To think social workers need much better protection when they visit threatening families?

[Jane379]

After the recent terrible case of Preston Davey, I noticed some posts on threads here mentioning the danger social workers are often in when they DO try and report things. Threats from the families, outright intimidating behaviour when they do visit etc

Police etc have weapons. Social workers are mainly women so more physically vulnerable,,and they can't carry weapons of course. Naively I assumed they were protected from aggressive clients, but it seems there's shockingly little protection.

AIBU to think social workers visiting agesssive families need something like a bodyguard? More protection than they currently get, anyway. Few jobs require people to visit potentially aggressive and dangerous homes with such minimal protection. With the amount of cases, the danger, etc , it's no wonder it's hard to recruit social workers.

If there were more male social workers- and more generally- maybe they could help on challenging visits? I expect aggressive clients would be more reluctant to intimidate if men were present.

The £2.4billion is over 3 years and needs to cover a wide range of supports including family support and funding kinship care. On the face of it, it sounds like a good idea but to do it well needs year on year funding over a very long period of time.

A similar initiative started in Scotland 5 years ago - we’re now in a position where social workers are taking children home with them through lack of placements for children.

The change of the child protection conference chair to be a lead practitioner role has meant all our CP chairs have left and are currently agency staff. They're not frontline but they're very experienced and being a step removed from the case allows them to have independent oversight, that's being removed. The LPP role is more like a cross of social worker/manager and conference chair, as they'll chair core groups and strategy meetings as well as the conferences. Some of the team managers have left too as they're not comfortable someone else making those decisions on cases that the TMs manage and ultimately carry the responsibility/risk for.

At the same time the teams have changed from duty -> longer term safeguarding to a combined team. That can work, but usually in authorities with very good early help services to limit the amount that comes through to social care. In our teams it means the staff spend the majority of their time dealing with urgent duty, and have very little time free to do the longer term work. That longer term work is child protection plans and care proceedings, so you can understand why they're feeling unsafe if they can't book that work in because they're 'on duty'. They've also lost all their family support workers, who did any amazing job, because those staff are now part of the broader multi agency child protection teams and have their own caseload of child in need cases rather than being available to support others.

It might not be this way everywhere, I haven't looked at the model enough to know what is legally required and what is our LA using this as cost cutting, but we've seen a lot of staff go after getting to some relative stability in the last year or two.

For the restructure including changes to fostering and children's homes
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-sets-out-next-steps-for-childrens-social-care-reforms?utm_source=chatgpt.com

@Hammerthroe I totally agree. I've always wondered what going out in twos is meant to achieve in practice, when there's a threat - it feels like just something for a manager to say to make them feel better that 'something's been done'. And as you say, due to lack of staff if it does happen it's usually a student!

That pretty much mirrors the direction of travel in Scotland, and while the aims and intentions are good, it takes much more resource than you can imagine to do it well. I hope it does result in improvements because children deserve good quality, safe support.

This!
Literally, hundreds of thousands are protected by social workers every year but we don’t hear about that. Of course, there are some bad workers like every profession but to suggest social workers generally, are doing a shit job is so infuriating. You should try living in a country where statutory social workers don’t exist and you’ll sadly see the difference.

It often is a very physically dangerous job. It’s always a running joke with the police that a social worker goes to home alone with no protective equipment and police will only attend with at least 2, a car and all the necessary protections! But because of the relationship building aspect of the job, as well as the data protection concerns, it would difficult to go in with cameras and bodyguards, overall would probably do more harm than good.

I think people forget that social workers are working with humans and often those that are vulnerable, damaged and quite manipulative. Social workers are also human some with those same traits. It is not and never will be an exact science. Sadly, there will always be some who are not protected and will be seriously/fatally harmed at the hands of there abusers. Those who seek to abuse will find a way and sadly, there is no training in the world that can eliminate that completely. However, it is worth remembering, more good than harm is done by the mere fact that social work exists in this country, whatever ignorant people would like to believe.

There's a role for it obviously but its always given as some magic cure

Here youre going out to someone who has held hostages before, who has weapons in the house. Safety first, take someone who's been here a day and looks like they'd blow over in a strong wind.

Ironically that person ended up needing to be removed by the police who turned up en mass including with shields. I turned up in sandals with a pen 😄

I mentioned above about going out with police because we thought a guy had crossbows and was experiencing a psychotic break. The police hid around the corner. I was a student, the designated '2nd person'!

Going to a house with dangerous dogs is a bit of an issue in our area currently. Social workers have to go to homes to see children where the police have recorded dangerous or illegal breed dogs. Families often use them to intimidate social workers too. They're told to tell the parents to shut them away before they go in the door, but that's not exactly failsafe. I've been to homes where there's holes in doors from dogs chewing them!

