News

All the latest news from Community Care Live 2002 staged at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London:

Reports from Thursday 23 May (see below for reports from Wednesday 22 May, including speech from health minister Jacqui Smith):

New guidance for infant disabled children

Community Care Live delegates were the first to hear of draft consultation guidance on services for disabled children aged 0-2 years, writes Natalie Valios.

The department of health and department for education and skills set up a working party to develop the guidance. It comprised representatives from government, social services, voluntary organisations as well as parents of disabled children, and was chaired by Paul Ennals, chief executive of children's charity NCB.

About 3 per cent of children between the ages of 0-2 are estimated to be disabled.

The guidance highlights ways to make life easier for their parents, including early diagnosis, accurate and timely information, joined up assessments, family-held records and key workers.

Currently, parents often experience a lack of sensitivity at the point where the child is diagnosed; inconsistent patterns of services; lack of co-ordination; and a lack of information.

"One mother had had 350 appointments for her 18-month-old disabled child," Ennals told the audience.

The guidance outlines proposals for a family service plan. This would be a written report of the assessment describing the child, family and the services they need. It would also name a keyworker.

It is proposed that as part of the keyworker role, the worker would have a budget to be used to solve an immediate problem, for example paying for a taxi when it's too complicated for a family to get a bus to the speech therapist, explained Ennals.

Other suggestions include "debugging the system" by appropriately sharing information between professionals while protecting confidentiality, and providing practical support to families.

Ennals is hoping that a "slab of money" will be announced in Chancellor Gordon Brown's comprehensive spending review in the summer to help reshape and build on services for disabled children aged 0-2.

After consultation, the resulting guidance will feed into the national service framework for children. Guidance for Sure Start projects working with disabled children aged 0-2 is also expected in a few weeks.

"Together From the Start: services for disabled children 0-2 and their families" at www.doh.gov.uk or www.dfes.gov.uk

President calls for £30,000 pay norm for social workers

Some of the money the government has given to social services should fund pay increases for social care staff, said Mike Leadbetter, president of the Association of Directors of Social Services.

Leadbetter, also heads Essex social services, said: "Some of the six per cent the government promised will need to go on salary increases."

He also said that average for experienced social workers should be £30,000 a year.

When asked by delegates whether this should be an average for all local authorities, he said that this could not be achieved because councils will always pay differing rates. However, the market was pushing wages up to the £30,000.

"When Essex paid an extra £2,000 to its social workers we took staff from neighbouring councils such as Hertfordshire and Suffolk. They then increased their wages attracting staff from their neighbouring councils. This process will continue to push up wages." He also said that wage problems existed at all levels, for example "care workers earned £6 an hour but could go and stack shelves in a supermarket for £7.50 an hour".

Leadbetter also looked at other factors that could help improve recruitment and retention in local authorities. These included improving the culture of the organisation, offering career breaks and secondments, providing differing routes to becoming a qualified social worker such as open learning or in-house training, and using support or clerical workers to take on some of the non-essential social work tasks such as form filling.

Government urged to set up national child protection board

The government has been urged to set up a national child protection board to co-ordinate policies, writes David Callaghan.

Norfolk social services director David Wright told Community Care Live delegates the board should be steered by a cabinet minister.

Wright said: "We need government support when the cock-ups happen to ensure the other agencies are called to task. Where is the accountability in the other agencies, where it gets beautifully defused?

He said all the different agencies must communicate more effectively: "We cannot be allowed to plough our own furrows."

He also called for area child protection committees to be put on a statutory footing, repeating a call from other organisations such as the Association of Directors of Social Services.

Catherine Watkins, who is team manager for a children and families assessment team in West Sussex, said that other agencies should be more focused on child protection work, and she called for mandatory child protection training for staff from all agencies.

Peter Beresford, who is chairperson of the user-led body Shaping Our Lives, said children must be heard in child protection cases, and asked why Victoria Climbie was not asked about her situation using a French interpreter.

"The crucial and defining issue from the murder of Victoria Climbie is that no-one listened to her or spoke to her and no-one asked her about what was happening," he said.

Child sex abusers can be called 'paedophiles'

Nearly two thirds of child sexual abusers fulfil the same criteria applied to adult paedophiles, Eileen Vizard, clinical director of the Young Abusers Project, told delegates, writes Natalie Valios.

