Poverty-aware practice with children and families

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence informed practice with children and families, young people and adults.  

Susannah: I'm Susannah Bowyer, I'm the Assistant Director at Research in Practice and I'm here in Sheffield University in the office of Professor Kate Morris who is Professor of Social Work here at the University of Sheffield, and her long-term companion and collaborator Professor Brid Featherstone who is from the University of Huddersfield. Both are experienced social workers and long-standing researchers in the field, and in this podcast we are going to have a conversation about the powerful body of research with which they've been involved over the last number of years, and the radical vision that they proposed for thinking differently about working with children and families in need of support and protection.  

Kate: And we should, at this point, just mention the colleagues involved in this. Which is Sue White, professor here at Sheffield, Anna Gupta, professor at Royal Holloway, co-authors of our social model book, and Professor Paul Bywaters, and the child welfare and equalities research team who have made a significant contribution to our work in this area.  

[The nature of that relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect] 

Susannah: Thank you, absolutely. And, indeed, Nuffield Foundation and other funders as well in different parts of this research. So, shall we start there, then? Thinking about the work led by Paul Bywaters and involving many of the colleagues that you mentioned there, and the relationship between child abuse, and neglect, and poverty, to, kind of, set the scene for some of the grounding of why this poverty-awareness approach is so important. So, there was a review, wasn't there? Early in that large scale research project in 2016, which drew together research which shows a strong association between families’ social economic circumstances and the chances that children in those families will experience child abuse or neglect. That evidence, in that review, was shown to be found repeatedly across developed countries, across different types of abuse and maltreatment, and using various different methods and research approaches. Could you explain a bit about the nature of that relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect?  

Brid: Yes, it has a direct effect, as the review identified. So, for example, it's a direct implication the fact that people don't have enough money to provide food, a growing issue, actually, in our society. The lack of money to buy in support, the lack of money to have decent housing, lack of money to provide heating for children, so food poverty, fuel poverty, etc. But, also, indirectly, there is a large body of research now on the impact on parental stress, relationship between parents, between couples, and also, actually, something that perhaps we used to pay a lot of attention to, but we have maybe not so much in social work itself, the quality of the neighbourhood conditions in which people are trying to raise children, the levels of support, how safe they are, etc. So, one of the things that comes up a lot though is that it's not just a background factor, and we found the evidence review shows this but as Kate will say later in terms of the case studies, it's really important not to think of it as just something that's inert, or passive, or there. It's actually implicated, every day, at all sorts of points, around the decisions people have to make about do they get the bus? Do they buy lunch? Can they feed the kids? You know. And, it interacts with a whole range of other psychological issues that will be going on for them.  

Susannah: So, lots of the, kind of, presenting issues that might come before social work or family support around things like lack of food in the household, or non-school attendance, might best be understood with a really front-facing, kind of, consciousness about how poverty might be a factor there?  

Brid: Absolutely, and I think what we are saying is that perhaps we have lost, to some extent, that consciousness. We are not saying it will be the only reason why children aren't being fed, or that it's the only reason why they're not being taken to school. What we are saying is, though, that we absolutely have to engage with that as a key factor, and that's an increasing issue in our society where you have 4 million children living in poverty, and you have growing numbers attending food banks, etc. So, what we are saying is we need to be poverty aware, so it has to be a factor in our assessments.  

Kate: Yes, and it's also being aware of those changes in context of families, like Universal Credit that can have a direct impact on their wellbeing. Lifting our heads up a bit, as social workers and practitioners, and being aware, are you in an area where Universal Credit is being rolled out? Are you in an area where certain helpful services have been closed down or their funding ceased? It's just really engaging with that context in which the family is trying to either survive or thrive. I think that's important, and at times gets a little bit lost as we are detached in offices, away from neighbourhoods. It's easy to lose sight of that a bit.  

Brid: Yes, do we understand the demographics of the area, you know, is it all zero hours contracts? What are the work situations like of people? All those, kind of, very practical, everyday aspects of people’s lives, that we really need to have as part as our understandings of how they are around caring for their children.  

