes, such as 'Triple-P' (Sanders, 2008) and the latter might include community development social work (Jack & Gill, 2010). Hood, et al (2020b) found that early help services had shifted towards more complex forms of 'late-early' intervention as a response to funding cuts, diminishing the capacity of local authorities to resolve more universal needs. This shift away from open-door provision has been reported nationally (Action for Children, 2020).…”

In Defence of Ordinary Help: Estimating the effect of Early Help/Family Support Spending on Children in Need Rates in England using ALT-SR

“…Though there is no way to establish the size of reductions to the provision of services with experimental evidence against those without, the case of children's centres in England may serve as one example due to their area-based implementation, universality, and provision of multiple varied services. Smith, et al (2018) report that between 2009 and 2017 more than 30 per cent of registered children's centres had closed and 55 per cent of local authorities reported reduced services, with increased focus on specialist provision for complex needs and reduced universal support (see also : Hood, et al 2020b).…”

“…, $ = -0.007 [-0.013, -0.0005]). This may reflect decreasing need at a national level over time, but based on existing evidence may more likely reflect higher CIN thresholds related to rationing of services (Devaney, 2019, Hood, et al 2020a, 2020b, Smith, et al 2018. Lastly, the ALT-SR model tests for correlations between trends that are not already attributable to IMD score.…”

“…Severe cuts have fallen on preventative services (Webb & Bywaters, 2018), and a patchwork of evidence suggests that reductions in provision have been exacted on services that do not meet the 'gold-standard' of evidence; including children's centres and youth centres (Smith, et al 2018, YMCA, 2020. There is evidence that the support retained has created a shift away from universal, open-access provision and 'ordinary help' and towards provision of programmes for multiple complex needs with targeted families (Smith, et al 2018, Hood, et al 2020b. In years where these services were more plentiful the effectiveness of local authority spending to prevent risks to child health and development appears to have been greater.…”

Towards a critical decision-making ecology approach for child protection research

“…For example, what proportion of a national budget goes to preventive services as opposed to statutory services, or to what extent Indigenous people can access resources and power to create independent services. Bywaters et al (2019) and Webb et al, (2020) for example found that the inequalities relating to family deprivation were the largest effect on outcomes, although other institutional level factors did have an effect, while Hood et al (2020) found through qualitative methods that cuts to community services and a more pro-active attitude to child neglect were key drivers of demand from 'external' factors. Understanding how these are produced by the political decisions of the day are key to a complex understanding of how decision outcomes happen.…”