Rethinking child protection strategy: evaluating research findings and numeric data to challenge whether current intervention strategy is justified.

Conventional thinking in relation to child protection and safeguarding takes as an axiom that child abuse can be detected and treated, and largely eradicated through robust assessment. Conclusions from public inquiries and serious case reviews set up in light of child fatalities are treated as an authoritative statement of what should be done to 'strengthen' the system to prevent further fatalities and eradicate child abuse. The recommendations cascade through practice and affect families who become the subjects of social work assessment. Importantly, the vast majority of these families have not abused their children and many are simply requesting support services. This policy has proved not only ineffective in preventing further fatalities but has caused a flood of data and bureaucracy. It has enmeshed a large number of families into the system who turn to third sector organisations for help in to cope with the adverse consequences of assessment practices. Despite this, increasingly intrusive and prolonged assessment is considered in academic research and government policy to be best practice. This project questions the paradigm that current assessment practice is appropriate or fit for purpose.

This project builds on work already completed in a doctorate, a smaller funded project peer reviewed articles (in progress) and a monograph (in progress) to produce analysis that draws offers a creative and novel analysis that challenges accepted thinking. The groundwork for this project has already been completed by the PI including identifying and sourcing sample data. The project considers four, linked under-researched areas of investigation, all of which are transformative in challenging accepted thinking and practice in the area:

(1) A meta-analysis of public inquiry and serious case review findings to assess trends in recommendations and their uptake. Analysis of the consequences of uptake will be undertaken together with a critique of the use of hindsight conclusions extrapolated from statistically rare cases as a basis for policy applied to all social work assessment;
(2) A trend analysis to ascertain the current state of knowledge in relation to the outcome of social work assessment;
(3) An impact assessment of the outcome of assessment; and
(4) A statistical evaluation to question the use of risk assessment as a predictive and a diagnostic aid in social work assessment given the high prevalence of false positives and false negatives inherent in this approach.

None of these elements have been examined in detail before, and not together. In short this is an important and unconventional critique. This analysis will provide the only comprehensive analysis of the data and will radically and critically question whether the paradigm can objectively be demonstrated to justify the financial and resource cost involved in the industry.

The project is transformative as it proposes a unique approach and analysis which could radically change accepted thinking across several areas of social science. The thinking behind the project and its critical approach in questioning aspects of an entrenched policy will create new insights and questions that have the potential to radically alter policy. The project is designed to utilise sound methodologies that are triangulated and are not, in themselves, risky in terms of whether they will be accepted as methodologically valid. The transformative element and risk occurs in the novel research question and challenge to the paradigm. Given the controversial nature of the project and the intention that the results will be ground breaking in relation to thinking and debate in the area the project is designed to use available data, thereby minimising methodological issues (such as negotiating access) that could cause problems for successful completion of the project. This aspect of the project is considered paramount and will ensure the project is achievable.

The dissemination for a project of this kind will be wide in the UK and internationally. It will have impact on the large number of private and public agencies involved with child protection (in education, health, social care and government), practitioners in law and social work, academics, parents, children and families.
The project seeks to make a meaningful impact in relation to future policy in this area and the planned impact is therefore wide. There is potential for large government and societal savings as a result of the part of the project that provides the economic cost/benefit analysis of current policy. The societal impact is potentially very large as there is currently no official acknowledgement or concession in policy of the harm caused by the current approach. This project seeks to raise the profile of this issue and question the argument that if the system is largely successful such harm is an inevitable by-product. The project's transformative approach to considering whether the system is successful brings into question whether this approach is justifiable. Once debate is opened in this area the potential for impact in relation to change is large. The approach taken in this project will produce scientific impact in the sense that this is the first analysis of its kind in this area using methodology from the social sciences (and is thus 'scientific' in the sense that the results can be quantified).
The beneficiaries of the project will include:

- Government bodies including:
o Policy makers responsible for writing and implementing social welfare policies;
o Policy makers responsible for writing and implementing economic policies. The project will provide a unique way of interfacing these two potentially competing policy areas;

- Service users including:
o Families who are affected by assessment. This is approximately 5% per annum of the total number of all families in the UK;
o Children who are at risk of suffering significant harm or death which under the current system are at risk of being missed as a priority despite assessment;
o Children who are not at risk of suffering significant harm or death but who are at risk of harm caused by assessment and have no legal right to stop the process;
o Individual family members involved with social work assessment including parents, siblings, grandparents, wider family and friends. It is known from existing research the impact on them and on children of such families is potentially devastating. Such cases form a significant number of the 5% per annum;

- Service providers including:
o Social work practitioners and managers;
o Local authority policy makers and legal departments;
o Practitioners concerned with social work assessment from a social welfare and a legal perspective;
o Others concerned with child protection and safeguarding including inter alia LEAs, academies, teachers, sports clubs, the police, doctors and health providers.

- Support providers including:
o Lawyers concerned with the data protection, data governance, civil liberties aspects of this area who are not generally included as beneficiaries of child protection research;
o Third sector organisations who are currently working to support families affected by assessment without official acknowledgment that there is a need for such support and/or who have a high level of spend each year to support policies without the necessary tools to understand why they are ineffective and problematic;

- Academics in the field who will benefit from the generation of debate in this area.

- The general public who will benefit from any policy change with an associated cost reduction. The project challenges the public perception that any scaling back of child protection and safeguarding assessment can be done without endangering children. Challenging the evidence base for this is a central plank of the research.