I am currently working closely with one of the pilot boroughs for the multi-agency child protection teams. In the theory it works well but in practice, it has shifted the issue of burn out to other areas in the service. Also, tue multi agency aspect is not great, police, health and education have very different threshold to social care so lots of managing professionals anxiety and no clear framework to progress or deescalate. I also have lots of worries and the lack of independence of one team managing the case from the front door all the way to a CP plan and making all the key decisions. It feels very marking your own homework. But, there is a much bigger emphasis on early help, family support services and family networks which is positive. It’s interesting but overall, I’m not convinced that this will not be just another great idea that isn’t well funded long term!

This

I’ve been that person too - the police suggesting I go in first because they didn’t want to inflame a delicate situation. I was chased off the property by a guy with a samurai sword in one hand and a dog lead holding back a snapping dog in the other.

As if like magic, my feed pops up with this.
Car with full reg on view (videos of their faces), video of a man shouting abuse at them
Literally hundreds of comments about everything from getting bonuses for stealing kids, their hair, their faces, calling them alcoholics, calling for them to be "exterminated", have their kids taken off them

On just this one page there's videos with 200k + views each

That's really interesting @LessonsinChemistryandLove I'm trying to be open minded because let's face it, no one likes a restructure. But the combined team does worry me. I've known it to work in some authorities but only the ones that are really stable and well resourced. The idea of having to choose between going out to a child with an injury when you're meant to be assessing a parent for court just fills me with horror. Both roles are urgent in different ways but of course duty always ends up taking priority as you can't leave a child in potential danger.

I've worked in a team which did everything from assessment to close/adoption and it worked well. We were on duty every 8 weeks or so, I'm not sure why you would be on duty constantly.

@Hammerthroe that's pretty horrible. I've known a few colleagues to be posted on those types of sites, and not much is done - they're usually just told to lock down their social media and to make sure they've got their phone on them, it's a bit shit. Managers are empathetic but they don't get any training or resources to help social workers in those situations.

Resources. The authorities I've been in it's been one week in three or one week in two. Which is bonkers even if you were 'just' a duty team, and needing to get your assessments done on time.

That doesn't make sense. A team is going to have 5-7 social workers, so you'd expect any locality to have at least 6-8 long term teams so why would you need to be on duty that often? Our current assessment service has 4 teams so they are on every 4 weeks but they only do assessments.

My sister had to do children's social work as part of her social worker degree. She said some parents would say they are peadophiles because they work with children

The teams are bigger, but there's enough coming through on duty that they're struggling for capacity, and aren't able to keep the kids they did the initial visit for, which is supposed to be a key part of it. I think in theory they expected the broader team would mean less coming through to the social worker (eg being picked up by another agency or the non qualified CIN workers) but that's not the reality. I agree it doesn't make sense, it's been a long time since I've done duty but even on a dedicated duty team we were one in four weeks, 1 to do duty and 3 to ideally get the majority of the assessments done before it rolled round again.

Edited to add - they're working in a neighborhood model, so it wouldn't be 6-8 teams covering the local area, it's 1-2 covering their 'patch'.

Sounds like a very poor design TBH. It doesn't surprise me.

I go into homes as a tutor for primary/secondary students through the LA so am I classed as a lone worker? The rule is that an adult over the age of 18 must be present at all times (safeguarding). This is usually a family member.
What protections should I have?

I suspect as a tutor you’re not talking to parents about challenges in their parenting, or trying to address neglect, or investigate abuse. The social work role is a particularly challenging one for parents to engage with for obvious reasons. Do you often feel unsafe working with the kids you tutor?

@Jellycatspyjamas For context, I exclusively teach children that have been deemed currently unable to access any mainstream setting. This could be for a wide range of reasons. Nearly all have an EHCP.
I also obviously don't know the families I'm working with initially or the parent I'm on my own with.

Im assuming the risk is different because you are there at their request.

Still i would expect there to be safeguarding policies etc.
Are you self employed? It's worth asking in the tutoring communities

In general it's would be about having a good risk assessment, and environmental awareness (eg making sure you are sat near exits, pets put away if needed) having someone who knows where you are going and when to expect you back and what to do if you arent

I'd expect there to be some sort of behaviour agreement/t&Cs with a low threshold for when youd refuse a service

Again if you are self employed you'll need to create the appropriate policies yourself, and If you are agency then they should have them

Theres a big difference between anyone that lone works in a home eg. Sky engineer, plumber and tutors and people who are working in controversial roles in the home eg debt collection, social work and mental health workers. They are people turning up to do sometimes unpleasant things, to people who do not want them there and who may have a big history of risk
Some of my caseload for example can't have home visits from carers, from district nurses or from housing because they are deemed to risky, however I still have to attend.

@Hammerthroe I'm not necessarily there at parental request as I work via an agency for the LA. I'm there because every child has the right to an education. The parent(s) don't fund the tuition themselves; it is paid for via LA as child is currently unable to access any other educational setting. This could be due to behavioural issues or for a whole host of other reasons.