[The policy context across the UK] 

Susannah: Thank you. No, absolutely. So, come back to some of that, the practical detail of poverty-aware practice and how to develop that. But I also just wanted to explore a little bit more about some of that research with Paul Bywaters and colleagues, because I think one of the things that's so strong about research and international research is that when people are working right in the belly of one particular system or one particular, kind of, policy context, it can be hard to imagine that things can be done differently. And, both history and looking back to, sort of, social working in recent, previous decades, but also some of the international work across the four nations of the UK that you did with your colleagues, show that things don't have to be done in the way that we are familiar with doing them in England. Now, that four nations work showed some very interesting different statistical findings around child welfare activity, across the four nations. And, of course, we can't show graphs and charts on a podcast, but it would be great if you would be able to give us a little bit of a taste of the findings on the comparison between the way that these policies play out in different parts of the UK.  

Brid: I mean, a key message is that within each country the relationship with deprivation was statistically significant, so a child's chances of coming into care rose the more deprived they were, and that's in every country. What is, as you say, interesting though is that there were differences between the four countries. England and Wales were pretty similar, whereas Scotland had very large numbers, when you control for deprivation, Scotland had very large numbers of children in care, and Northern Ireland had much lower rates, we calculated it per ten thousand. But that's quantitative work that opens up lots of questions about why, it doesn't answer why, it tells us that there's something going on. But I do think the headline for us, at this stage, is that within each country the relationship with deprivation holds, and is extremely significant.  

Kate: And, you may within that see some local variation, so you may see some local authorities producing different figures, you may see some regions producing some difference. But if you are going to say what's the significant driver? This relationship with deprivation is the significant driver for the unequal rates of intervention within each country. Yes, of course, practice matters, and yes, local thresholds and local, kind of, decision-making matters, but, if you are going to understand a pattern, and it is a pattern, it is a, you know, systemically we have to see that as a significant driver. Where it gets interesting, as Brid said, is that Northern Ireland is a very poor nation, and yet it has a very low rate of intervention, so some of the questions we've been raising are about those differences between nations, rather than within nations. And, the other interesting area is ethnicity and trying to understand what the data tells us about the different experiences when you factor both poverty and ethnicity into the analysis.  

Susannah: Tell us a little bit more about that?  

Kate: So, it's very early days, I think we would say there's… it raises more questions than it answers. That we haven't had a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the different rates and patterns when you factor in poverty and ethnicity.  

Brid: So, if you take deprivation into account, actually, white working-class kids have very high rates of children in care. Then there's this, with terrible data incidentally, there's this mixed category which is very high rates again. Lower rates, given deprivation, for Asian kids, and then Black kids are after, in the middle. So, I think what we are saying is that there's been a story that it's about racism and discrimination which, of course, we wouldn't deny, but what we are saying is, we do need to look at the interaction of deprivation and ethnicity and we do need more research in that area, definitely.  

Kate: And, what it brings us back to, and I think it's something as practitioners to think about as well, is that because we know so little about the social and economic circumstances of the children with whom we intervene, it makes it very difficult to arrive at some broader based understandings. So, for example, because we don't… although case-by-case we collect information about families, at a population level, we don't know how many families are in work or out of work, in terms of their children being in the care system. So, it's very difficult to say whether work is a protected factor or not, because we don't have that data. So, it is quite staggering that we don't have that data nationally, and we don't have that picture of whose children we are intervening with or removing. And I think there's an important set of questions for us about the data we are collecting and how informed we are about some of the actions we are taking.  

Brid: Yes, exactly. So, it raises lots of really interesting research questions about, you know, Asian kids, what's that about? Is it that, you know, that they have, as people believe, stronger social support, or is it that the mother isn't in employment, or? We simply don't know, but it opens up those questions. We do really want to get across that point, that major point though that deprivation is a really significant issue, both across the piece for families, but also within countries. We have tended to go down there looking at the differences, the differences between different local authorities or the differences between different regions, and we are not denying those, but we are saying there is an underlying pattern that we need to address.  

Kate: One of the realities for Black and minority ethnic children is that they are overrepresented in poor areas, so by bringing in deprivation into the analysis you start to understand some important differences in children's experiences, and that's another reason for needing to read across these data sets in a way we perhaps haven't historically done.  

