One Social Workers Reflections on the Children Rights Referendum
If we are serious about children’s rights we must focus on what they need and provide that in a transparent and effective manner, as the proposed amendment says “best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration”.
Some people have argued in the past and will no doubt argue again that a children’s rights referendum will set children against parents and break up families, that meeting children’s needs will come at the expense of the family unit. The truth is that couldn’t be more wrong. Enabling children’s rights, all of them including the right to a family, means protecting children by protecting families.
Let me give you examples from my day to day work.
Protecting the family is the best way to protect the child and their rights. To support families we will regularly use local services, such as the local Family Resource Centre. This can provide a variety of excellent supports to promote family well being and by doing so protect child. Recent reports have shown the increasing demand the services of local Family Resource Centre’s at a time when their funding is decreasing. If children have a right to safety, a right to family relationships, then services like this need to be protected and promoted.
For me this issue is illustrated the best by housing need I see in my clients lives. So many of the families I work with in social work have housing difficulties – overcrowding, substandard accommodation, and lack of meaningful tenancy supports. For families from the travelling community housing provision is even worse. The child’s best interests and their right to shelter and housing can only be made real through the whole families receiving adequate housing supports – to protect children’s rights we protect their family.
Everyday decisions are made not based on what a child needs, but what we can provide. The recent Report of the Independent Child Death Review Group stressed the importance of promptly identifying and providing the necessary services to meet the needs of the child. Yet frequently it is not a question of what is the most appropriate service but which of the only services available is least inappropriate.
Best practice in social work underlines that a child should only be taken into care as a last resort and that children’s needs are best met in their family of origin. The amendment itself stress that the state will only take on the role of parents “in exceptional circumstances” and in a “proportionate” way. As social workers we seek to first protect children by supporting families, only when this fails will children come into care. I believe that a children’s rights referendum will make my job easier because it will make supporting families easier and not because it will mean I can break up families easier.
To Support children’s rights means supporting families, supporting the amendment to the constitution means supporting children and families together.
I for one will be voting a giant Yes on November 10th.
Childrens Rights Referendum under Starters Orders…..
So, Saturday November 10th has been set as a the date for the children’s rights referendum.
Now is the time to get out and canvass, at home, at work, in our neighbourhoods.
Also, don’t forget to vote!
For the wording of the referendum see the governments website HERE
The website of the Campaign for Children can be found HERE
And for a different opinion from me and the Campaign for Children check out the website of The Alliance of Parents Aginst the State HERE
Following the Paper Trail All the Way to Hell!
With this blog I wanted to give an insight into the world of Social Work, an insight into the process of Social Work – how we do what we do, why we do what we do. Central to the process of modern social work is the paper trail, our case notes and other forms, to the extent it sometimes feels like all we do.
A few quick examples of the paper trail, but by no means all:
- Case notes – everything we do should be written down, everything. Every phone call, every conversation with other staff relevant to a case, everything. If it’s not in the cases notes it didn’t happen – an idea I will come back too
- Referral forms – every time we need a service for our clients it means a stack of forms to fill out, this is very frustrating when it is a HSE service, or indeed the childcare workers on our own team as it feels more about control than providing a service. Looking for private services outside the HSE mean a funding request, private procurement application with three quotes and the agencies own referral form – the result being that when an service is needed as soon as possible, as soon as possible turns into a six weeks.
- Standardized Business Forms. – The HSE in a well intentioned attempt to deal with the lack of consistency and clear standards across the country have introduced standardized process, and a dozen forms to back them up. While the aim is good (and discussed below) the reality means more paperwork with deadlines and stats (intake form in 24 hours, initial assessment in 20 days, and how many done in that time scale measured and monitored)
- Court reports – never use “could” “would” or “should” unless you want to get an earful from the judge. Never copy and paste from the previous report (even if nothing has changed) unless you want an earful from the judge. Get them in 3 working days in advance, unless you want an earful from the judge (spotting a pattern here?). And certainly have them ready before every other professional so that they can copy and paste from your report!
- Statistical returns – The numbers and the data have begun a big thing for the HSE but in all the wrong ways. Either way, we now have a load of forms to fill in showing how much of our targets we are hitting.