Vizard said that children and adolescents under 17 cannot be given a psychiatric diagnosis of paedophilia as it is assumed that paedophile interest in other children does not occur before that age.

The Young Abusers Project, now managed by the NSPCC, has seen 330 cases since it began in 1992. Girls comprise about 10 per cent of cases. Learning difficulties, maternal abuse and an interest in sexually abusing animals were prevalent features in girls who sexually abuse other children.

Almost 63 per cent of children presenting at the project had serious psychiatric problems. ‘If services are being set up without mental health input then these children are being deprived of the right help,’ warned Vizard.

The project is hoping to get funding to carry out research into dangerous severe personality disorders in children. ‘We need to find ways of identifying the few children who will go on to commit very dangerous crimes,’ she added.

Professionals must promote pre-trial therapy for children 

Child care professionals must promote the use of pre-trial therapy for children who have been sexually abused, child sex abuse expert Tink Palmer told Community Care Live delegates, writes Lauren Revans.

‘All children now have a right mandated by government for pre-trial therapy,’ Palmer said. ‘We all need to make sure that we are in a position to offer it.’

Palmer, who leads the Barnardo’s Bridge Way Project in Cleveland, said only 42 of the 483 children dealt with between December 1994 and January 2000 were required as witnesses in criminal proceedings.

She said it was essential to push for intermediaries to be allowed to represent very young children deemed too young to be witnesses in criminal proceedings to ensure more convictions.

‘People like me should be the mediator that goes to court to say this is what happened to that child and it cannot be anything other than that because of the persistency and consistency of the theme of the child’s behaviour,’ she said.

Children at the project who are due to give evidence in criminal proceedings are promised that everything will be done to prevent their case files being disclosed to a third party, but are not given an absolute guarantee.

However, Palmer said that of the 42 cases over the five year period, she had been subpoenaed to produce files on only three occasions. Each time she had pleaded public interest immunity and, although papers were still referred to in court on one occasion, no information from any therapy sessions was revealed.

Palmer stressed that the police and Crown Prosecution Service should be informed before any pre-trial therapy begins, but that they had never objected to it.

She added that pre-trial sessions must be held on an individual basis and be well documented, and that the therapist must not ask questions directly related to the specific case or alleged perpetrator.

Reports from Wednesday 22 May: 

Children's Fund head points to new intervention services in schools

New early intervention services based in schools for children in difficulty are likely to be announced in the forthcoming spending review, according to the head of the Children's Fund, writes Frances Rickford.

Kathy Bundred said she hoped the new school-based services would be an example of new initiatives for children and young people, which are based on partnership changing mainstream services. The new services are most likely to be provided by voluntary sector organisations, and would give additional support to children who need it at an early stage.

Sure Start's head Naomi Eisenstadt said it was too early to know about outcomes for children, but said lessons were being learnt about how to deliver services to the poorest families. She said there was still a reluctance among some people to spend public money on children under five, although the impact of living in poverty was greater on young children than other age groups. Building services designed on community views was not always straightforward when there were very diverse views within communities.

Every estate has six "loud mouths" who can absorb a high proportion of staff time, and discourage other parents form getting involved, she said. She also admitted that some Sure Starts had difficulty reaching out to those very vulnerable families who were reluctant to use services but needed support.

She said that setting up the projects took much longer than they thought, and that many agencies found partnership working very difficult. Flexibility and very practical support was the key to building local confidence - and it was not possible to respond flexibly to local community needs if service models based on evidence of "what works" were imposed from above.

She said many parents had gained a great deal from involvement in Sure Start, and there were examples of families trying to get housing transfers onto estates where there were Sure Start projects.

Martin Barnes, director of the Child Poverty Action Group, welcomed the government's "bold" pledge to abolish child poverty in 20 years, but criticised ministers for failing to admit progress had been disappointing.

Instead, when figures showed the number of children living in households with incomes less than 60 per cent of average had fallen by only half a million instead of the 1.2 million predicted by the treasury, the government "went into overdrive" to deny that they had failed to hit the target by using a measure of absolute instead of relative poverty.

Barnes said if you "pick and mix" different measures of poverty, you undermine the credibility of the pledge itself. He pointed out that child poverty levels were still scandalously high in some communities, with 73 per cent of children in Pakistani and Bangladeshi families living in poverty, and 41 per cent of all children living in London.