[The interplay between interventions in children's lives and their social, economic and material circumstances] 

Susannah: Yes, so like so often with data analysis, the data analysis raises many more questions that need to be explored a bit more deeply, but as you are saying, there is this core finding here that a model of child protection or welfare that doesn't incorporate an inequalities perspective is likely to be ineffective. Can we now talk about the qualitative research that you did exploring the interplay between decisions to intervene in children's lives and their social, economic and material circumstances? 

Kate: So, alongside the work with the big data sets, we were able to spend time immersed in social work teams having a think about how social workers take account of children's social and economic circumstances in their decisions to intervene. And, there were some overarching themes that come from that and it's important to say irrespective or where we went, social workers are dealing with unmet need and rationing. So, repeatedly across the sites we can see social workers feeling frustrated by being unable to meet the needs of the families. Poor localities of the usual site of social work practice, all the teams, predominately the families they worked with, came from the poor areas, and that was unremarkable and therefore unremarked upon. It was, we call it, the wallpaper of practice, people are so used to poverty forming the backdrop that it no longer was the focus of attention or comment. It's ingrained, poverty is an ingrained endemic, but actually wasn't particularly visible in practice with sponsors. So, while social workers were able to articulate when prompted fairly detailed hypothesis and analysis about the relationship between poverty and the family difficulties and needs and problems, when we looked at plans for children, when we looked at decision-making, we see remarkably little evidence of sustained attention to social and economic factors that might be involved in that need.  

Our analysis also suggests that existing frameworks may struggle to connect professional core business with families’ core business. Professionals’ core business was often described as parenting, risk management, capacity, viabilities assessments, and of course, for families their core business was often food, warmth, shelter, the use of food banks was evident across the piece, housing difficulties, no recourse to public funds. So, for families the core business is about being able to feed your children, keep warm, safe environment, and the professional core business was about systems management, parenting capacity, so one of the things we talk about is how might we reconnect families’ core business with professionals’ core business? And, it's an interesting conversation about why we've ended up with core business that isn't the same, really. The other things that social workers talked about was that a real sense of poverty is almost too big to tackle, in the context of ever diminishing resources they talked about the impact of cuts to services, the reduction and the hollowing out of family support services. Poverty can just seem too big an issue to tackle. Social workers talked about almost feeling in poverty themselves in terms of not having the resources and the facilities to engage with families.  

Brid: I think that's what came out of the case studies, but since then it's just become obvious that that's a really dominant narrative, actually, and that it extends from policy makers right down that people have just, kind of, almost thrown their hands up in despair and said what can we do about this, you know. If a big company decides to leave England and, kind of, have its production elsewhere, how can we change anything? That's a really important thing that we need to tackle actually, as a society, thinking about how we can. To some extent, the social workers were echoing a much more pervasive sense of powerlessness about poverty. And actually, we do have recent experience, though from previous governments where we did tackle poverty. Do you know we have recent experience where we reduced the numbers of children living in poverty by taking certain policy measures, so it is very important to remember that. I was at a presentation recently where the Child Poverty Action Group were making that point very clearly and saying it doesn't have to be like this, it used to be different.  

Kate: There are three, kind of, further relevant themes I think, one is we need to be terribly careful we don't place a burden on front line practitioners to change what are systemic patterns, so we need to recognise by change of practice enhancing practice is important on its own, it's not enough. This pattern we see, this relationship between deprivation and unequal rates of intervention practice can only be one part of redressing this. But we also saw social workers getting themselves in what we describe to be a, kind of, moral muddle really, in that in wanting to practice equitably, they didn't want to acknowledge poverty. They would say things like most families in poverty don't harm their children, it's not fair to make assumption about the relationship between poverty and harm, we want to treat people the same, we don't want to let that inform our decision-making. But, of course, the reality of that was it meant social workers weren't in touch with the everyday experiences of children and families. So, ignoring the poverty didn't make it go away for the family, it just made an important factor that was missing in those assessments. I think as a profession and as a discipline we need to untangle this, kind of, moral muddle.  

