Council Spotlight

Council Spotlight

Following the success of the Family Safeguarding pilot which took place in Hertfordshire in 2015; Peterborough City Council has worked hard to replicate the programme, with significant progress. We speak exclusively with Lou Williams, Service Director, Children & Safeguarding, Peterborough City & Cambridgeshire County Councils to find out more about the model and uncover the benefits of working under a singular management team.

Over the last two years, you’ve taken a joint approach to strengthen services for children by having a singular management team for Peterborough City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council. What have been the benefits of utilising a joint structure?

Working across two councils has had its challenges but two years on, we’re seeing the positives. Senior managers have the benefit of looking at what best practice is taking place across two authorities and can learn from one another.

We work hard to ensure that we get the best from both councils. In these times of relative austerity and in the right circumstances, we can start to share resources which will simultaneously reduce costs yet protect frontline services.

We can share training programmes for our social workers and support staff as well as discovering how we can smooth our processes. Working jointly has enabled us to have the oversights to solve problems much earlier. This is having a positive impact on those working on the frontline.

Looking to the future, I think that more authorities may start to work together in partnership, especially as budgets continue to tighten. In Peterborough, we are a small unitary authority which may lack resilience compared to similar areas. In contrast, Cambridgeshire has slightly more resources. While we remain two separate authorities, in terms of service delivery, we are undoubtedly stronger working together than we are separate.

How does the shared structure work on an operational level when you are working across two separate areas, which may have their own unique, and individual challenges?

Each council is clearly defined, and they remain separate in terms of day-to-day operations. Our practitioners based in Peterborough will only work with children and adults in the Peterborough remit, and likewise for our Cambridgeshire social work teams. The only exception to this is in relation to the MASH and EDT, which are fully shared.

We’re clear our services haven’t merged, and they are not subsidising each other. It’s just our leadership posts and support services which are shared.

It’s important to us that each council is kept separate because they are both very diverse and offer different challenges and opportunities. For example, Cambridgeshire is a large county with relatively affluent areas in the South and throughout Cambridge itself – but there are some considerable concerns about county lines networks and some areas of relative deprivation too. In addition, if we consider the Fenlands, we can see much more rural deprivation and diverse populations.

Peterborough, meanwhile, is a large cathedral city; It has a very diverse community in the centre of town, with long-established Asian and Italian communities as well as more recently arrived communities from central and eastern Europe in particular. But it also includes its own rural areas and more affluent city centre areas.

The differences between the two councils mean that social workers can come and work here and have a completely different experience to colleagues working in other parts of the service and with different communities. This makes both authorities exciting and varied places to work.

The joint structure has been designed to maximise your effectiveness. Can you provide any examples of how the joint structure has improved services for children and families throughout Peterborough and Cambridgeshire?

Our two Assistant Directors have operational responsibility for aligned areas of service delivery across the two authorities. One has responsibility for the MASH, assessment teams and the teams working with children in need, child protection and children in proceedings. The other has responsibility for children in care teams and care leavers alongside some specialist teams in each authority.

This approach allows us to learn from one another. We can see what works well in one area, and benefit from each other’s experience. For example, with children in care and/or care leavers, we can see what works in supporting family placements and moving children through to adoption – including early permanency and FFA.

Soon, we’ll be starting to develop joint training and development opportunities for our foster carers and improve participation for children in foster care. They’ll continue to exist separately but if we can meet and learn from other areas, it can only lead to positive outcomes. Another idea which we’re considering is thinking about how we can use our young inspectors to inspect each other – it’s all about using creativity and combining our resources to allow each council to continue to improve. These initiatives are led by the third Assistant Director, who leads on quality assurance and practice development across both Councils.

Your family safeguarding structure was launched in Peterborough last year. Since then it has reported significant progress, can you tell us what is so innovative about it?

This is the programme which was developed in Hertfordshire back in 2015. We launched it in Peterborough in 2017/18 and it’s been fantastic.

The key to this programme is that it incorporates adult mental health and substance misuse workers within our children’s teams to support children on child protection plans. This allows them to offer a seamless service to entire families. We know that most children on a child protection plan are affected by at least one aspect of the toxic trio. This model allows us to make referrals and offer support to those who otherwise may not meet the threshold for support if they approached adult services individually. It enables families to benefit from a properly integrated single support plan.

If we take domestic abuse as an example; most prevention programmes are only available to perpetrators of domestic abuse if they been convicted of a crime. With our family safeguarding model, we can offer programmes prior to this, enabling us to focus on more preventative work.

As a result, our social workers can really focus on working with the child and seeing how the interventions are making a positive impact.

Looking ahead to the future, Cambridgeshire has won funding from the Department for Education to implement this approach, and we will be launching there in early 2020. It’s an incredibly exciting time to work here and we’re looking forward to seeing the continued success of the programme.

Can you tell us more about how the recruitment of adult practitioners has positively impacted the work that you’re doing with families?

Our substance misuse services have received positive results from this model. They work in the broader community, but the success rate within the Family Safeguarding service is some of the best that they have. This reflects the fact that most families don’t want to live in a continuous cycle of poor mental health, substance misuse or domestic abuse. We believe that if you can provide the tools to address these difficulties, they will use them to improve their own lives.

We have many testimonials from families saying how much the support has changed their lives. We are also able to make quicker decisions when it becomes apparent that there may not be a positive outcome. As all social workers know, it’s in the child’s best interest to make changes before they suffer from significant trauma. Our multi-agency teams can share their assessments around risks and potential for change and make informed decisions quickly.

What stands out to us about the success of the model is that the number of children in care in Peterborough have stayed relatively stable. Our care numbers are below the average of similar statistical neighbours and we put this stability directly down to the impact of the Family Safeguarding programme.

You’re about to roll the Family Safeguarding structure out across Cambridgeshire – what are the challenges of implementing an entirely new approach in a new area?

Organisationally, the Family Safeguarding model is a big programme. It will involve recruiting for a lot of new staff and specifically encouraging adult practitioners to join the team. We will be providing training and there will be some cultural changes that need to be made but thanks to our experience in Peterborough it should be much easier to recruit for the right people to join us.

When we initially set up the programme in Peterborough, we discovered that this model can make some partners anxious because they felt that we were taking higher levels of risk. It took time for them to trust the new approach and there will be some hand-holding until they feel confident that we’re working in the right direction. This trust will take time, but we have the experience from the pilot in Peterborough and case studies to show why this model is such an effective way of working.

What have you learnt from your success in Peterborough and how can you use this to continually improve services?

Peterborough has been on a journey. I’ve been here since 2012 and last year it received a “good” rating from Ofsted which was a proud moment for the Council and most importantly for the staff who have worked so hard and so passionately to support vulnerable children and their families. We know that social work flourishes when there is a supportive environment, a clear focus on positive practice and outcomes for children, and manageable caseloads.

We’re retaining fantastic staff because they genuinely enjoy working here. They know that they can really make a difference in the life of a child or family, which is often the reason why they entered social work in the first place.

When everything comes together as it should, our children and families really will continue to benefit from what we do.