Contents
• Introduction
• Staff Changes within Manchester City Council
• Domestic Violence and Abuse Services
• Social Care, Early Help and Troubled Families
• Levels of referrals to Social Care
• Children’s Board
• Safeguarding and Manchester Safeguarding Children’s Board
• Forced Marriage Protocol
• Children and Families affected by the Criminal Justice System
Introduction
Manchester’s voluntary and community sector is about to start the new financial year in a place of great uncertainty. We are still waiting to understand the direct and indirect impact of Manchester’s budget cuts, and awaiting the local and national election results.
Although the consultation about the budget cuts has been a difficult and stressful process with potentially devastating impacts for the people of Manchester, it has been heartening to see the strength and passion of campaigning from the voluntary sector, service users and communities to save the services that they value so highly. Together Manchester’s voluntary and community sector has demonstrated its value and its commitment to standing up for the people of Manchester. The strength of campaigns, particularly to save the Youth Fund and save Women’s Refuges has been inspiring.
Although some organisations have been issued with reprieves others are taking cuts of 20-100%.
Cuts to Manchester’s Advice Services on top of the existing cuts to legal aid, the closure of Manchester Law Centre and reductions in advocacy services is going to place further levels of stress on vulnerable families and the organisations that support them. It comes at a time when many projects in the community are seeing increased demand for their services. The impact of welfare reform is adding to pressures on families, and raised thresholds for all services meaning that many are presenting with increasingly serious and complex needs in community services.
Changes within Manchester City Council
There have been several changes following both the OFSTED Inspection and the voluntary severance scheme within the Council.
Gladys Rhodes White is the Interim Directors of Children and Families. She has a background working in Rochdale after the crisis about Child Sexual Exploitation. The Voluntary Sector Children Young People and Families Leaders Group will be meeting regularly with Gladys Rhodes White to improve collaboration, commissioning, and new approaches to supporting children, young people and families over the coming year.
Jane Booth is interim Chair of Manchester Safeguarding Children’s Board she is Chair of Rochdale Safeguarding Children’s Board and has a wealth of experience dealing with the aftermath of a failed Ofsted standard and the Child Sexual Exploitation issues in Rochdale. What happened in Rochdale also shows that moving on from an OFSTED failure is not a smooth process. Rochdale is acknowledged to have improved under its latest inspection but is still under a new improvement notice. The political ramifications of the process and challenges about the nature of inspections continues.
Julie Heslop is Strategic Lead Integration and Prevention and is the new lead for Early Help and has now moved from Education and Skills to Children’s Social Care. Julie also leads on Troubled Families and Complex Dependency work for children and families at higher levels of need. The aim is to integrate Early Help more closely into the spectrum of work from prevention, specialist interventions and social care. Julie will continue the work that was started between Elaine Morrison and Macc to engage the Voluntary Sector in the Programme. Click here for more information
Karen Dalton Deputy Director of Children’s Services has left and her replacement is being recruited.
Domestic Violence and Abuse Services
Newsflash: *Funding*: Grants programme for community groups to support domestic abuse victims/ survivors: Click here for more details.
Review of Domestic Abuse Services in the City
The outcome of the campaign to save refuge funding, is that the Council decided to conduct a review of all domestic abuse funding, rather than implementing potential cuts of 20-40%. This review will sit alongside the current Delivering Differently redesign of domestic abuse services which is led by Shirley Woods-Gallagher from the Greater Manchester Public Service reform Team. Macc continues to support voluntary sector engagement with this process. Engagement with the voluntary sector had been on hold during the Council budget consultation but has resumed with a series of multi-agency workshops looking at the domestic violence strategy for Manchester, co-production, service design and service user involvement as well as a workshop to design a grant programme for domestic abuse services.
The future of funding for Refuges
There is a wider issue about the future of the funding of refuges. Several Councils across England are moving funding from traditional refuges to housing associations. Others are limiting access to refuges from people outside their local authority area, even though this is recognised as a necessary safety issue for many people fleeing domestic violence. At the moment Manchester does not do this, but others in the North West do.
Social Care, Early Help and Troubled Families
So the Council continues to tackle two major issues – how to help children and families early so their problems do not escalate (early help) and how to reduce demand on social care services.
Early Help - The Third Voluntary Sector Early Help Summit took place on 19 February at Central Methodist Hall.
Wrapped up in the numerous discussions taking place in strategic partnerships as well as voluntary sector organisations are a number of fundamental questions about the direction and purpose of the work done in Manchester with Children and Families. What are the drivers - is it improving outcomes for children and families? Bringing spiralling costs under control? Passing OFSTED? Are they compatible and how is this playing out in practice? Alongside this are a number of questions about approaches and culture - are we taking asset based or deficit based approaches to the way we work with families and communities? Is using evidence based interventions on carefully targeted cohorts providing the right type of solutions or leading to perverse behaviour to meet targets? On a practical level – how do we deal with children and families missing appointments – some are removed from waiting lists when they are the very people who may be most in need of help and support.
Many social policy interventions are still rooted in a deficit approach. Focussing on what is wrong and missing from people that will be fixed by professional intervention. Programmes are designed that target scientifically identified cohorts of individuals and families to deliver an intervention and leave. If the evidence based intervention doesn’t work there is a growing culture of blame on the person who received the intervention rather than looking at what may have been wrong with the approach. It adds to a rising tide of blaming of individuals for their poverty and hardship.