Then the other thing we saw, and this is a difficult area for us to think about, but one I think we have to, which is we did see some systems and some practices that reinforces shame and suffering of poverty. One of the things we've been saying in this work is we know you can't change some of these bigger patterns but do take a look at your everyday systems and your everyday practices, and make sure they aren't making a difficult situation worse. And that occurs in all sorts of ways, we saw families struggling to fund attendance at critical meetings, we saw non-attendance being reinterpreted as resistance when it might just be that actually, practically, it's almost impossible to get there. We saw quite negative narratives about particular areas or districts, quite pejorative comments about where families were living, some territorial stigma really creeping in to social workers descriptions of areas. So, I think whilst we are absolutely clear, there's a limit to what individual social workers could do, humane practice that doesn't further reinforce shame and suffering is important in this.  

[Humane practice] 

Susannah: Yes, humane practice it's a really important concept and in a way one that, you know, even the fact that we need to name it is a, kind of, important moment, isn't it? That we are rediscovering the need to think in humane terms about the work that's going on. I suppose, as you're saying, if poverty is, kind of, part of the wallpaper in social work practice or has become part of the wallpaper in England and social work practice, and if the, kind of, cultural norm for social work practice has become very focused on risk, individual families assessing the risk factors within individual relationships between this parent and this child, out of context of where they are living and the pressures within which they’re existing, then it's very easy to see how that can slide into something, that for parents, is actually really scary. It's all about, they are coming to take my kids away, and the possibility of engaging and getting the support that a good social worker can and does provide to families is reduced, it's a challenge, isn't it.  

Brid: Yes, so what's happened is we've developed this framework which is that child abuse and neglect is about what individual families do or don't do, and as crucially, what individual parents do or don't do, and often it's what individual mothers do or don't do. It's quite household focused, it's quite narrow in its gaze, it's often very psychological. Again, we're not saying that psychological approaches aren't important, they are, but it kind of needs to lift its gaze a bit to looking at, well, who does mum talk to? Who can she go to if she needs to borrow some money? Where does she go with three kids when the buses are all, kind of, different, for different kids and they've got to go to different schools? So, what we are trying to say, and there [are] examples in the research, but also from our other colleagues and we write about this in the book, of where people’s inability to access housing, for example, is taken as evidence that they are not committed to their children. You know, so it's a, kind of, completely voluntarist approach to the capacity of families to do things, you know. It doesn't acknowledge that we exercise personal responsibility within circumstances that are not always of our own choosing. You know, we are not totally the authors of our lives, are we? We are all bound within constraints trying to exercise agency. So, we think that social workers just got that individual structure bit a bit wrong actually, on that continuum, it's gone too far towards it's your responsibility, whereas we need to, again, reorient it, bring it back.  

Kate: As part of this project, we were able to spend some time in one of the most deprived communities, thinking about how community members and families understood and thought about children's services, because we felt it was important to have that bit of data in the mix, as well. And it was really interesting because one of the things that was clear is that they didn't experience social workers as connected with other community resources and services, so they didn't see a connection between social workers, employment advisors or food banks, or local faith-based organisations. There was a sense of social work being semi-detached or detached from everyday community life. But there was also something quite interesting about a community narrative, really, about social workers being fairly punitive, finger wagging, scary, you know, they are going to take your children away, they tell you, you know, tell you what to do and, yet, also, from individual family members in that very same community some incredibly positive stories about how much their social worker had helped them. So, there is something interesting about individual family experiences and community narratives and a distance between the two, that they reflect, I think the point that Brid is making, about how well we're engaging with communities and families beyond that individual risk focus lens, and echoes that really.  

[Co-producing approaches with people who have lived experience] 

Susannah: And you talked a bit earlier about the fact that perhaps social work or other forms of social work where the workers will be living within the communities and understand through direct experience what it was like to live in that community and how we've probably moved, in most cases, away from that and people are driving in and out of work and know first-hand less about the communities where they are working. Conversely then, in terms of doing things differently, what comes through strongly in your studies is around co-producing approaches with people who have these experiences and really hearing first hand those stories and experiences of what it is to live in those communities and with those pressures. Anna Gupta has got some lovely stories from where she unpacks some of these questions from the point of view of the person who has been characterised as failing to engage for instance. And, I just wonder if you've any other, you know, any other examples, positive examples of where parents and families are being drawn into that co-production and social workers and others are being awakened to those experiences by hearing properly what it's like.  

