Abstract
The English child protection system is a professionally orientated one. It is a system in which notions of risk and need are determined by professional child protection workers and managers, with significant decisions made about children known to be at risk. This includes decisions about fostering or alternative care. Yet, families tend to be left out of the various forums and debates where risk determinations and practice decisions actually happen. In this article, we examine how we have tried to address this imbalance by introducing an entry to care panel system. The panel can offer a helpful pause to rushed and pressured decisions to use care as an alternative to working with situations of risk. Child protection workers and their managers are invited to take a discursive look at how risk operates in each case. This has resulted in better child protection practice. We show how the type of panel we introduced played a significant part in evening out of the care numbers in two English local authorities. Our argument is for the panel to be seen as a practice initiative—An example of purposeful bureaucracy, where decisions reached or ratified are informed by risk and need discourses. We argue that this practice initiative has helped our workers to adopt a more critical approach to risk discourses in their child protection work. Practice based tools were introduced alongside of the panel to support this way of working. We show the gains for our practice, and importantly for the families we work with, as we work differently and more expansively with risk discourses.
Highlights
The relationship between child protection and risk is a complex one
Child protection social workers employ a range of tools to assist them “encode the imprecision of risk” including drawing on their own practice iterations and habits, their “simplifying rules of thumb” (Heyman, 2010), and in this article we explore how failure to recognize the limits of risk assessments can encourage a rather narrow practice focus
We report on how we responded to loud messages by some of our child protection workers that our risk work was too narrow and deficit focused, and we show the positive outcomes this has had for our clients and staff
Summary
The relationship between child protection and risk is a complex one. The rhetoric of risk on the one hand is used to identify those who meet the criteria for statutory child protective services, while at the same time legitimizing interventions for some and not for others. The work of risk assessment and risk analysis tends to be regarded as a task for professionals, with families frequently being subjects of the decisions made. Entry to care panels are common to most English local authorities, and we argue that the panel needs to be more than a gate keeping forum for resource decisions like fostering and residential care. Rather, we argue it can be a dynamic form of social work intervention. Care panel arrangements were established as a response to narrow definitions of risk driving decisions to place children and young people in formal care. We demonstrate how we have moved beyond a narrow and negative “risk society” paradigm after listening to a group of workers challenge simple and narrow notions of risk
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