Safeguarding Partnership Board

Audience

This one day session is designed for social care practitioners working directly with children and families.

Aim

The core of effective practice is social workers and family support staff establishing and maintaining respectful relationships of trust with children, young people, and families. For many different reasons, this can be far from straightforward.

In this workshop participants will develop practical strategies to engage with families when issues such as anxiety, reluctance, or hostility makes relationships difficult to establish.

With an emphasis on self-reflection and reflexive practice, participants will develop interpersonal skills for building relationships that include support and healthy challenge – essential aspects of relationship-based working.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand and Practice techniques, skills and approaches to enable empathetic and authoritative relationships with families
• Discuss how power differentials and dynamics can operate in social work intervention with families
• Hear different voices and perspectives of social work interventions
• Challenge and reconceptualise the language often used to describe families who may not want to work with us
• Examine theory underpinning the reasons and causes of conflict in professional-family relationships
• Gain greater confidence in promoting healthy challenges in professional-family relationships

Pre-Course learning

An area of work often ignored, both in staff development and research, has been practitioners working with families from affluent backgrounds. Limited attention has been paid to children in affluent families, there are numerous reasons behind this but usually they are considered at ‘‘low risk’’. The spotlight is on families from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and emphasis is placed on the relationship between poverty and neglect (Bywater et al., 2016; Morris et al., 2018). However, children from affluent families may suffer maltreatment in less visible ways; they might not be materially neglected, dirty or malnourished, but instead emotionally neglected (Bellis et al., 2014).

The attached research link focuses on one of the few pieces of research in this field. It explores how social workers intervene with affluent parents when there are child protection concerns about neglect. The study examined three key questions:

1. How do social workers identify risk factors for vulnerable children in affluent families?

2. Which factors inhibit or enable social workers’ engagement with resistant affluent parents when there are child protection concerns?

3. What kind of skills, knowledge and experience is necessary for social workers to effectively assert their professional authority with affluent parents when there are concerns about abuse and neglect?

Findings revealed that social workers have to navigate complex power relationships with parents who are able to use their class privileges to resist their interventions. The paper concludes with a discussion of social workers’ skills and capacities for engaging ‘highly resistant’ affluent parents in the child protection system.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/25232/1/Accepted%20Recognising%20and%20Addressing%20Child%20Neglect%20in%20Affluent%20Families%209%20Oct%202018.pdf

Activity (30 minutes)

Carrying out this activity, can be used towards your CPD evidence base.

Read through the research paper and note down any learning around the following questions:

1. Does the research mirror any of your own experiences working with affluent families

2. Which factors inhibit workers’ engagement with ‘resistant affluent parents’ when there are child protection concerns?

3. What kind of skills, knowledge and experience are necessary for workers to successfully engage with affluent parents when there are concerns about abuse and neglect?

The workshop will start with some of your reflections from this activity.

Please Note: This event is a 6 hour online workshop delivered through Microsoft Teams with 30 minutes pre-course preparation.

Teams link: Jersey | Working with Families Where Engagement is Challenging | 9:30-15:30 | 18.09.24