National charity Family Rights Group has published a roadmap it says will help family justice areas support children and families earlier and safely reduce the need for care proceedings.
The roadmap is included in a report evaluating a Dorset pilot programme that was designed to drive system change in how local family justice areas approach early work with children and families.
Reimagining pre-proceedings, a four-year workstream, aimed to help create conditions in which partnerships working with families can thrive, and local areas can safely divert children from care and remain within their families.
An evaluation of the Dorset pilot published by Family Rights Group and written by independent research consultant Caroline Thomas sets out the impact of the programme, and explains how local areas and central government can support the approach being applied more widely across England.
“As the government progresses with major reforms to children’s social care, and ahead of the publication of the new Family Justice Strategy, the pilot and its evaluation offers lessons for how to make a real impact for children and families”, Family Rights Group said.
Key findings in the report include setting out how a focused pre-proceedings workstream in a local family justice area can create better conditions for families to get help earlier.
Early indicators in Dorset, which has also been part of the Department for Education’s ‘families first’ pathfinder, point to a reduction in care proceedings being issued, an increase in the number of family and friends considered for kinship care arrangements, and stronger services for families.
The report also notes that effective change requires a local vision for pre-proceedings that families, children’s services, the family judiciary, local family justice board and other agencies and organisations have all collectively developed and bought into.
“This kind of system-wide partnership working is critical to making any meaningful progress”, the Family Rights Group said.
Children’s and families’ insights and expertise “open the door” to designing and delivering better services, the report says, which “requires a clear strategy and robust engagement mechanisms”.
The project has also generated learning on how to effectively work with children and families to co-produce better services. This includes tools and methods to understand the journey that children and families make through systems and processes, and to identify points of strength and points of difficulty where change is needed.
Other areas of learning from the project include the benefits of local areas co-producing template communications to families to support better understanding and partnership working between families and professionals, along with strengthening local family group conferences services and ensuring families understand the different types of meeting they may be involved in the child welfare system.
Developing a better understanding of the local kinship care population and how this can inform the co-production of a strong kinship local offer is also an area of learning, as are improvements to data collection and analysis to combine quantitative information with the deep insights of children, families and practitioners.
Caroline Lynch, legal director at Family Rights Group and the project’s co-lead, explained: “There is a huge body of evidence to show that early, effective partnership working with children and families is crucial. It can prevent difficulties from escalating, help to keep children safely within their family and avert the need for care proceedings.
“Family Rights Group’s Reimagining pre-proceedings workstream set out to turn that evidence into a co-produced actionable approach that could be applied in local family justice areas and make significant change for children and families.
“Our work also revealed the conditions critical to that approach being effective, including the need for a strong co-produced local vision for early and pre-proceedings work that everyone is bought into, and a clear focus on working with, rather than doing to, families.
“At a time when there remain high numbers of children entering the care system, and a series of reforms being driven by national government, Reimagining pre-proceedings provides important learning for local areas and national decision-makers about how to build a system that supports more children to remain safely in their family.”
Sir Andrew McFarlane, former president of the Family Division and patron of Family Rights Group, said the report is “important”.
“It is right to spend time and thought to get things right before proceedings start”, he added. “This report improves understanding of the ways in which all those in a local family justice area can work together to strengthen and improve the local system.”
Caroline Thomas, the independent research consultant who carried out the academic evaluation, said: “This evaluation report provides a unique insight into how a local family justice area approached and created the conditions in which pre-proceedings were reimagined.
“The evaluation’s 10 learning points offer policy makers and practitioners ideas and suggestions about how they might contribute to wider efforts to reimagine pre-proceedings for the benefit of children and families.”