Minister announces details of new social work degree

All future social work students will have to demonstrate their ability to work "confidently and effectively" with other professionals under new requirements for training announced by health minister Jacqui Smith, writes Janet Snell.

She said the new three-year social work degree course would also focus on communications skills as well as areas such as law and human growth and development . She added that the new qualification would "put social work on a par with other graduate professions".

Smith said when she originally trained as a teacher, courses "lacked rigour" and theory and practice and were delivered as two separate strands. It was important to avoid the same mistakes in social work training.

"Social work, like teaching, is a very practical job. It is about protecting people and changing their lives, not about being able to give a fluent and theoretical explanation of why they got into difficulties in the first place," she told a packed hall.

She said the new degree courses must ensure that theory and research directly informs and supports practice. "That is why students will spend a minimum of 200 days learning in practice settings," she explained.

The department of health is setting up a task force to increase the quality and quantity of practice placements. This will work with employers and higher educational institutions to ensure employers are providing enough high quality practice placements for tomorrow’s social workers.

The minister said the government would be undertaking a full review of the funding of practice learning and will announce the outcome early next year.

She also told the conference that the £15 million training strategy implementation fund, announced in February, is to be used to support 26,500 staff to undertake a range of training opportunities including induction training and improving National Vocational Qualification award structures by training staff to become NVQ assessors, mentors and verifiers.

This would "enable employers to be able to train their staff and managers….. and promote a culture of lifelong learning and continuous professional development within social care."

Turning to the issue of joint working she stressed that health and social services must work together in partnership, and that could be achieved either through Section 31 partnership arrangements or care trusts.

"Social care professionals have much to teach health workers about being user centred," she said. "I believe that social services does have a special approach which the NHS can learn from, an approach that should be nurtured and maintained. But I also believe that social services can learn from the NHS."

Smith added that the department of health had been notified of over 100 sites that are using the flexibilities now available, spending over £1billion, with over half of them led by local authorities. And many more sites have expressed an interest.

Click here to read a full text of Jacqui Smith's speech.

Local authorities fail homeless people with alcohol and drug problems

Homeless people with alcohol and substance misuse problems are being failed by local authorities, delegates heard, writes Keith Sellick.

A lack of resources and strict criteria about provision led to difficulties in referring homeless people with dual diagnosis to social services in Hampshire. Projects are having to use the voluntary sector, which is more flexible about treating clients and quicker in providing services.

Trish Padwicke, who works for the Reachout project in Hampshire, said that even though local authority awareness of homeless people with dual diagnosis was improving, it was still necessary to use voluntary sector services.

Rosemarie Driver, resettlement manager from May Place House in Basingstoke, which houses homeless people, said that referral to local authority alcohol services can take anything between four and 12 weeks. She said that: "Local authority services did not give this client group enough recognition. Where they did provide services they were often understaffed or lacked resources."

Both speakers gave examples of clients where voluntary sector services were used because of lack of council provision or where clients did not fit council criteria. For example, one client "Simon", who had a history of alcohol abuse, was not housed by the local authority because he had left his wife and child and so had made himself intentionally homeless.

The session looked at Maca's work in assessing homeless people and settling them in accommodation. The Reachout project works with other agencies to provide services for homeless people with dual diagnosis, and May Place House provides housing and support for a six-month period to enable clients to live back in the community.

Government told delayed discharge focus damages other council services

The head of community care at Kensington and Chelsea council has launched an attack on the government saying it is focusing on reducing the number of delayed discharges to the detriment of other local authority services, writes Anabel Unity Sale.

Peter West told delegates: "Our beef in social services is that the only thing Tony Blair knows about us is whether our discharge rates are up or down. It is a very narrow and distorting focus."

He said councils were also concerned and anxious about health minister Alan Millburn’s proposals for local authorities to reimburse hospitals' costs for each day after a patient who is ready to be discharged stays in hospital.

West added that in order for housing for older people to be planned effectively a statutory partnership had to include supported housing providers, community care and primary care trusts. He said: "We have had enough of this separate planning from government."

Also addressing the same session, Anchor Homes director Barbara Laing said the government’s current policy of increasing the number of people being discharged from hospital meant more appropriate services needed to be provided.

She said: "This policy requires rapidly expanding care capacity in the community. Such development of services relies on good collaborative working."