My daughter is in Year Ten, midway through her GCSEs. Her school arranged for them all to have a careers talk with a career advisor. I wasn’t present but my daughter reported home on this interaction. The careers advisor is a professional in her field and I am not a qualified careers advisor. She told my daughter the following: “Should you be doing so many GCSEs, you don’t want to burn out?” “You’ll find it very hard to get work experience in environmental work.” “If you do Further Maths at A Level, you might drop it because it is too hard.” “You don’t want to do medicine do you, because it is very competitive.”

Overall, my daughter felt the experience was mostly pointless, she made one useful suggestion about work experience and that it wasn’t a beneficial experience.

Luckily for my daughter, she isn’t overly vulnerable to other people’s opinions, and she has a family who will support and encourage her. However, we cannot say the same for all 15-year-olds. We can’t say the same for all those who draw on social care services either.

This caused me to reflect. How much power can a professional have and are we using that power thoughtfully and meaningfully.

I am sure the careers advisor felt she was being wise and bringing her experience to the room and educating the 15-year-old in front of her. But did she recognise that she had never seen my daughter’s educational performance and wasn’t well enough informed to comment on her ability to do GCSEs? Did she know whether that specific child was likely to continue with Maths or not? Did she recognise that girls might struggle in STEM subjects and maybe it is because they find the system discourages girls more than boys?

In social care, do we do the same? Do we find out enough about the person to know whether they, individually, are capable? Do we tell people what’s hard rather than what is possible? Are we so concerned about the risk of failure that we don’t plan for success? Do we encourage people to a lesser version of their ambitions and safe certainty?

Obviously, my hope is that we are the more robust, personalised and ambitious version of this story in children and adult’s social care. Actually, I hope that is true across all of the public and care sectors. And I truly believe that strengths-based approaches are a powerful vehicle for realising this ambition.

At the heart of strengths-based approaches is the belief that we can harness people’s own strengths and powers, and that we are using our professional power to enhance the position of these strengths. To help, not to inhibit.

One of the themes SCIE is exploring in our Showcase Webinar series is strengths-based approaches. We have a wonderful webinar up already and we will be bringing you more across the year. Join us to think about how you can drive forward aspiration with your own strengths-based approaches and sign up to the SCIE webinars. Onwards and upwards.

In 2018, when we penned ’Asset Based Commissioning – Better Outcomes and Better Value’, we were convinced that individuals could get closer to experiencing the lives they wished, in the sort of community they wished. A key factor to realising this is that individuals and communities understand the assets they control and are willing and able to use these effectively.

No way did we foresee the vast release of additional individual and community assets prompted by Covid 19. Progress that we thought might take ten years, happened in weeks. Covid has spurred individual and community self-help and the flexing of services to support what people were already doing to help themselves. No stats yet on the volume of self-help and volunteering, but in time we will understand this and the profile of ‘covid volunteers’; what they did, why, how many first-time volunteers etc. Where organisations were a galvanising force, we will understand the types and sizes, which pre-existed covid, which were quickly established, what worked and why.

The Public Service Transformation Academy has been focused on teaching the potential paradigm shifts in commissioning through the Cabinet Office Commissioning Academy

Volunteering may reduce during Waves 2 and 3 and beyond, due to perceived reduced need, state intervention, volunteers coming off furlough, and individuals being unable to sustain crisis level effort. This is all understandable but hopefully, levels of self-help and volunteering will still exceed pre-covid days.

The attitudes and actions of commissioners will have a significant impact. Some will seek to:

  • Build on the progress in self-help and volunteering made over the last eighteen months, supporting individuals and fledgling community organisations, in the process boosting asset based commissioning
  • Whilst others will try to reassert control and consistency, through imposing standard specifications, regulation, reporting requirements

Amongst the horrors of Covid-19 there been positives, more than just a vast increase in volunteering; we think there has been a shift in who was involved, who exercised leadership, the relationship between citizens, volunteers, and the state, how needs emerged and were prioritised.

Covid dividend

Handled well, a paradigm shift in self-care and volunteering will be a significant ‘Covid dividend’. Handled badly and what could have been a paradigm shift will be little more than a paradigm skid or swerve.

We want to understand what commissioners are doing as the UK progressively opens- up. Tell us what you are seeing; actions to support and develop or a focus on reasserting control and consistency?