Kate: So, yes, before we, kind of, delve into individual examples, just more generally, there's a lovely sentence from a community leader in the community study where they talk about tidal hope, and that communities live with tidal hope. Which is this ebb and flow of short-term funded initiatives, be it Sure Start, Children's Centres, whatever. And the impact that has on the community in terms of how devastating that can be, so you can start to appreciate and enjoy a local resource that then goes, and that makes you a bit wary the next time there's a local resource but you engage, and then that goes. So, I think it's really important for us to understand the fabric of that community's life and this consequence of short-term targeted intervention, I think it's important to say that and that's at community level.  

Then, at an individual level, one of the things we talk about in Stepping Up, Stepping Down – which is a research report funded by Lankelly Chase – is families rarely have any positive space to contribute their knowledge, experience and skills in relation to navigating services, coping with particular stresses and strains, whatever it might be. The most usual route for families to engage is through complaints. If it's not the caseworker, it's complaints because you don't like what you've received. Having positive spaces and places for families to engage with us, in all sorts of different ways, whether that's about designing services, commissioning services, evaluating services, it's relatively rare. When we have seen it, it's provoked all sorts of really interesting conversations between policymakers, practitioners and families about doing things differently. So, I think that's quite an important way of thinking differently, move away from a deficit model of family engagement to a strength-based model of family engagement.  

Brid: I mean, this is not linked to this actual research but is a theme in the book that we've written, Protecting Children: A Social Model, there is now around the world and there is a bit of an explosion here, in this country, particularly of parent's voices and parents starting to tell their stories, often on social media and in conferences. I mean, five years ago, it was quite rare still to get a parent at a children's services annual conference. Whereas it's now quite routine, and that's quite important. Going back to your point about humane practice because people are starting to hear each other's stories because one of the things about a risk-based system is that people's stories get colonised into a risk frame. And, so, their, kind of, plea for help is not understood or heard or recognised. So, we think that there are a lot of really positive and embryonic things going on around parents' voices. Andy Billson has just started, he's part of a big parental-led, parental advocacy network, which is international, which we're very positive about. Another thing we talk a lot about in the book is the learning that Anna and I got from the adoption enquiry. Where we, the parents, birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptive people, came together for a day in a room and talked to each other and listened and heard each other. And there are some very positive things happening around contact now and adoption for a range of reasons. One thing I think that really is very clear is you can have a lot of very good research and you can have people plodding on desperately trying to get heard, but it takes a while for things to come together. So, what we're seeing at the minute is the coming together of a range of things.  

Kate: Often I think the parents charter from your family, your voice, and the work with family rights group around parents’ panels. These are all green shoots, as Brid is describing, of thinking differently together, forming alliances, doing it differently. And we have to give, you know, we have to give those real proper space to grow. We've got to be so careful that we don't, yet again, go in there and colonise those and turn those into what we think they should be. I think it's going to be a very interesting time.  

Brid: And not necessarily very comfortable times actually. You know, we found this in the adoption, people get very cross, they get very hurt, they're very damaged by what has happened to them. Yes, and I think the whole role of professionals and academics is really interesting in this process.  

Kate: Yes.  

Brid: Really interesting.  

[Supporting strategic managers to think about practical ways to apply the findings of this research] 

Susannah: In 2018, you ran some workshops for Research in Practice around England, at which you were supporting strategic managers from local authorities all over the place to think about practical ways to apply some of the findings of this powerful body of research that we've talked about. Could you explain a little bit about the approaches you suggested to them, the practical means to put some of this into practice?  