The simple fact is that every week there seems to be more and more paperwork; but like many things in Social Work isn’t a black and white issue.
Why so much paper work? If it’s not on paper it didn’t happen. You could have done an in depth productive and effective piece of work with a client, but if you don’t write it down it never happened. So the paper work provides on one side increased oversight and increased transparency. What you did and why becomes real, is there for all to see. It becomes easier to track decisions of Social Workers, to follow the history of a case, to understand what workers, what didn’t and what needs to be done. Given a long history of scandals and inquiries this can only be a good thing. However, this breeds a defensive reaction, a fear that everything must be written down, not to record the nuances of a case, but to protect the worker. Every little conversation with a Team Leader becomes an email or a joint case note. Every time a child or parent sneezes, it becomes a case note so that no one can say the Social Worker didn’t do their job. The recent reports into deaths of children in care highlighted the importance of this, they were solely based on reviews of the files, and any work not recorded was not seen. A Social Worker could have been criticized for not doing something that was in fact done. This defensive practice will only be made worse when registration is in full swing, as every Social Worker is open to personal liability in their cases. Getting the balance right between these two sides can be hard, and depends on so much beyond the control of the Social Worker. A well supported Social Worker on a high morale team will probably be less defensive and as a result more engaged with the work, and the reality is good cases notes make the work easier and make court reports and indeed giving evidence easier.
Coupled to much of the new and increasing paper work is stats and targets. This is an issue I looked at in a previous post (Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics…Social Work by Numbers) and since that time it feels like things have got worse. Stats are not being used to provide an insight into the work and understanding why or why not things happen, they are targets to hit regardless of quality and effectiveness. The pressure and the political game come from the top and roll all the way down the bureaucratic chain. Social Workers and Social Work teams have to struggle to keep the client, i.e. the child, at the centre of things instead of being about numbers on a graph. This is where effective leadership in managers shows, in Team Leaders, and more so in Principal Social Workers, as they try and maintain the right balance.
So, where does all of this leave the coal face Social Worker? More importantly where does this leave Social Work?
How the individual Social Worker handles this depends a lot on them and their personality and how organized and efficient they are in themselves. However, even the best will feel that pressure, that weight of responsibility that comes with the job and the undone case note. This is counter balanced by the pressure of the undone home visit, the visit you couldn’t do because you were so busy with the paperwork. Sometimes it feels like time management and efficiency at paperwork are more important than interpersonal skills! It can be stressful, it can be frustrating but I think most Social Workers understand the importance of good paperwork; good case notes and accept it as part of the job.
So what about Social Work as a practice? If we accept on the one side time with clients and building relationships and accept on the other hand the importance of proper paper work than an optimal balance must be found. The case notes and the direct work aren’t mutually exclusive with a proper caseload that allows time for both, but the reality is that most teams are so under resourced both in terms of workers and in terms of admin support that caseloads become too big to manage both competing elements of the work. This is dangerous for clients and for children as inevitably one of the two important parts will suffer. This is also dangerous for Social Work as new or potential Social Workers decide they want to work with people not paper and look elsewhere.
Oh, and I haven’t even touched on the most annoying part of the paperwork, our decaying and outdated IT systems, which as the Standardized Business Processes are rolled out will come under increasing pressure and will move closer to outright collapse.
The post below is a guest post that I wrote for the - http://www.campaignforchildren.ie/
We have been promised a stand alone referendum of the subject of children’s rights, before the end of 2012. Enshrining the rights of children is important to improving standards and services for families. Despite what you will be told children’s rights will not undermine families.
Check out the Campaign for Children’s website and get involved.
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I’m a child protection social worker. I work on the coal face of child protection in Ireland, an issue that has been a contentious and at times controversial area of Irish life.
It’s an area often shrouded in confusion, unseen by the general public and only discussed in time of scandal. Yet the child protection problems that modern Ireland face ask deep questions about us as a society.
As a child protection social worker I spend my days dealing first hand with the results of inequality and social exclusion, the root causes of most of the problems that social workers deal with.
A full and concrete acknowledgement of children’s rights in Ireland will make my job as a social worker easier. This is not because it will undermine families, but because it will hopefully mean that children and families will begin to need less intervention from social workers in the first place.
