Finches and Frameworks

In 1837 Darwin identified 15 species of finches, all with different types of beak, specifically adapted to enable them to eat the different foods available to them on the Galapagos Islands.

In 2019 Barnardo’s identified 100 separate child sexual abuse services, all with different types of structure, relationships, operations and user experiences, with each service having adapted to enable them to deliver different types of children’s services across the UK.

Photo of finches perched on a tree (by David Clode via Unsplash)

In Darwin’s case the discovery was a moment of genius. In Barnardo’s case it’s not such a good thing. We have adapted to different ecosystems but having a hundred services that are all different means that as an organisation we fail to benefit from efficiencies of scale, such as:

• Optimised and shared expertise, administration and management processes
• Collecting data to understand performance and improve services
• Simplified and standardised user experience so practitioners can focus on a specific user’s requirements
• The opportunities your brand values, the brand permission and organisational heritage given to us to develop and nurture children and young people

What are we doing about this?

In this blog post I am going to describe the work we’ve been doing to design a risk assessment framework that enables more efficient, effective multi-agency environments to exist and thrive. This will help our services do what they are really good at — direct work with children at risk of abuse and exploitation.

Barnardo’s has just over 100 child sexual abuse and exploitation services and 1000 children’s services overall. We are one of the UK’s largest children’s health and care service providers. The fact that our services are commissioned, designed and configured differently is not unique to just our sexual abuse services, but it is the area that I’ve been working in.

This work is part of Barnardo’s Core Priority Programme (CPP). We’ve invested in research, development and design of a range of specialist approaches that work together in addressing all forms of child sexual abuse including:

• Familial and extra-familial child sexual abuse
• Child sexual exploitation and trafficking where sexual violence occurs
• Institutional child sexual abuse
• Children who have problematic and harmful sexual behaviours

Diverse local requirements

So, why are all our CSA services adapting like Darwin’s finches? It is, of course, because of the environment. They’ve been commissioned by 100 different local and district authorities to provide all sorts of different types of abuse, missing children, trafficking and exploitation services.

The child protection system relies on different agencies with different skills, objectives and perspectives working well together. And the configuration of these agencies, the process and interactions will differ from one locality to the next: in order for Barnardo’s services to work with these organisations, we have to adapt.

Here is a typical example. In one place, Barnardo’s could provide a sexual exploitation service and a few miles away we could provide a service that combines missing, exploitation and trafficking. In a nearby local authority, we could provide two separate services: a harmful sexual behaviour service and a service specialising in working with under 10’s. And we could provide consultancy at a regional level on child trafficking.

In the example above, each service has slightly different processes, protocols, roles and relationships. The referral and risk assessment will be different, case information will be structured differently, and we will deliver updates onto different case management environments. The only constant is that we deliver an assessment to develop a set of interventions with a child to support and safeguard them from risk and harm.

This constant, the risk assessment process, is what gives us a foothold to start transforming Barnardo’s services, and an opportunity to help these systems work more effectively for children and young people. We’ll come back to this shortly — there is one more thing you need to be aware of.

Working with risk and at risk

As well as the complicated and diverse nature of the environment, there is another major factor that makes the service design task a challenge.

Child sexual exploitation and abuse for most of us is an emotive, difficult topic to talk about and to comprehend. We want others to deal with it. But if we think for a moment that those people and organisations we’ve delegated to look after our children are failing — no matter what the reality might be — it becomes the subject of outrage, debate and recrimination.

This is a tough environment to work in — and things will go wrong because lying, deceit, distortion, naivety, suspicion and self-preservation are all factors in our interactions with those involved: the reality is that facts are often uncertain, knowledge is often unreliable, understanding is often incomplete.

Services and individuals will rarely be congratulated for getting things right and are often denounced in public for getting things wrong. The result is a sector that works with risk and at risk — an uncomfortable place to be for the dedicated, steadfast and caring people who choose to be here.