Kate: So, we did a series of action planning exercises with the workshops. I have to say, I think, on behalf of Brid and I, we were bowled over by how willing people were to engage with this, and how much this resonated, this research and this thinking resonated with their experiences. And that was, as researchers, it's tremendously heartening when you realise that actually, there's just such a strong connection between your research and people's practice and policy interests. So, there was a set of work we started to do in terms of data and thinking about how well people understand the communities that they serve. And people going away to really think about what data they might routinely collect and how they might interrogate that to better understand the families and children they're seeking to deliver service to. So, that was quite important. And it will be interesting to see where people have gone with that. We saw the green shoots of some quite sophisticated work in terms of thinking about the relationship between data and poverty and deprivation and the children coming through the system, and therefore, the families from whom those children were coming from. We did some very careful thinking about policies, people thinking very carefully about things like their neglect policy and wanting to go away and think about that. And thinking about the fact that poverty may not be as evident in their neglect strategies as it needed to be and that that might then lead to some changes in their local authority wide structures and approaches to neglect.  

And in terms of some of the decision-making processes, certainly, some people who are independent chairs, child protection conferences, looked after children, wanting to go away and audit the plans to understand where social and economic conditions and contexts are in terms of those plans, whether they're evident. And if they're not evident, should they be. And then on a day-to-day basis, people saying, 'I need to poverty proof some of my practice. I need to stop and think quite carefully about how realistic and possible it is to engage for families living with poverty. What does it mean in terms of routine use of food banks.' People have become very familiar with that but had perhaps stopped thinking about what that really meant in terms of everyday practice. So, people going away to just look at their routine everyday casework practice, and just do a bit of poverty proofing around that. So, it's really a layered response to the research. But quite sophisticated and quite nuanced in terms of what people are going to take away.  

[The poverty aware framework for social work in Northern Ireland] 

Susannah: And when you talk about, you know, that there's a real groundswell of attention and consciousness about this, there's some good stuff to draw on, isn't there? So, there's this poverty aware framework for social work that has been launched in Northern Ireland. Would you flag that a bit because I think that's something people can access online very straightforwardly?  

Brid: And that came straight out of the Child Welfare Inequalities Project. Sean Holland was on our advisor group. He's the Chief Social Worker in Northern Ireland. He became very engaged with the findings of the whole project, spoke it off launch event at the end of the conference, at the end of the project. They worked in Northern Ireland in the multi-agency basis. And they have family hubs, so they see those as very important places to locate some of the practice. Yes, it's a multi-agency document that's trying to think across the piece about how people can embed a poverty aware approach.  

[Accessing benefits] 

Kate: Another, kind of, sensible, we thought, development, folks starting to explore whether they could co-locate income maximisation services with some of their duty teams so that families… social workers felt they weren't sufficiently knowledgeable about the current benefits systems, that it's just too complex, and so trying to form those routine working relationships. And, certainly, we know for some areas, that has led to over 80% of families seeing an increase in income. And if you go back to the review that Brid talked about at the start of this podcast, that, you know, poverty is a contributory factor to child abuse and neglect. If you can maximise income, you are going to see for families some easing of the stresses and strains in which they're living. So, those seem very practical developments that people were prepared to take on the back of this research.  

Susannah: And there's a real clear cost benefits data there, isn't there? So, Child Poverty Action Group, again, I think you saw the same presentation I did, Brid. We're talking about benefits advisors placed in food banks. And, really, extraordinary levels of additional income that were drawn into families because benefits to which they had entitlement were not being claimed. And given this advisor right there on the ground at the food bank, that was really making an immediate difference there. So, in terms of, sort of, locality strategy planning and thinking about how to use resources, that something like that can really reap huge returns in, you know, a relatively small investment in thinking about advice at that level.  

Brid: Yes, Child Poverty Action Group mentioned Tower Hamlets particularly. I did a presentation at Manchester Met (Metropolitan University), where the Child Poverty Action Group were speaking. I was talking about this particular project. And then you had somebody who was doing advice in the community. She was a manager of benefits advice in the community and, kind of, advice centre more generally. And what was really important was the three of us talking to each other because the Child Poverty Action Group hadn't quite made the links that we were making into the child protection system.  

