I am a child protection social worker - AMA

[KeepingUpWithTheKs]

I feel as though there are a lot of false information in the press and in general knowledge about child protection social workers so, ask me anything!

Hello. As my name suggests, I'm a kinship care grandmother. Has this form of care increased in recent years, and is it recognised by society eg schools, doctors, etc as differing from foster care?

Do kinship care teams liaise with schools in any way to ensure that grandparents are not at a disadvantage when it comes to the curriculum and possible digital exclusion?

What are your thoughts on, and experiences of, privately run residential homes?

How do you feel when you see children being abused and murdered by their parents/carers and then hear about the amount of social work involvement that they have had that did nothing? Do you feel guilty? Do you put it down to poor social workers?

how many years post qualifying are the most experienced members of your team?

How many month/years roughly do people stay in your team?

how many agency staff do you have in comparison to permanent staff?

if you have asye staff how well do you feel they are supervised?

When you get called, do you feel the person has got it right most of the time? Is there usually cause for concern or do you find you get called a lot of the time for things are aren't causes for concern?
And how do you grade the risk? Low, medium, high.. what would these entail?

Like how does medium differ from high? Do you have a scoring sheet? (I genuinely don't know)

Under what sort of conditions do you get called/step in? I feel this "child protection" phrase is so generic I just don't understand it. On here you see people recommending to posters that social services be called because the children are experiencing abuse if their parents fight and then other people on here saying that they can't get social services to care that their physically abusive ex wants 50% custody. It's very confusing to me.

Why are so many children falling through the cracks? It seems like there’s a new story everyday on DM about another baby who’s been killed by their parents

What is the point of an AMA thread if the poster just disappears?

Why do you think families are continuously bumped back to early help?

Why do families who would have previously met the threshold no longer meet it?

Why is the threshold so high for social work involvement?

Are social workers now effectively crisis response as opposed to prevention?

It was only an hour ago. Maybe they were on their lunchbreak and will come back later.

Social workers always take ages to get back to you, if at all, (ime) 🤔.

Do you know how busy SWs are? I’m not even kidding but I’ve made myself giggle here because it’s no joke

🤣🤣

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Apologies for the delay! Getting back to all questions now.

Kinship care is recognized as different from foster care and always should be, however, as with much of social work other professionals are often ignorant to the different types of carers. It has certainly increased where I am based, as the number of foster carers are stalling and even falling.

Kinship care teams should liaze with schools to ensure that there is no disadvantage, however I am very well aware that this doesn't always happen so please do not ever feel as though you cannot pester for this as it is imperative.

Professionally for me they are a very last resort and the reason for this is that it creates an instant instability in a child. Personally, i think it is very much a mixed bag. Some are amazing, some are awful which is why I am so hesitant about them. However, I am aware that this is largely down to funding which has a huge impact .

Do you see many adoption breakdowns

How many malicious reports do you get?
We always see on here about children being left alone in terms of the normal building independence in middle childhood, then without fail there will be a poster saying the parent should be reported. How many complaints are just about differing parenting styles?

I am no different to any other mother and having children of my own it is absolutely heartbreaking. I think it is incredibly niave to believe that social workers do nothing, we get a very small opportunity even when a child is on our caseload. If you imagine, I have 35 children on my caseload at the moment, I have to visit them all, write notes up on them all, and engage with them all on a deep enough level to get them to trust me to open up. If you couple this up with parents who are manipulative and abusive, it is very very challenging. I think we should be asking the same questions of teachers, GP's, nurseries, etc. However, I do believe that poor practice does happen and shouldn't happen but what the public fail to recognize is that it is often poor practice at management level which leads to these failures. Allocating often complex cases to newly qualified social workers and throwing them in the deep end is never going to be a great idea and it happens way too often.

The most qualified member we have is 10 years.

The average turnover I would say is 2-3 years.

We at the moment have 2 agency staff in.

Supervision is really not great for anyone due to work load.

I would say it is 70% right and 30% malicious in my expeirence which is often pretty clear from the initial referral, checks and conversations.

The way we grade is mostly based on the conversations we have with the family and the other agencies involved with the family at the point of referral. Baring in mind by this point it has already gone through an initial triaging procedure through the MASH team.

Why do so many social workers go to known abusive homes where the DC are at risk and not INSIST on seeing the DC?

(How many times have we heard about the parents making excuses to the SW to not see the DC and the SW just left?! Logan Mwangi being one of them 😡)

This is individual for each social worker to judge which is why you will see cases which seem similar reacted to in different ways. There is national guidance to follow as well so it is based on a mix of the guidance and the intuition of the social worker.

So, firstly there is a difference between public and private law. In cases of reports of abuse etc it will go to a local authority social worker whereas in child custody cases it will go to a different team altogether so I can't comment on that.

We get cases that go through the initial screening process which happens with the assessment team and are decided that they reach the threshold for child in need or child protection.