And if you’d like to participate in the Public Service Transformation Academy’s open learning community, join us on 23 June for the days after: are we learning? Are we building back better?

John can catch a goldfish with his bare hands. It’s one of his strengths. How did I find this out? When the staff at his dementia day service were cleaning out Norman’s tank John decided to help – by thrusting his hand into the tank and deftly extracting the fish to allow the staff to clean round properly. Norman was a little shocked but he didn’t seem to mind and in fact that little bit of human contact was probably quite a treat.

So why am I telling you this?

Because our system for providing care and support rarely allows for people’s strengths to shine through. When we carry out an assessment or put together a care plan, people’s unique talents are unlikely to get a mention. Even if they did, the next layer of risk assessment would manage to suppress any chance of John’s fish catching abilities being employed to useful effect.

Why does this matter?

Is it really a problem that John attends the day service and we never know he can catch a fish with his bare hands? It matters because if John can contribute something to his support, whatever that may be, then he feels proud. So he has moved on from having his basic needs met to boosting his self-esteem. People talk about it and thank him for his help. He becomes a bit of a legend and he glows with pride that he did something good for someone else that day. One of the five Ways to Wellbeing is to give something back and by doing this one thing John boosts his own wellbeing. Not only that, he gains a purpose – he becomes part of the fish tank cleaning routine and he looks forward to the next time he can lend a hand.

Sustainable social care needs to create the conditions that allow people’s strengths to shine. We must move away from a model of passive recipients to active participants and give people the opportunity to catch that fish.

As a registered social worker with 30 years’ experience, I have worked in various roles in mental health social work, including Operational Director for Mental Health in Milton Keynes. I have been in my current role since 2009, including a part-time secondment to the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi), where I worked with other local authorities developing and delivering community led support (CLS)/strengths based social care (SBSC).

The journey in Leeds

In April 2015 a new DASS and Deputy Director started in Leeds, and these appointments, plus the introduction of the Care Act, enabled us to look at how we delivered social work in Leeds. Cath Roff, the new DASS, announced her desire to ‘liberate social work’ (a wonderful thing to hear!).and told us her mantra for change:

  • Do no harm
  • Don’t break the law
  • Don’t break the budget

The order of these messages was key.

Innovation

In order to avoid the Leeds habit of ‘pilotitis’, a programme board was established and an innovation site – one of the more established co-located neighbourhood teams in a deprived area of Leeds – was selected. We wanted the innovation to be owned by front-line workers, so we also set up a ‘Making it happen’ group and invited interested frontline workers to join.

Achievements

  • Replacing huge, overly complex assessment documentation with a ‘blank sheet of paper’ conversation record and changing the way we talk to people – focussing on what’s strong not what’s wrong
  • Changing where we talk to people – we have Talking Points in each neighbourhood team locality and no longer default to seeing people in their own homes
  • Ensuring we listen to people and hear what they are saying (and sometimes what they are not)
  • Linking people into the wealth of 3rd sector support Leeds is privileged to have
  • Ongoing evaluation in partnership with the NDTi and associated LAs

Next steps

There is no end point to this journey – whenever you think you have got ‘there’, ‘there’ changes! SBSC and CLS are a return to the roots of social work and without a doubt there is a massive culture change for people who have grown up with the ‘care management’ approach to social work. We need to properly engage with the population of Leeds. Under the old model, we rationed and rationed until people had exhausted themselves. Now we are wanting people to come to us earlier, before everything gets broken, but we do need to make sure they understand that!

I often tell new recruits that ‘if you can do social work in Bradford, you can do it anywhere’. Bradford is the 4th largest Metropolitan Council with a population in excess of 530,000. The diversity of this population is staggering. Like most other areas we are experiencing rises in demand, and the complexities of families but somehow we have managed to keep the number of children who need to be looked after – or who are on Child Protection Plans – lower than many of our statistical neighbours. When Ofsted reported on our joint targeted area inspection last year, they described social work in Bradford as flourishing.

One of the reasons for this is our strength based approach. Bradford Children’s Services have worked with our Safeguarding Children Board and all partners to introduce and sustain Signs of Safety. To date we have trained more than 2000 people who impact on the lives of children in Bradford in Signs of Safety. This includes not just Early Help Workers and Social Workers, but also Health, Education, Police, Probation, Voluntary Sector and beyond. Critically, we have run events for Senior Leaders and Elected Members. We can confidently say that Signs of Safety is becoming embedded in Bradford.

