Looking back on the Revisiting Child Protection in Scotland project: A View from the Field

In this blog, Trisha Hall, Scottish Association of Social Workers’ manager, talks about what the Revisiting Child Protection in Scotland project – and the TLC resources within it – have meant for her …

The Talking & Listening to Children (TLC) resources are a great set of tools and approaches which are of immeasurable value to social work, but also other professionals working with children and families.

For social workers to engage in the training sessions means such a welcome change from training in yet another system or procedure, assessment process, measuring tool, impact analysis or familiarisation of yet other professional framework, which at present appears to be the only training available to social work. We are operating within increasingly bureaucratic and procedural cultures, where there is little time for reflection and learning. This project takes practitioners back to why they wanted to be a social worker in the first place. It allows them to reconnect with the passion to make a real difference, through making the relationships with children and their families that build trust, that are non-threatening, but that may prevent an escalation from a child being in need to a child becoming at risk of harm.

The project’s overall impact has evidenced the need for a different culture, which allows for social workers to learn from academics but crucially also from each other, and the people they work with and for. We need to review CP practice in Scotland, not the systems which currently shape practice. We have so much evidence in the form of theories and in depth research, but very little sustainable practitioner based and informed activity.

The sessions have also shown us as the professional SW association how it is vital that we keep campaigning for the systemisation of evidence-based practice and associated tools. It is already evident that despite the very positive response to the workshops, the participants are not able to continue the activity as we had hoped if they have to do so in their own time. There is such an urgency in the day to day work and the frequently large caseloads that it is unlikely any continuation is possible in worktime. Yet this may be false economy. Children and families social workers, particularly those working in child protection, last an average of nine years before they seek another direction. We have to truly reimagine and revisit our child protection practice in order to make sustainable changes that will really “get it right for every child” as well as their families and communities.

Trisha Hall, SASW, Edinburgh
24th May 2017