[Rethinking child protection] 

One of the things that I think that we really need to confront as a society, I think, is that child protection is seen as something over there. It's to do with really, really troubled, stressed, difficult families, problematic families. And, actually, it's seen as, kind of, something quite different from what happens for everybody else. I suppose one of the things we're trying to say is, we're trying to go back to earlier messages in our society, which is, child protection is everybody's business. We can all struggle. We can all end up in trouble. We can all end up falling off that precipice and, you know, there was a piece of research that I often talk about, Caroline Hooper's work, which shows how money and trauma can interact in an intergenerational sense to really make things problematic for families. But we tend to think of it, 'Oh, it's over there. It's these uniquely stressed families.' And that was why those conversations were really important, actually. And the Child Poverty Action Group came to our launch as well and are clearly making the links now into a broader understanding of child protection.  

Kate: I think what you're saying there is really pertinent. I think often within my work of research and practice, you see different bodies of theory coming to the fore. So, trauma-informed practice, for instance, in the last couple of years has been an area of a great deal of attention and has huge riches to bring to direct practice. And yet, it's this, kind of, broadening your lens, isn't it, you know? If we narrow our lens too finely onto one particular body of theory or one way of analysing a situation, we're completely missing a trick and we need to bring these theories into conversation with each other. Just as you say, we need to bring different areas of professional expertise together on the ground to make sense of these.  

Brid: And that can be hard because I think it's about thinking ‘both-and’ rather than ‘either-or.’ And it's, kind of, holding a whole range of perspectives in mind and in thought and in action. And it's easier to think, 'Oh, I'll just concentrate on this bit over there.' But actually, social work is about the whole picture, and that's historically what it has been about. So, it's very important that we try and support social workers to be able to think about the whole picture. The other thing is that we've all had the experience of people saying to us, 'Oh, we know poverty is relevant, of course, it's relevant, but not to the families we work with, you know, they're uniquely troubled. And if you gave them more money, they'd just drink it.' So, it's really important that we, kind of, really think through what's going on there.  

Susannah: So, many of the things that we've been talking about through this conversation are themes that come through in your recent book that you've done, once again, with your colleagues, Anna Gupta and Sue White, building on the reimagining child protection book that came out, three years ago now, is it?  

Brid: 2014.  

Susannah: 2014. So, you know, a really strong, kind of, grouping of thinking and a strong building of thinking around these questions. I know, you know, some of these themes have come through already in the conversation, but talk to us a bit about the book and the model and how you feel that that collaboration between the four of you is really generative in building the thinking here.  

Kate: Do you want to start? So, you're right to connect it with reimagining because that started our thinking. And we should make mention of Jo Warner here, who we wrote an article about the risk monster with, which formed a bridge really for us between reimagining and a social model. And that article with Jo began to think about, if you think about the social model of disability and the way in which it's shifted, the power dynamics changed the paradigm, really, or attempted to in terms of how we understand, and respond to, and think about disability. That was the kind of paradigm shift we wanted to engage with in terms of child protection and hence a social model for child protection. We really see it as a starter for conversation. So, we're trying to contribute to a conversation rather than say we have the answers, and we're very clear about that and we say that repeatedly. We don't have some kind of off the peg model in this book that people can go away with and it will solve everything.  

Susannah: Still no silver bullet, eh?  

Kate: There is never going to be one. It's much more about saying, 'Is there a different way of framing this? Is there a different way of thinking about this? Are there some different conversations and different voices to be heard? And so that's what the book's trying to do, really, and bring together these strands, as Brid says, that recognise the role of trauma, of social-economic determinants of the way in which we think about the rights of children to flourish in our society and how we understand family support. So, it's quite a big picture in terms of the book, but then also we've tried to take some specific examples and say, 'Look, this is how this community or this service tried to think differently.'  

Brid: You asked about the relationship between us as researchers. I mean, Kate, Sue and I did Reimagining Child Protection Towards Humane Practice with Families, and I think it's fair to say, and I think the same is definitely true in Protecting Children in a Social Model, is whether it's fool hardy or not, we're not afraid to range across disciplines. I come from a sociology background, as does Sue, you come from an applied social studies background, we've a range of different experiences as researchers and as social workers, we've done lots of different types of research, like for example Sue's research on system design, and all that ground-breaking work she did for the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) around how social workers are spending their time.  