Solving our problem

As the risk assessment is one of the fundamentals that holds together a child protection system and is a constant across all of our 100 CSA services, this is where we started our work.

The children’s services team I worked with saw an opportunity to develop a framework that could provide a standard way to design an approach to identifying and managing risk. This would account for the dynamic nature of practice and the different types of interactions and relationships with other agencies within a specific local ecosystem.

We ran a discovery to find out more. We spoke to Barnardo’s colleagues in a local authority's social care team and worked with children to understand their journey through the different agencies in this interconnected environment.

We discovered a lot of things including:

• Referring children at risk and with vulnerabilities is complicated, flawed and inefficient
• There are many different views and perspectives of what assessment means
• There are many different assessment practices often based on outdated tools
• Organisational risk is a significant consideration and this tends to mean that agencies are mostly reactive and rarely proactive
• The way we record, share and report progress, risk and harm is outdated
• There is almost no data collected that can be used to improve children’s experiences

And from a child and family perspective their journey through the system is:

• Daunting and no one knows what to expect
• Never a good experience and often terrible one
• Peppered throughout with victim blaming and inappropriate language
• Opaque, confusing and frustrating

It’s worth mentioning that amongst this rather difficult but not unexpected set of findings there was an upside. It confirmed that although our ecosystems and the processes we have to follow might not be child-centred, our Barnardo’s staff are.

We put children at the heart of our interventions, we strongly advocate for children within the sector and we tackle blame-language head on. Many services have already developed a contextual safeguarding approach (current best practice) well ahead of the rest of the sector and our partner agencies.

Developing a risk assessment framework

We developed a prototype risk assessment framework, based on our research. It consists of three objectives, six values, and eight principles. Over time, we will add practices and tools that adhere to the framework.

It’s a work in progress but let me give you an idea of our six values:

1. The needs of children and young people over organisational risk
2. Individuals, interactions and relationships over processes, forms and tools
3. Proactive engagement as well as reactive crisis management
4. Sharing and collaboration, not working in silence
5. Flexibility and adaptability over fixed rules and rigid systems
6. Caring and safeguarding not blaming

And here are two examples of the framework’s eight principles:

1. Understanding harm and abuse from a child’s perspective as well as contextual assessment allows us to make better decisions on how to keep them safe and what further action needs to be taken within their wider network.
2. As far as possible and appropriate, interventions should be designed in collaboration with our service users, not for them. We bring all our skills and experiences and they bring theirs.

The framework has been tested with a number of senior children’s services managers across the UK. The results were positive and it was seen as a driver for changing the systems — moving from an approach which focuses on process to an approach that focuses on principles, values and practices.

If we can start to develop and deploy these principles and develop complementary practice across Barnardo’s, then this will hopefully cascade through the sector and become a mode of working for other agencies too. This will mean that although we will always need to adapt to our environment, any adaptation will be based on a consistent and embedded set of fundamentals.

Conclusion

The risk assessment framework is an important opportunity to influence the sector to update practice and develop technology platforms that work. And for Barnardo’s, it is a unique opportunity to build services that work more effectively for children and in turn create sustainable services for the organisation.

To do this:

• It will take investment to design, develop and deploy
• It needs to be properly resourced with associated tools and products
• It will take time to trickle through systems
• It will take senior leadership in Barnardo’s and across the sector to promote and sponsor

It took me a while to understand how a framework could solve our finch problem. But then I realised I already work to a framework — Agile — which is central to the way we work in digital. With Agile I can arrive on site and within an hour I know when all my ceremonies are, where to collect my tasks from; I know what is expected of me and I know what is expected from the team.

The idea that we can develop a framework of values, principles and practices that allows a system of interconnected agencies to become child-centred, deliver better outcomes for children and work together to eradicate child abuse is not so finchpie in the sky after all.

Davie is a service designer in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.

We’re hiring! Read more about the team we’re building and our current roles available.