Root problems
When we examine the reasons children come into care we can learn a lot. Of the four categories of abuse child protection social workers deal with, neglect is the number one cause of children being taken into care, ranking far above sexual abuse, physical abuse and emotional abuse.
The neglect of children in families stems from the neglect of their families as a whole, and the neglect of the communities they live in on a wider scale. It’s widely acknowledged that for most children the best place for them is in a loving family environment.
If we believe this to be true, it’s imperative that we support families and strengthen communities in order to protect children.
Best interests of children
The virtual invisibility of children in the Irish Constitution means that every day children and their families fail to get the supports they need. The best interests principle means that all decisions that are made that directly affect the lives of children will be required to take the best interests of the child into consideration. This principle, if enshrined in our Constitution, will mean strengthening families.
It’ll mean that the children and families who DO need social work intervention will be better supported by the recognition of children’s rights. As it currently stands, the HSE has long been shown to provide a patchwork service, with resources, services and even models of service delivery spread around the country at random.
All children and all families deserve the best services this State can manage. We need services to be driven by the best interests of children and their families and not by resource allocation.
Even if we make family supports more widely available and improve and streamline social work intervention, a minority of cases will remain in which families will not be able to provide a safe environment. These children will need to be taken into care.
But these children too will benefit from clear and strong children’s rights. At every step of the way, from court, to placement, to foster care, to aftercare – the best interests of the child and their own individual rights should be centre stage, allowing their needs to be at the centre of service delivery.
All children deserve to have their rights respected. In my role as a social worker however, I have seen with my own eyes that it’s the most vulnerable children in this country who most urgently need a strong declaration of their rights.
Only then can they and their families get the support and protection they need and deserve.
A Child Centred Supreme Court?
Whatever the final wording, if the coming Children’s Right referendum passes it will mark a new phase in Irish Family law and Irish jurisprudence. Whatever the wording new and novel cases and legal arguments will heard, and old ideas will be questioned in this new light. In times like this the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, take on a central role.
It is with this in mind that I note with curiosity the news that the Hon. Mr. Justice John MacMenamin has been appointed by the government to the bench of the Supreme Court.
The Hon. Mr. Justice John MacMenamin previously presided over the Minors list in the High Court, which includes all special care applications. Justice MacMenamin has shown an interest in child law, special care, children’s rights and unmarried fathers, often contributing to seminars and publishing papers on these areas. Justice MacMenamin has show an awareness of the rights of the child, perhaps this is most infamously seen in his judgement in the High Court in the Baby Anne case. This judgement was of course over turned by what were then his superiors in the Supreme Court.
It is impossible to know how or if his judgements will be effected by his promotion, but I for one will watch with interest how this plays out.
Of parallel interest is the fact that in her judgement in the Baby Anne case, Supreme Court Justice Catherine McGuinness stated that given the law as it was she had to overturn the high court verdict, but did so reluctantly. Of course, with any referendum these restrictions may no longer apply.
It would foolish of me to make any serious predictions, but a constitutional amendment, a new judge, and an old one given new scope guarantee that things will at least be interesting.
Aftercare…or just care after the fact?
When we take children into care we do so to make their lives better, we do because we have a duty to “promote the welfare of children…who are not receiving adequate care and protection” and we do so because they “require care or protection which they are unlikely to receive unless the court makes an order”. The hardest part of the job is that we aim to make lives better but so often fail to do so. Sure we can stop things getting worse, but when we set ourselves such lofty aims is that good enough? This is something that comes back to me when reflecting on my work, and can be seen in so many aspects of our work. Aftercare provides a good place to see this dynamic in action – by the time the young person is in aftercare they are an adult, and we can reflect on the long years in care and the effect they have had, for good or for bad.
The legal basis for after care is grounded in Section 45 of the Child Care Act which states “Where a child leaves the care of a health board, the board may assist him for so long as the board is satisfied as to his need for assistance and he has not attained the age of 21 years.” This is in turn supported by a National Policy on After Care and Leaving Care detailing the processes and procedures. There has been some criticism of this set up, in that by stating that the health board “may”, and not “shall” the law does in fact provide little guarantee of support and services once a child turns 18. The political fig leaf on this issue has been provided by Subsection (4) which states that “In providing assistance under this section, a health board shall comply with any general directions given by the Minister” and has been used by Former Minister for Children Barry Andrews to direct the HSE to formulate and implement a comprehensive aftercare policy to provide services to all children leaving care. Despite this, it remains, as described by Geoffrey Shannon, a “hollow promise”, with supports subject to funding and resource availability, which all too often are not in fact available. There are still plenty of cases without an allocated Aftercare Social Worker.