For the last 18 months all Initial Child Protection Conferences have followed the Signs of Safety methodology. Using simple, clear, jargon free language to engage children and families in conversations detailing what is working well, what we are worried about and what needs to happen next is impactful. Families have constructed their own danger statement and families have told us ‘I now get why you are worried.’

This strength-based approach has freed up our staff to be more courageous (and less risk adverse) in their decision making and solutions.

Over the past six months, Bradford has extended the Signs of Safety model into the West Yorkshire Problem Solving Courts pilot. In addition to a Social Worker focusing relentlessly on needs of the child, we appointed a separate worker to focus on the needs of the adults. It’s early days, but there is already clear anecdotal evidence (which we hope will translate to hard evidence) that this approach is enabling children to safely and appropriately remain with their birth parents. The emerging case studies not only represent a win for the public purse, but also a win for children and for families – and that is why we came into social work in the first place.

We have all heard a lot about how we need to get to strengths- based approaches – building on what people are good at, the assets they have, and what they already do that works. Since I started my role in March of this year, I have concluded that this applies to refining our strategy too. National Voices needs to change. Our influencing environment is different: Person-centred care is largely reflected in all relevant policy documents now, but it has clearly not arrived in the lived reality of how most people experience their care. And our funding environment has changed too – the time of core grants, where a government body sees the value in a voluntary sector infrastructure organisation and funds it, seems to be over for now.

This all means we need to find a way of addressing the gap between rhetoric and reality on person-centred care, and we need to do so in a way that helps us to fund our ongoing work.

In thinking through this challenge, it became clear to me that we need to take a strengths-based approach: we haven’t got much money or many people, and if we think of ourselves as a stand-alone organisation, this lack of resource will severely limit our impact. But we are part of a massive network of assets. We have 160 members, who have great people working for them, across policy and influencing, service delivery and innovation, research and advocacy. They work with thousands and thousands of volunteers, and draw on the resilience and energy of even more people we are here to support: people living with ongoing health problems, and many of the other issues that are associated, if not caused by ill health: poverty, loneliness, inequality.

Connection is our strength

We need to think of this network as our asset. Focus on the connections we need to build, and strengthen our insight and analysis of what our members know and do. We can then engage so much more effectively with the many opportunities for change that arise out of the national push for primary care reform, the local drive to implement social prescribing, or the regional ambition to integrate services.

This means we need to learn some different skills too; for instance, listening to our partners’ experiences; facilitating collective action; and supporting people to advocate for themselves and others. It might sound a bit trite, but it is still true that our connection is our strength.

To us in Walsall, Restorative Practice means strengthening relationships between people as well as strengthening social connections within communities. It focuses on building relationship with children, young people and their families and connecting with the communities in which they live. We think this will help us to better understand their needs, ensure we are empowering them to make positive changes and enable them to secure sustainable outcomes. So we are committed to embed restorative practice as a fundamental part of our transformation programme. It is a common-sense approach.

To ensure we will stay on course we have set out a number of principles:

Taking a system-wide, asset-based approach

Our transformation programme is not just social care-focused but works across all of children’s services in Walsall.

Moving away from over-reliance on processes and compliance

That means moving from a culture focused on the problematic (ie assessing need). Instead we are investing to create a stable confident workforce who are able to effectively manage uncertainty and risk and identify people’s strengths and build on them to secure change and build resilience.

Creating locality based teams

This isn’t just about moving the furniture, but a relentless focus on connecting practitioners, where it makes sense to do so, with communities and local resources.

Co-producing the transformation journey

This means co-production with our key stakeholders including children, young people and families. To achieve this we having to reshape our relationship with them to ensure that it is based on high support, high challenge.

Learning from asset-based innovations and transformations elsewhere

We want to develop a whole-system approach that has a strong evidence base. In particular the importance of whole family/community based support, focusing on relationships, and striving towards evidence based decision making across the organisation.

So, we have concluded an asset-based approach is common sense, but not always common. We acknowledge that this will require lots of energy and courage, but is absolutely the most important change needed to get it right for our children.

This is the story of how a profound re-imagining of the relationship between citizen and state came to give birth to a new approach to children’s social care.

The Wigan Deal

The Wigan Deal is a response to austerity with roots in the values and society of ex mining communities. At its heart is an approach that builds on assets and through conversations.

