We ask a lot of our schools. We want them to deliver high-quality teaching that enables our children to achieve academically and prepare them for adult life. But we also expect schools to care for our children and help make sure that they are protected from harm in school, at home and in the wider community.
The ‘child protection’ role played by schools is long established. However, under the wider umbrella of ‘safeguarding’, schools in England must be alert and respond to a growing list of potential dangers. This list has extended over recent years to include complex and interrelated concerns such as online safety, mental ill-health, radicalisation, criminal exploitation and peer-on-peer sexual abuse. Asking schools to step in and work alongside other agencies including the police, the NHS and local authority children’s social care services has become a default response as our awareness of these dangers has increased.
Paradoxically, education policies have simultaneously pulled schools in the opposite direction. Under the government’s ‘academisation’ programme, initiated in 2010 by the then Conservative Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, schools have been strongly incentivised, and sometimes forced, to separate themselves from local authorities and attendant multi-agency structures. The switch from ‘local authority maintained’ to academy status promised much greater autonomy for school leaders and freedom from local bureaucratic constraints. Furthermore, since 2010, education policies have also strongly emphasised the teaching and learning responsibilities of schools, while the broader welfare responsibilities of schools that lay at the heart of the previous Labour government’s Every Child Matters (ECM) framework have been disregarded. Tellingly, schools were not included as a ‘statutory partner’ alongside local authorities, the police and the NHS in the new multi-agency safeguarding arrangements to replace Local Safeguarding Children Boards, which were announced in 2018 and implemented in 2019.
We sought to investigate the impact of this tension between safeguarding and education policies in the research for our new book. Through our conversations with over 300 people, including over 200 working in schools, and surveys of many more, we established a good understanding of how schools and other agencies are striving to continue to meet their safeguarding responsibilities in this contradictory policy environment. In doing so we had to take account of the wider impact of a decade of austerity measures including substantial funding cuts for welfare services, which had contributed to rising levels of child and family poverty and rising demand for children’s social care services.
Much of what we found was reassuring. On the one hand, local authorities reported finding it harder to sustain and develop relationships with some schools in the context of academisation, reduced funding for early help services and pressure on children’s social care services. However, we found no evidence from our visits to schools, of which roughly half were academies, that academy schools took their safeguarding responsibilities any less seriously than local authority-maintained schools.
Accessing and working with local authority services including children’s social care can be difficult and frustrating at times. However, most schools valued the support they received, including from Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs and education safeguarding advisers, and acknowledged the pressure that social workers in particular were working under. Perhaps the most reassuring finding was that the mantra that ‘safeguarding is everyone’s business’, associated with ECM, remained firmly embedded. This was reflected in schools dedicating more resources to this area, with many opting to establish ‘safeguarding teams’ rather than heaping all the responsibility on a single teacher who was the designated lead for child protection. The dedication and commitment of school staff to safeguarding was also demonstrated during the pandemic which came after the research for our book, but which we reflect on in our postscript.
However, schools have been placed under a great deal of additional pressure over recent years and have not always been getting the support they need. As expectations have grown and welfare services have been cut back or withdrawn, it is often schools who have been expected to take the lead on the provision of ‘early help’ for children and families without much input from other services. This not only puts pressure on schools’ budgets, but also on staff who may not feel suitably qualified or experienced. Moreover, schools in the most deprived areas provide substantial levels of support to parents struggling to cope with poverty, some of whom are living with domestic violence, poor mental health or the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse. Schools everywhere reported difficulties in accessing NHS child and adolescent mental health services, with some feeling pressured to fund such services themselves in the absence of help from mental health experts.
We found communications with children’s social care services were invariably shaped by ‘referral’ processes and ‘threshold’ guidance documents which at times seemed designed to help manage demand for services. Many school staff felt that thresholds for children’s social care had been raised so high that they were holding onto complex cases that would previously have qualified for ‘child in need’ or ‘child protection’ support. In such situations, schools were left to carry on gathering evidence in the hope of meeting the threshold later.
Looking ahead, the recent change of tone in government policy documents offers some encouragement. A rhetoric on school autonomy has given way to a greater focus on partnership and collaboration. The recently published education White Paper acknowledges that ten years of structural reform has created a ‘messy and often confusing’ system under which the responsibilities of academies, trusts and local authorities are sometimes unclear or overlapping allowing ‘vulnerable children to fall through the gaps’. We also welcome calls made by the Children’s Commissioner and the author of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, Josh MacAlister, that the representation of schools under the recently established multi-agency safeguarding arrangement be reconsidered. Local authority and schools’ staff we spoke to were baffled by the decision to exclude schools in the first place. However, it is not clear that the suggested approach to be taken to representation would address the sector’s concerns.
There is also much more to do to ensure that schools are better integrated into local children’s services provision at both the strategic and operational levels, bringing staff in schools closer to other professionals. Effective multi-agency working must be about more than ‘making a referral’ and passing cases around different agencies. We came across excellent examples of early help interventions that were led by schools, supported by a range of agencies meeting the needs of the child and family. The shape of early help offers must be designed to fit with the needs of local communities. Whatever role schools play in this, the provision must be securely resourced and not invisibly grafted on to schools’ responsibilities.
Carl Purcell is Research Associate in the NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit at the Policy Institute at King’s, King’s College London.
Protecting and Safeguarding Children in Schools by Mary Baginsky, Jenny Driscoll, Carl Purcell, Jill Manthorpe and Ben Hickman is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £24.99.
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