How do we get the best for our children and families? The clash between education and social care
Jo Heaton, Head Teacher of the Federation of St Peter’s Elwick C of E Primary and Hart Primary Schools
Systems – a boring title for a blog, fundamental to the smooth running of any organisation, but also a major problem when systems in one place don’t fit in neatly with systems somewhere else.
One set of systems that really seem to struggle to fit easily together, for me as a Head Teacher, are education and social care. Why is it that both sides often find themselves frustrated with the other? And this blog is definitely not a criticism of anyone – more a call for us to look at where we are with things and question whether there is some way that we can do things better?
Professionals in social care and education are both contending with budget cuts, increasing workload and changing systems. Let’s get that elephant in the room out of the way to start with. But I put it that this makes the need to evaluate even more important.
We need to start having more joined up thinking. Imagine how much more straight forward all our lives would be as school leaders if we could improve communication with social care and how much more effective we would all be.
We all know how many times ‘communication’ between agencies is cited as the major flaw in serious case reviews. So let’s look at how we can improve it…
Let’s imagine the day to day of all of our school lives – we work with our families so closely that we build those relationships, we usually know instantly when something is wrong, we work with them to improve things, often being the ones to refer to social care when we know the needs are greater. It is us they come to when things go wrong in their lives, or to ask our advice on a massive range of things from parenting, help with housing and benefits, grief and family difficulties. We are often woefully undertrained, underprepared and struggle to know the answers and support to give. We reach out, employing counsellors, training our staff as best we can, providing parent support adviser roles and doing everything that we all can to improve things for our families and our children.
Then far too often, when we engage social care, the experience of working with agencies and social workers leads to frustration – frustration that the needs presented ‘don’t meet the threshold’ for intervention. A recent statistic in our area is that over 60% of referrals don’t result in assessment or ‘early help’ being initiated because they don’t meet the threshold. It is schools who then pick up the pieces. When agencies are involved we get frustrated when there is a lack of information provided to school about what is happening, despite us chasing it. Or watching our families move between workers and agencies, who we share the same information with repeatedly. We get frustrated because we care. And I am sure that the same will be said by social care – so let’s take this as our starting point. We are all in our jobs for the same reason – we all want the best for our children.
But how could this be improved?
Sir Michael Wilshaw stated recently that schools ‘provide the glue that helps hold our society together’. So where does social care fit into this? Social care ranges from the very, very early help that we know will reap rewards such as parenting skills and support, all the way through to child protection procedures. This is so much a part of holding society together that by implication Sir Michael should have added social care into his comments.
I just wonder that maybe we could place schools at the heart of this, as the glue that does indeed hold society together, with all of the funding and training that is required of such roles.
In our region there are Multi Agency Hubs with lots of agencies working together under one roof, with all of the local intelligence that exists there. This is a massive leap forward and definitely the right direction of travel – but the link with schools needs to go further. Social care teams assigned to our schools who have a presence in our schools. Funding for schools to employ and train social workers to provide the work on a range of levels to our families. Imagine if you had someone in social care who was dedicated to work with the families in your school, to address their personal needs, to build those relationships, to signpost to the right support and to provide trained work that helps support our children and families. Imagine this Utopia where there is no need to chase information because you have that same trained member of social care assigned to your school to provide you with the updates on the outcomes of work with your families, on a regular basis, no matter which agency has picked up the work.
But why does this need to be a vision of something that would be great, why can’t we fight for the funding and systems for it to be a reality?
Those of us who have ‘Operation Encompass’ in our schools in our region never envisaged that system until it was presented to us, but it has proved invaluable to many of us. When police attend an incident where children are present at the scene of domestic violence, the information is shared with a co-ordinator from Operation Encompass and I (as Head Teacher) receive a phone call at school early the next morning to inform me. Our staff are then best placed to support the children and the family. The key to this is sharing of information. This is the vital part. So why not find a way to share information in a more structured way now? Social teams need to be connected to education for us to find the best way forward.
We need to get away from a blame culture of whose fault something is, or whose responsibility it is and grasp the nettle that it is all of our shared responsibility and we need to work more closely together.
As I walked around the school grounds at the start of the day last week, when I was mulling over this blog, I heard a Dad saying our school motto to his son as he said goodbye, ‘Remember son, always your best’. And it made me wonder – do our systems at the moment always allow us to provide ‘the best’ for our children?