On the ground aftercare is generally provided by an Aftercare Social Worker, who handles most, if not all, of the aftercare cases on the team. This creates a huge caseload of young adults needing support and help, a caseload that like any overly large caseload begs the question how good can these supports be when they are spread so thin. This is not to denigrate the hard work and commitment of after care workers, it is more a comment on the over burdening of frontline staff that the HSE goes in for. In fact the work of the Aftercare Social Worker can be even harder given that the young adults who are the clients can drift in and out of services and can be some of the hardest to engage. Getting a child to engage with the reality that their life is about to be turned upside down as supports disappear can be frustratingly difficult, particularly when it is a child who will be getting very little from the service. Despite what Helen Buckley patronizingly says, it’s not just a matter of “just trying harder”, for some kids turning 18 means freedom from Social Worker, from residential units and the freedom to go out and destroy themselves. In reality most support, both practical and financial, is only available to people in education or training. If you are in education there is a lot of support, assistance with fees, assistance with rent, and assistance with the cost of living. If you’re not, you are left to rely on social welfare.
The research both here and overseas shows time and time again the poor outcomes for children in aftercare and for children with care history. A lot of time and energy is being spent to improve aftercare services. Courts and Guardians Ad Litem are paying more and more attention to aftercare provision to obtaining commitments to support and funding. More and more policy documents and reports stress the importance of aftercare, and rightly so. Consider the fact that so many of us don’t leave home till closer to 25 instead of getting thrown out at 18. Even when we do finally leave there is a social safety net there for us which is not there for young people leaving care unless the HSE improve services!
However, there is a certain air futility to all of this. The young people we are dealing with in aftercare come from deeply damaging and destructive backgrounds, and are often just that, deeply damaged. They have also been through care, which brings with it its own trauma and harm. Given all this hurt it’s not surprising that so many don’t prosper at all. Compare them to the other children in the communities most of these kids come from, that is lower socioeconomic areas (a polite way of saying lower class really, but we cant talk about class can we) where educational attainment is low and social exclusion and unemployment are high. The majority of kids in these areas will struggle in life and education, few of them will end up as doctors, barristers, politicians, bond traders or chairman of some financial consulting agency. When measured that way, kids in care don’t do relatively bad, but is that really good enough? Given the pompous rhetoric of Social Work making life better it’s not good enough. Given the amounts of money spent on Social Work it’s not good enough. Given the fact equality should a central value of any society it’s not good enough. That young people in care do as well as some of their peers in marginalized communities shows there is something much deeper wrong, both with our society and with our care system and it is something that starts long before the young person gets anywhere close to 18.
Here’s the rub, Social Work is treating symptoms, and doing so badly. We need to start treating the root causes, the root causes of the social exclusion and poverty that drives of many of our referrals and their negative outcomes. That is a challenge that is perhaps beyond the scope of the individual Social Worker, drowned as they are under deadlines, caseloads, court reports and case notes. However there are avenues for collective action in social work, our union, the Irish Association of Social Care Workers and their Children and Families special interest group. Of course, outside of social work there are even more ways to engage with the political system and to work for social change, but who has the energy for that after a long day in the trenches?
All The Stuff You Might Have Missed!
I have (finally) updated the Archive page – http://fullcareorder.wordpress.com/archive-index/
Since my article was picked up by the Guardian Social Care Network Blog I picked up one or two extra followers but I haven’t had much time to write new articles yet. figured an easy link to my previous work might keep you all interested until I get some new content up.
Thanks for the interest in this blog, there are quite a few things I want to get off my chest so more posts will be coming, plus as I read back through the stuff I wrote early on I see there are several promises of work that I have not lived up to!
I am tempted to indulge myself with observations about the art of blog publishing but that would be truly off topic, so I will just thank you all for reading the blog and for your patience while waiting for updates, which will be coming very soon!
