‘We make mothers responsible, but don’t work with men’: Brid Featherstone on child protection

In 2015, you took part in a project raising awareness about the impact of poverty. How have you seen that progress?

In 2010, when the coalition government came in, they would say, ‘Oh, poverty has nothing to do with child protection. That’s about people behaving badly’. I think there has been a shift.

From 2015 to 2021, I took part in the child welfare inequalities project, which mapped and explored inequalities in child welfare intervention. I believe it succeeded in raising awareness because we framed our messages in ways that people could engage with.

One of our messages was that there was an inequality for children at the heart of our services. For example, one statistic you’ve probably heard of is that a child in the poorest parts of the UK, such as Blackpool, is more than ten times more likely to be in care or on a child protection plan than a child in the richest areas.

Now, does that mean that all parents in Blackpool don’t love their children or have poor attachment patterns? That set up a certain set of conversations.

We found that social workers would tell us, ‘We will do this or that, but [poverty] isn’t our core business. Our core business is assessing for risk’.

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So we did training sessions on attitudes and got them to think about a day in the life of somebody in a less affluent area and the choices they’d have to make every day. Not to excuse them but to try and understand them.

For example, you say, ‘She takes her first child to school and leaves him in the playgroup at eight o’clock but the school doesn’t open until half eight, so that’s neglect’.

But, hang on a minute, what other children has she got? What’s the bus service like? Has she got a job to go to? Has she got childcare handy? We did this day-in-the-life methodology and it was very powerful.

You can’t solve poverty as an individual social worker. Poverty is a big issue for governments to solve. But you can be aware of the impact it has on your families to assess risk better.

Then you can distinguish between the parents who can’t be bothered to get up in the morning and take their kids to school on time and those juggling impossible things. That’s being poverty-aware.

You were a foster parent for around 20 years. How did the experience inform your work?

It was very rewarding, very hard work.

It was also really useful because I would ask the children what a good social worker looks like. One child had this idea of a social worker that was lovely, and very funny.

It was definitely not someone good at paperwork [laughs]. But somebody who was fun, who took them to the cinema, listened to them, sang along in the car with them. Someone who was on their side.”

I saw so many practitioners coming in and out of our house, so many of them brilliant examples. But it made me realise that, as social workers, we’re such brief visitors in children’s lives and we have so much power. We really need to think about that. We need to leave children with as many connections as possible.

It has also made me realise that children  never stop trying to make sense of their lives. A very simple thing was, we’d be sitting watching television and it struck me how family-oriented it was. The ads would be mum and dad and children or that family model would be promoted as commonsense.

The children were constantly having to make sense of their situation and the difference. It wasn’t just about going to school and explaining why they didn’t live with their mum and dad. It was even in their leisure time, sitting there watching television.

What are your hopes for the future?

I feel cautiously optimistic. We’ve had a really dreadful, chaotic, irresponsible time.

I hope that ministers will understand how important it is to engage with and hear about what it’s like to live in the towns where services have disappeared, where you have really big issues around accessing food and safe spaces for your children.

I am disappointed that politicians generally are not that interested in child protection.

Over the years, I’ve tried to get mainstream politicians interested and they seemed to see it as something separate from everything else. That it has to do with ‘bad families’.

I would like them to understand that there is a social gradient and that child protection is everybody’s business.

Which influential figures in social work would you like to see Community Care profile?