From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships?

On a date in July 2013* yet to be announced, the Child Care History Network is holding a conference at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust at Toddington near Cheltenham. The theme of the conference From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships? is intended to provide a springboard for some fundamental thinking about child protection. For the last forty years child protection and safeguarding have dominated social work with children and their families. The conference will look at how this thinking has developed and ask whether it is time to move on to a different way of viewing ways of meeting children's needs.

How do we best protect children? Is safeguarding still the top priority? Should we place a greater emphasis on nurture? What else should we be doing? As with all CCHN events, delegates shall not only be considering historical developments but also looking at how we can apply what we have learnt from history.

Among the speakers who will be presenting to the conference are Sir Roger Singleton, Chair of the Independent Safeguarding Authority and Mark Smith, Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh.

As well as the presentations, the day will provide opportunities for delegates to participate and share thinking on the theme.

The date and further conference details will appear on this page and on the CCHN website in the very near future.


* Please note the CCHN announced that the date of the conference was to have been June 21st, 2013 but due to unforeseen circumstances the conference has been deferred to a later date.

CCHN has provided us with the following rationale for the conference :

Safeguarding Children : achievement or rhetoric ?

Safeguarding children is officially defined as :

The process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development, and ensuring they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care that enables children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully. (Ofsted, 2005)

The claim made for the concept of "safeguarding children" is that it is comprehensive and goes beyond what its proponents describe as "basic child protection." The new view is that "safeguarding children" deals with a wider spectrum of issues than what we have come to know as child protection. Safeguarding children, it is suggested, provides effective child protection where the latter is only a part of wider work to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Safeguarding children also demands that all agencies and individuals should aim to be proactive in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children so that the need to protect children from harm is reduced. (Department of Education, 2013).

In our conference we will trace the narrative of the history of what has come to be known as "safeguarding children" and we will also hope to examine the claim that "safeguarding children" really does represent a paradigm shift from what was termed "child protection" to the extent that it will help all children and make all children safer.

From the Maria Colwell Report of 1974 through to the Munro Review of Child Protection in 2011 there is a sense in which "child protection" has grown into a huge empire in the social work school of professional thought. Certainly it has engendered a continuous production line of different policies, and procedures. This process is still alive and working among us without, it seems, ever creating a situation with which we can rest more easily. More importantly there are still many children who live in poverty, who suffer neglect, who fail to flourish, who do not enjoy good health and there are still children who are the victims of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

It has been suggested that the problem with child protection is that in a way it has become an institution with some of the flaws characteristic of big institutions. It was born out of professional failure and the tragic death of a child and it sustains itself in the aftermath of further tragedies by producing literature and teaching that speaks of "imperatives" which in turn cultivates a blame culture when things go wrong. It is a system which says, after the event. "Why didn't we do a risk assessment?" rather than saying a priori, "Now have we made sure our children have what they need to see them happily through today?"

There are those who would argue that the formal safeguarding risk assessment procedures we have in place to safeguard children are too impersonal and inorganic. Too often they disregard the views of children and parents alike. They would suggest that it might be better to approach "child protection" in a fundamentally different way by providing unhappy children with the kind of natural nurturing relationships they need with adults: relationships uncluttered by the requirements of regulation and procedure. This of course might necessitate not only the provision of means to train people to develop their already naturally held nurturing capabilities in order to extend these to the care of other people's children. For this scenario to flourish there may be a need to cultivate a more nurturing social climate within our wider community if children are to be safeguarded.

On the surface safeguarding children appears to be straightforward: something that should just happen yet it evokes contentious and complex issues as well as many ideas about how these would be best approached. Our hope is the conference will stimulate you to pursue, discuss and debate these ideas as well as the many others that will arise during the day.

This news and opinion item first appeared on the goodenoughcaring website home page on April 11th, 2013.