In the five years since its inception Wigan enjoys healthy local public approval ratings, a relatively stable financial environment and improving outcomes.

Aligning children’s social care

Professor Eileen Munroe’s 2012 report on the future of Children’s Social Care focused on how might re-empower social work professionals & more local flexibility. The Children’s Social Care Innovation Fund in 2014 was the catalyst for new ideas and thinking and Wigan saw the opportunity to test its Deal thinking in Children’s Social Care focusing on CSE and adolescent mental health. The evaluations pointed to a strong alignment.

Wigan was rated ‘Good’ by Ofsted in March 2017, recognising its ability to maintain a safe (but traditional) system while exploring new approaches though innovation. Wigan was then faced with a choice – put its faith in a traditional system that had served it well or invest further in innovation. It chose innovation.

A dynamic network of national innovators

By 2016 Children Social Care innovators from across the country were starting to talk. Enabled by the Spring Consortium, and with access to better evidence, Wigan opted in 2017 to import 3 innovation projects tested elsewhere – PAUSE, Mockingbird Project and No Wrong Door project – as they were asset based in their approach and Wigan Deal consistent.

Increasingly we are convinced that innovation is the ‘join’ between areas of national policy and strong localist visions.

The Greater Manchester dynamic

Recently the Department for Education awarded Greater Manchester £5.7m to scale and spread children’s social care innovation across its 10 Councils building on initial work by Rochdale, Stockport, Salford and Wigan. Aligned to Greater Manchester public service reform, this will see the emergence of the next step – system level change driven by innovation ecosystems.

The Impact of the Wigan Deal

The Deal is more than reform, it’s a movement and a new model of sustainable public services. We’ve lost £160m in government grants but we haven’t cut services – how they are delivered and where they are delivered has been transformed. This approach is improving outcomes and saving money, doing better with less, and we are confident this will continue.

In East Sussex we’re looking to have meaningful and helpful relationships with children and families. We call it Connected Practice. Other local authorities have chosen to practice systems such as Signs of Safety or the Reclaim Model of child protection casework. For us though, Connected Practice is how practitioners develop transformative relationships with the most vulnerable families in the community. This can be achieved by having a good understanding of trauma, attachment and risk, underpinned by evidence-based approaches.

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We believe that families have strengths, networks and skills that they can bring to bear to foster positive change; and this underpins Connected Practice. So as part of developing each child’s plan, practitioners ask the question: What are the strengths that we can harness within this family/ carer and extended family to create change?

In addition to supporting families, East Sussex has continued to invest in wider preventative and community services which help maintain families’ independence, such as early help and community-based support.

Ofsted report

We’re delighted that our recent Ofsted inspection of children’s services said: ‘The East Sussex model of “connected practice” has been comprehensively rolled out and is fully embedded, resulting in helpful, enduring and trusting relationships between practitioners, children and their families, sometimes over many years’.

Supportive relationships

From Director of Children’s Services to frontline workers, it’s vital to prioritise supportive relationships with each other. In this way, connections have a cascading effect; if practitioners feel supported then they can have helpful relationships with the child and family with whom they work. Therefore the model promotes connections throughout the organisation, including through high quality supervision, group supervision, and practice development.

We know that through these supportive relationships more children and young people are supported to stay at home with their families – leading lives that are safe, stable and fulfilling.

Stuart Gallimore is President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)

Stockport has transformed our children’s services over recent years to create ‘Stockport Family’ which is an integrated and agile early help and social care system that challenges the concept of referrals, thresholds and agency boundaries. Stockport Family works closely with universal services, particularly health, schools and police, to ensure that services can identify needs early and provide timely support and intervention. The integrated structure has strengthened links with midwifery, school nursing, health visitors and early year’s services. We have created a simplified structure to allow professionals and families to “call in” the right intervention, specialist knowledge and skills at the right time.

Stockport has a well-developed ‘Team around the School’ model, which places skilled and motivated early help practitioners alongside link social workers, school nurses, and other local partners within the community, to work with whole families as need arises.

All work with families is underpinned by Restorative Practice, promoting behaviour and practice which helps to build and maintain healthy relationships; resolve difficulties and repair harm where there has been conflict. The concept of ‘working with’ is embedded in our values and has positively impacted on our culture to deliver strengths based practice and whole system change.