Growing Support
5 Summary conclusions
1. We set out to answer three key questions at the beginning of this review. We asked what support was currently provided to vulnerable families with young children, how well this support met their needs and how well organisations worked together, and with others, to deliver responsive, effective support to improve the health, development and welfare of children in need and their families.
2. We found an extensive range of services offering practical help, information, parenting education and advice, and emotional support to parents in difficulty in each local authority and health board area. Families generally found services helpful, particularly family centres and services that assisted both parents and children to improve their skills and development. Nevertheless, parents told us that frontline staff were not always able to offer the right kinds of help at the right time and could appear unsympathetic or unhelpful. They also found that gaining access to services was not easy.
3. We found many instances of excellent practice in social work and health care, with skilled and committed practitioners delivering intensive support in often difficult and sometimes frightening circumstances.
4. We found that the outcomes for vulnerable children were greatly improved by social work support when the support was consistently provided by a single, named social worker over a period of time. In such cases all aspects of the work - relationships with the family, assessments of needs and risk, and work to support the family were generally of a good quality and in many cases of a very high quality. These cases clearly demonstrated that social work services have a vital contribution to make in improving the welfare of children.
5. Such consistent support from a named, skilled social worker is too infrequently available. Too few families gain access to social work assistance and often only do so when problems have become acute or chronic and the children are identified as being at risk. Even then help may be only intermittently available from different social workers.
6. Prioritising enquiries and monitoring of child protection plans at the expense of active family support to address their needs and problems is false economy for local authorities. Providing a child protection service without integrated family support fails to deliver the best outcomes for these most vulnerable children. It minimises social workers' substantial contribution to social justice and social inclusion. It also erodes public and inter-agency support for these services.
What is needed
7. More decisive early action is needed to support families to provide good care for their children or to secure children's futures in suitable alternative families when this is needed. There should also be more commitment to direct work with parents separated from their children to prevent the same pattern being repeated. This will require all services to reshape their activity and responses.
8. Local authorities need to reinvest in their social work services and revitalise these core helping services. These must take their place alongside health, education and voluntary sector services in a partnership to deliver integrated family support for children in need as well as children at risk. In turn all services in touch with children or parents must give attention to child protection as a core responsibility essential to the delivery of care and support for all vulnerable children.
9. Health and education services should encourage and support the most vulnerable children and families to make best use of their universal and mainstream services. This will require new and creative approaches to service delivery, and depend on closer collaboration with social workers.
10. These matters are taken forward in the report and recommendations contained in 'It's everyone's job to make sure I'm alright'.