We're investigating more, but are children safer?

There is an intuitively compelling idea at the heart of much child protection reform: if professionals share more information, work more closely together, and identify risk earlier, they will make better decisions and children will be safer.

After 15 years of Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASHs), we can test that assumption against outcomes. My recently published research with Matt Jay and Simon Haworth in the British Journal of Social Work found that MASHs were associated with increased child protection investigation, without better identification of children subsequently requiring child protection plans or reductions in serious incident notifications involving significant harm or child deaths.

That matters because the government intends to extend the MASH approach through new Multi-Agency Child Protection Teams (MACPTs). More investigation, without better outcomes.

Section 47 investigations increased from around 85,000 in 2010, when MASHs started to be introduced, to more than 230,000 last year, while child protection plans increased little. In 2010 roughly half of investigations were followed by a plan; now nearly three-quarters are not.

Using Freedom of Information data on when local authorities introduced MASHs, linked to national child protection statistics, I found that investigations increased more following MASH introduction than in authorities without one. 

The pattern is clear: from 2014 onwards, MASHs were associated with more investigation, without evidence that the additional investigation identified more children who had been harmed.
 

Measure what matters

Government evaluations of MASHs have concentrated largely on implementation and professional experience: whether information sharing improved and professionals valued working together. These things matter, but they do not tell us whether children experience less harm.

We risk repeating this with Families First. Early Pathfinder evaluation provides useful evidence about implementation, but quantitative impact analysis has not yet established whether MACPTs reduce harm. 

Before extending the model nationally, we need to know whether children experience less harm, whether families receive useful help and what unintended harms intervention itself causes. Activity is not an outcome.

The recurring response to tragedy

Responding to a recent Sunday Times article about the research, children's minister Josh MacAlister cited the deaths of Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly, Preston Davey, Victoria Marten, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson as demonstrating why joined-up multi-agency child protection is vital. 

He said MACPTs would address rising investigations ending without further action by bringing expert practitioners together, so the right action is taken first time.

This illustrates a pattern that has shaped child protection for more than two decades. A child's death understandably creates determination that it must never happen again. 

Reviews identify missed information or failures of coordination; the response is more information sharing, tighter coordination and earlier identification of risk. 

Victoria Climbié's death itself helped drive the integrated structures from which MASHs emerged. Yet after 15 years of MASHs, we have more investigation without the improved outcomes that were supposed to follow.

When suspicion becomes the organising principle

The problem is more fundamental than improving information sharing and coordinating investigations. Research I published with Matt Jay estimated that, before they reach 18, around one in three children in England will be assessed by children's social care and one in five will come under suspicion of abuse or neglect.

This involvement is profoundly unequal. Children growing up in areas of high deprivation experience much greater levels of child protection intervention. 

In some communities, suspicion and investigation are becoming part of the ordinary relationship between families and children's services rather than an exceptional response to exceptional circumstances.

Serious harm to children is rare and difficult to predict or prevent. Yet attempts to identify risk earlier have drawn vastly more families into intrusive investigation. 

My MASH research shows further increases in investigation without evidence of reductions in serious harm or child deaths. We have already expanded the investigative net without achieving the reduction in serious harm that was supposed to justify it.

Unnecessary investigation is not harmless. It causes fear, distress and stigma, disrupts family relationships and undermines trust in professionals. When families fear that asking for help may lead to investigation, they become less willing to seek it. A system that brings large proportions of families under suspicion weakens relationships on which children's safety depends.

Reducing social harm

We need a fundamental shift: away from organising child protection around predicting which families will harm children, and towards creating conditions in which children, families and communities are safer.

Children do not experience harm in a vacuum. Deprivation, insecure housing, insecure work, domestic violence, inadequate mental health and addiction services, disability without appropriate support, school exclusion, isolation and lack of practical help all create pressures on children, parents and communities. 

These should not simply become 'risk factors' in assessments of individual families. They are social harms on which government, services and communities can act.

This requires a different kind of multi-agency working. Health, education, children's services, police, housing and voluntary organisations hold knowledge and resources, but so do families and communities. This combined resource should be used to understand local pressures and co-create responses.

In communities experiencing social harms safeguarding should respond to those conditions. Families and communities should be partners in identifying what would make children's lives safer and in designing and evaluating the response.

Multi-agency working could be enormously important in this change. Its purpose should be focused on working with families and communities to understand social harms and co-create local solutions.

Creating safer communities, stronger relationships and the conditions in which families can thrive should be at the heart of how we protect children.

Dr Andy Bilson is emeritus professor of Social Work at the University of Lancashire