This is a guest blog, authored by our colleagues at the Centre for Justice Innovation: Sophie Carter, Vicki Morris, and Carmen D'Cruz.
We are pleased to share this series of blogs on pre-proceedings, delving into the critical aspects of managing and supporting families within the Public Law Outline (PLO) process.
This first blog explores early intervention models such as Early Help, multi-disciplinary formulation, and the Family Safeguarding Model, which aim to prevent families from reaching the threshold for pre-proceedings. The second, 'Entering pre-proceedings – Can we still make meaningful changes once the threshold has been met?', emphasises how using the pre-proceedings period effectively to gather evidence and support families, can increase the chances of diverting them from court whenever possible. The third blog, 'This is not the end’ – Assessments and Support in Pre-Proceedings' highlights the value of dynamic assessments and the potential role of the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts model (FDAC) in providing tailored interventions that can prevent families from entering care proceedings. All three underscore how proactive, collaborative, and supportive approaches in pre-proceedings achieve better outcomes for children and families - and give practical examples of how to implement them.
There is a growing voice that speaks to the value of trauma-informed, strength based, restorative and systemic practice in children’s social care. This practice is well documented across the country, and more and more local authorities are committed to championing it. However, at a time when demand outstrips services’ access to resources, there are barriers to practitioners’ confidence in effectively supporting families.
A safeguarding approach that embodies this practice from the moment a family comes into contact with the family justice system, and improves collaboration and communication with valuable community partners, is critical to tackling these barriers. This will not only support those families that present in crisis, but crucially will help prevent families from getting to that point in the first place. In this blog, we briefly look at three models that are working to do just this.
Early Help
Early Help is a simple concept: refocusing attention and resources away from chronic and acute needs and consequent statutory interventions, towards the root causes of the underlying social issues. It is something of an umbrella term, describing a variety of responses that range from universal to preventative services to formal multidisciplinary teams around the child and family. Fundamentally, it is about identifying needs within families early and providing support before issues become entrenched.
The landscape of Early Help support services can be siloed and complex, making it extremely difficult for families to navigate their local services, particularly if they need multiple forms of intervention or support. By contrast, an integrated model of family support can give families a more consistent, public-facing point of access – and because services and professionals are already working together, it means a family only has to tell their story once to receive the right help from one place.
An increasing number of local authorities are delivering their Early Help offer through a Hub approach with a restorative framework. This means that families experience a more joined up offer of support whether this is by going to their physical Hub, through outreach as a part of the hub offer, or accessing early help support through online Hub resources. Research shows that young people and new parents in particular value being able to access these services more flexibly. The hubs provide support for families with children of all ages.
The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families provides a comprehensive overview of Family Hubs and early help, including the existing evidence for various aspects of integrated Hub models. It also provides an implementation toolkit; a collection of resources for setting up Hubs locally.
Of course, there are limitations here. Practically speaking, by the time an LA is considering pre-proceedings, the family will have likely already have had some intervention. It’s likely to have either already been escalated through the system, and possibly resulted in child protection processes, or be a new referral to the authority and be concerning enough to go straight to pre-proceedings.
Multi-disciplinary formulation
When working with children, young people and families, formulation refers to the way social care services understand their needs and experiences, and how they use that understanding to inform practice.
Rethink Formulation is one of the five aspects of the Leeds Practice Model that embodies their values and expectations of practice, thereby providing consistently high-quality help, support and care to families. The aim is to break the pattern of multiple assessments and short-term interventions, increase understanding of families’ needs and experiences, and reduce the risk of repeating interventions that were previously unsuccessful.
The formulations are attended by practitioners from across the workforce, leveraging perspectives and skill sets from multiple professions. The Rethink Formulation has ‘6 Ps’ and is based on the ‘Five P’s’ framework developed by Macneil et al (2012). The formulation considers the following for each family:
The Presenting issue – What is happening right now which is causing concern?
Predictions if things don’t change – What could happen if things don’t change?
Precipitating factors – What triggers things?
Predisposing factors – What challenges and vulnerabilities are there in the family history?
Protective factors – What positives and strengths are there?
Perpetuating factors – What’s keeping the issues going?
Critically, this model is not a linear ‘one and done’ process – all parts of the framework can be revisited on an ongoing basis, and information from one section can be used to test understanding of another.
The Family Safeguarding Model
Developed in Hertfordshire in 2015, the Family Safeguarding Model has since spread more widely across England and aims to be a ‘whole system, whole family’ approach to reform. It brings social workers and partners such as the police, health and probation, as well as specialist workers in substance use, domestic abuse and mental health, together in the same team. The approach is built on core foundations of social work practice with shared values across the partnership workforce. It works with children pre-birth to age 17 where the issues relate to abuse and neglect by their families. It can – and does – occur during pre-proceedings, but can also be used as a model before pre-proceedings are initiated, with a view to divert from escalating to this stage.
The model is underpinned by four core components:
Creating more multidisciplinary teams, including recruiting additional specialist workers in mental health, domestic abuse (working with both perpetrators and victims), substance misuse, and clinical psychology;
Whole team group supervision, including all allocated workers working with the family;
Motivational Interviewing training for key workers, to build up capability in a counselling approach designed to help people find their own motivation to make positive behaviour changes; and
The Family Safeguarding Workbook, assessing parent’s capacity for change with an electronic workbook to record case notes, aid information sharing, streamline processes, and reduce the administrative burden on key workers.
The evaluation of this programme not only highlighted a reduction in child protection plans and families entering care proceedings, but also showed improved partnerships and staff recruitment and retention.
As these three examples demonstrate, early interventions are crucial in preventing the escalation of issues that may lead to pre-proceedings being launched. However, it is important to acknowledge that despite best efforts, there may still be instances where entering pre-proceedings becomes necessary, and these cannot always be anticipated or controlled. In such cases, being prepared to consolidate and evidence the support already provided to the family is essential in determining the right course of action, to maximise the time available in pre-proceedings and improve the chances of diverting from full court proceedings.
If you would like to discuss the Trailblazers programme further, please get in touch with morgan.nasir-finlayson@mutualventures.co.uk
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