“The single most important factor in minimizing errors is to admit you may be wrong” – it is not an easy maxim for anybody to follow, especially members of a scrutiny committee. It is actually by Professor Eileen Munro of London School of Economics, who was writing about the complexities and challenges of child protection and social work.
In November 2015, Ofsted published a report after inspecting aspects of Brent’s children’s services. In the report, Ofsted made some recommendations for scrutiny as well as the department. Ofsted’s view was that scrutiny should focus more on children’s social care and be more challenging. In the past, scrutiny’s work programme had focused much more on education and early years than children’s welfare and safeguarding. It was not possible to see what impact scrutiny had made on those areas, warned Ofsted.
To go back to Professor Munro’s maxim, it seemed to me that we had to acknowledge that we hadn’t got it right in this area and needed to pay more attention to children’s social care. Scrutiny taking a closer look at a new framework for social workers called Signs of Safety was a good place to start.
In October 2014, Brent was one of ten local authorities awarded funding from the England Innovations Programme, which is supported by the Department for Education, to introduce Signs of Safety as its practice framework for working with children and families.
Children’s social care can be a fraught area and we are all aware of high-profile cases where scrutiny of children’s services and safeguarding has been too weak. Yet, Brent’s implementation of Signs of Safety, which the department started in early 2015, was certainly worth scrutiny’s attention. It is recognised around the world as one of the leading frameworks for social work, which should improve the safety of the borough’s children who are most at risk of harm.
My committee reviewed the implementation of Signs of Safety in Brent recently and spoke to front-line social workers to understand how the Signs of Safety model works in practice and the challenges they face. One of the principles of Signs of Safety is for practitioners to think critically, or in other words, to reflect on what has worked or not worked, being balanced about strengths and risks to avoid an overly negative or positive view, and remaining open-minded, all of which can be encapsulated in Professor Munro’s maxim.
One of the recommendations of my committee’s report involves scrutiny to review how the implementation of Signs of Safety is progressing in a year. I think critical thinking is a principle that scrutiny should not just be remembering in a year. It seems to me that it offers an important insight, which scrutiny should bear in mind all of the time and is something that could help to improve our practice for the better outcomes of all our most vulnerable children.