Kate: Hannah's work on the capability approach, it's a real broad church.  

Brid: It is, and it's also different bodies of research. So, for example, Sue would probably have much more experience of researching social workers and multi-agency research. She's done NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) studies where she's looked at patient safety, for example, so she brings all that system design stuff which I think is really valuable to thinking about what helps or hinders social workers to engage with families. Then we have done much more the service user end of it. I have a long history of working with fathers, of thinking how you might do domestic abuse differently, I've worked with a family rights group around parent advocacy. You've done years of research around family perspectives and family group conferencing, and equally then Anna's work with the ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World and worked with families in poverty, it's really important. So, we bring a whole range of different research experiences and Anna's background is actually not in the social sciences originally, I think she studied Japanese, actually, and came from India, brought up in Australia. So, we're not afraid to range widely, to look at philosophy, I love philosophy, to look at history, to look at sociology, to look at social work and we think that bring a real richness, we hope, to our work and to our conversations, and the last chapter of the book is very much about reaching out and saying, 'We do need to talk, you know? We need to talk to political philosophers.'  

One of the things I feel is really important is that in social work, we have this ongoing, very understandable conversation about why do people not trust us? Would it be good if the government started saying how great we are? Would that help? Why have we got such a bad image? I actually think we need to look at why lots of people aren't trusted in our society, why we've had a decline of trust in expertise, why governments aren't trusted, journalists aren't trusted, now we have experts aren't trusted. So, we need to look much more broadly at our broader literature, and of course, we all work in universities where we walk to colleagues from other disciplines all the time. Your sociological studies, the people working here have fantastic experience of different kinds of research. I'm the same, I've been looking to work in a range of different universities where women's studies was very strong in Bradford, or philosophy was very strong at one point. So, I think we're bringing a range of things, aren't we, in conversations and histories.  

Kate: And it allows us, and I think this is quite important, is that it allows us to move away from what works, and what works has its place, and we recognise that in the book. We explore the place of informed interventions in children's and families' lives, but with this book, we've tried to take it a step back from what works to really engage in a conversation about what's the purpose? Why are we in families' lives? What's the kind of framing for our involvement, and to think much more broadly because the risk of focussing on what works is we lose sight of that much bigger picture about who are we working with and why? And what rights do we have? And the ethics of engagement and all those much bigger, complex strands we've tried to bring together and again, it's not either/or, but it's about trying to situate what works in a bigger picture.  

Brid: Yes, I think it's really important. I've gone back to conversations we've been having in social work for years with people, wonderful researchers like Geraldine MacDonald who would say, 'Is it ethical not to be evidence-based?' We would also say that ethics opens up bigger questions as well. Something might work, but is it right? It might work in the short term but is it right in the longer term? And we had to face those questions in the adoption inquiry all the time, they were big questions in the adoption inquiry about short term effectiveness versus long term identity issues, for example. So, we've been having those conversations in social work for quite a while, haven't we, about evidence and ethics. I think in reimagining, we did have that chapter on ethics, really tried to drill down to some of that and we constantly use that reference from Dingwall, don't we, we use that everywhere, which is the quote about it's not about technical fixes but what's a good society? And I think that motivates all of us, doesn't it? To think what's a good society for children and families? Are we creating a good society? So, there are very challenging questions in the first chapter where we say, can you really improve child protection practice at the same time as increase the numbers of children living in poverty, or increase the numbers of families having to access foodbanks? Is there a bit of a disconnect there? So, we do put that challenge out to government, don't we, in that first chapter?  

Susannah: Yes, yes. Is there anything you might want to say about where next, then, for you and your team of colleagues?  

Kate: So, we're working with a number of local authorities where we're doing very small scale but innovative work, thinking very carefully about community and about place-based responses that can support children and families, and social work's role in that, but trying to take it away from just service-driven interventions to a more holistic approach, and we're hopeful that that work will grow and flourish over the next couple of years.  

Brid: And we're taking that work out of it being just about social work and people who are called child protection people, to actually starting to talk to community workers and stuff, to break down this assumption that child protection is something that's done with highly stressed families, over there, by particular kinds of experts.  

[Outro] 

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