Issue - meetings

The  Head of Safeguarding, Quality Assurance & Practice Development will provide  feedback on the consultation with parents about their experience of  Child Protection  Conferences.

It was reported that this piece of work, looking at how families viewed the Child Protection process, tied in with work that Hilary Corrick was undertaking in respect of parents’ views of the process, as reported later on the agenda. Rachel Oakley introduced the work undertaken, and Denise Sourris gave a presentation on this work and the findings.

Feedback had been sought, by means of questionnaires and interviews, from families who had attended a child protection conference from October 2011; 35 responses had been received from a mixture of parents and other family members, and from a diverse range of backgrounds. Four key findings had been around people feeling overwhelmed, feeling unheard, services/housing issues and understanding risk, and a number of more detailed points arose within each of these areas. It was reported that the findings of this study reflected national research findings, and that the responses had acknowledged positive aspects as well as areas for improvement. It was intended that the findings now be used to feed into service delivery, and this process had already started.

The committee noted with interest the comment in the presentation that there can be a conflict of interest between professionals and families, and that, while encouraging participation, there was a need to recognise the risk of over-identifying with the parents involved. It was noted that nobody was involved with social services out of choice, although they were generally in situations where help was required, and this contributed to contradictory and complex nature of some of the feedback received. In general, however, the feedback had been less negative than might have been expected.

The committee remarked that there was also an issue of false compliance, and families learning to say the ‘right’ things; professionals needed to be aware of this, although where there was a positive relationship with a good social worker, this was less likely to be an issue.

In response to a question from the committee, it was reported that there did not appear to be a correlation between the respondents and who their social workers were.

It was agreed that the copy of the presentation would be circulated to the committee.

The Committee thanked Denise Sourris and Rachel Oakley for the presentation.

RESOLVED

That the content of the presentation be noted.