Many community and voluntary sector groups have very different approaches to working with families, not least because their work is not normally on a statutory fashion. They support families and communities, build trusting long term relationships and support families to develop their assets and resilience. They allow people to identify the support that they would need to achieve their own goals. There is more space within the voluntary sector for staff, volunteers and service users to collaborate together as equals, supporting service users to identify for themselves what they need and when they want it.
Level of referrals to Social Care
One of the stickiest problems is that 50% of referrals to the contact centre don’t meet the threshold for social care. There are multiple issues at work here:
1. Social worker case-loads are very high
2. Thresholds for access to services are very high (which many who work across Greater Manchester feel are higher than neighbouring boroughs)
3. Where do those families go that don’t meet the threshold for a social worker – too many disappear only to reappear at crisis level where they finally meet the threshold
The OFSTED Review noted that case loads for social workers were too high. To tackle this the council has a Taskforce of 16 external Social Workers and 3 Team Managers have been commissioned to re assess all of the Child In Need cases that are currently sat on Social Workers caseloads. They will be undertaking a Child and Family Assessment (CAFA). There are 4 possible outcomes following the assessment:
1. No further action or services required and so the case will close
2. Case escalation back to Social Care if child protection issues are identified
3. Case allocated back to Social Care for a period of case planning. A new Child In Need Framework has been implemented by the Social Workers to prevent future drift
4. Case may require support under an Manchester Common Assessment Framework (MCAF) arrangement
If the case has been identified as requiring lower level support under the MCAF, the taskforce will be liaising with partners to progress this step down arrangement. The real challenge for the voluntary and community sector is what happens to the families who don’t meet the threshold for social care. At the moment too many seem to disappear off a cliff who are left to cope by themselves, or they are referred to voluntary sector groups who feel that they are not given the necessary information or advice to support the family. Improving this work will have a major impact on the outcomes for Children and Families and improved joint working between public and voluntary sector organisations. It is one of the critical reasons why there must be a strong voluntary sector voice in the design of the Early Help strategy and tools and the design of Early Help Hubs. Voluntary sector groups are key to navigating the support available at a local level and building up strong social connections and trust to enable families to positively engage at an early stage.
Children’s Board
The Children’s Board is currently developing its work plan for the next year. The Board will be leading on all of the non-safeguarding partnership priorities for the City – in practice this means driving the Early Help Agenda as well as attainment, aspirations, public health and leisure for children and families. The plan is that the board is going to pick 3-4 key issues to look at over the course of the year that the Board can have a real impact upon. Priorities will come from the implementation plan for Early Help, the OFSTED Improvement Plan as well as looking at performance around a range of areas in health that require improvements.
The Board also discussed that 50% of contact to Social Care doesn’t convert to statutory intervention – there is work needed to understand whether this is because of inappropriate referrals or disagreement about threshold levels and the capacity of social work staff to take on new cases.
The Children’s Board will drive through the Early Help agenda. It will continue to review the strategy and build on the work done by Elaine Morrison and the Early Help Summits, and Early Help Tools Workshop. It will be refreshing the Levels of Need Document. It will also look at what support people need to deliver early help and how we can deliver it on the ground – including how voluntary sector groups are connected into this.
Manchester Safeguarding Children’s Board (MSCB)
The Board has almost finalised its new business plan and structure. The Board is going to be smaller in order to be more effective. For the voluntary sector this will mean that Macc, Barnardos and the NSPCC will continue to sit on the Board and Macc is working with MSCB to look at where voluntary sector groups can contribute to subgroups and local safeguarding forums and maintain strong voluntary sector voice in the workings of the Board.
The Board is planning its multi-agency audit framework for the year which will look at a number of cases around: pre-birth assessments, missing from home, early help, neglect and thresholds and the multi-agency public safeguarding hub.
Macc is working with the Board to look at how we can capture voluntary sector practice around these issues, as much of the work that goes on may be under the radar of many of the statutory partners or they may deal with different families and it is important to understand the concerns, issues and areas of good practice in the voluntary sector and the impact of the work on safeguarding children and families.
Forced Marriage Protocol
The Board has launched its new Forced Marriage Protocol which provides useful guidance and is available here
More information and guidance about forced marriage and a range of other issues is available here (Forced Marriage information is the 4th box down, as well as information on staying safe online, harmful sexual behaviour presented by Children and Young people and the Greater Manchester missing from home protocol).
Children and Families and the Criminal Justice System
Conference on Children of People in the Criminal Justice System - I-hop and Partners of Prisoners organised a very interesting conference. The event marked the culmination of 12 month’s development work between i-HOP and the ten local authorities of Greater Manchester. It aimed to encourage multi-agency working, raise awareness about children of offenders and inform the development of a Greater Manchester action plan. The full reports are available here
Prison is the biggest reason for parental separation and black and minority ethnic children are disproportionately represented as their parents are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. There is no routine counting of children affected by this issue in services to properly understand the current picture.
The conference highlighted the impacts that incarceration of mothers and fathers has upon children. There has been progress in courts when considering the impact of mother’s imprisonment on the child but it is not considered in the same way when considering imprisonment of the father. Contact is not always viewed as the right of the child and a parental reward that can be withdrawn as a punishment.
This conference raised many issues for how the voluntary and community sector in Manchester works with people affected by this - does your organisation know if its service users are affected - particularly when the people in prison aren’t parents but boyfriends/ girlfriends or ex-partners?
Girls in The Criminal Justice System
Justice Inspectorate published an interesting report into Girls in the Criminal Justice System in December 2014. It highlights the impact of Child Sexual Exploitation, understanding of vulnerability and how girls fare in a criminal justice system that is largely designed for men.
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