Pioneering plan to help vulnerable children

Tragedies such as the deaths of Baby P in London and Brandon Muir in Dundee could be prevented if a ground-breaking experiment in the south of Glasgow is extended, an expert has claimed.

The ongoing scheme involves a collaboration between social services and staff from the charity Quarriers, who work closely with families in which one or both parents misuse drink or drugs.

There is evidence that the charity’s workers are able to get closer and give more time to parents, helping protect children such as Baby P and Brandon Muir, two infant boys whose cases have provoked increased public concern and pressure on social services departments.

Earlier this month Robert Cunningham was found guilty of the culpable homicide of Brandon. He was the boyfriend of the toddler’s heroin-addicted mother Heather Boyd. While the killing of Baby P was not drug-related, it was his mother’s violent partner who was responsible, and it is partly by monitoring such complex family set-ups more closely that the Quarriers scheme aims to make children safer.

A report on the first six months of the project by Dr Moira Walker, honorary research fellow at the University of Stirling, concludes that drug-using parents were more likely to engage with project workers from Quarriers than social workers and says: “It follows that this kind of service has a crucial role in child protection services.”

Ms Walker’s report praises the respectful approach taken to parents under the scheme and says many parents worked with the charity because they felt supported rather than judged.

She says that while much of society might view helping drug-using parents as the wrong approach, the Quarriers Family Support Project (FSP) is demonstrating it can work.

The report also found that such parents were more willing to trust workers who were not from the local authority social work department – even though most Quarriers staff in the project are social workers themselves, and make it clear that they will pass information to state social workers if children are not safe.

Ms Walker says of her findings “They show many positives and potential for change among parents typically portrayed as beyond hope, yet they also show that achieving change will be time consuming and long term.”

Ms Walker told the Herald that local authorities, central government and other bodies such as Community Health and Care Partnership’s (CHCPs) should consider copying the scheme’s approach.

“There has been a lot of focus on systems failure in recent cases,” she said. “But a lot of social workers know that families need a lot more support than they are able to give. Systems can’t be left to one side, but how you engage with families is equally important.”

The Quarriers Family Support Project was carried out in partnership with West Glasgow CHCP at a cost of £170,000 for the first year. The CHCP also paid for Ms Walker’s study to assess the effectiveness of the approach.

Staff work with families to establish routines, ensure attendance at school or nurseries, and make homes clean and safe. Progress is monitored regularly.

The FSP has so far worked with two dozen families and more than 50 children. Drug use was a factor in the majority of cases, although one mother only used alcohol.

Most of the parents were highly resistant to social work involvement. Some refused to open the door even to the Quarriers workers, and in one case the worker persisted, talking through the letterbox to the mother within for weeks before finally winning her trust.

This is the kind of intensive, close, relationship-based work social workers employed by local councils would like to do but often can’t, according to senior social worker Lucy Morton, operations manager for West CHCP.

“We’ve not had work like this where a voluntary sector organisation provides this level of intensive services. Social workers have a lot of pressure on the time they can spend with children and families.”

Even though it can work against them in the long run, families often refuse to work with social workers, Ms Morton adds. “Clients can also be very alert to the fact that we have the power to remove the children and can be quite scared to talk to us at all. But they will work with Quarriers. I would be arguing for extending it.”

The level of anxiety in society at large about drug-using parents is no secret either, Ms Morton says. But the Quarriers work acts as an additional layer of security, meaning threats can be picked up earlier. “Because the Quarriers staff are themselves well-trained in child-care perspectives, they have a similar understanding of risk. There is a huge amount of need and concern that we still don’t have accurate information about each individual child’s situation in drug-using families.

“With some families we are not at the stage where we understand all the risks. We may not be aware, for instance if there is another male in the house, or how much drugs are actually being used. With the FSP involved, at least you feel there’s an additional level of monitoring.”

Like Ms Walker, she resists suggestions from some quarters that such drug-users shouldn’t be allowed to look after their children at all, arguing that situations are often more complex. “There are some families where the level of care for the children is not good enough, where there is physical neglect for instance. But there are other parents who misuse drugs where there is some level of good parenting and considerable attachment from the children who often love them fiercely.”

Ms Morton adds: “Often families where there is a high level of alcohol abuse can be the most frightening and scary places for children and the anxiety of living with, for example domestic violence, can be just as damaging as living with parents who are out of their face on drugs.”

Meanwhile The Family Support Project may also help explain more about just how much children are affected by parental substance misuse, she says. “There is a lot we still don’t know, for instance about parents not being emotionally available to children – we don’t know how much damage that does.”

Mary Glasgow, service manager for Quarriers, said the scheme had the potential to prevent tragedies and improve the circumstances for children. “The goal is really about reducing the most extreme cases,” she said. “Despite what some people say about people who use drugs, evidence is beginning to emerge that with the right support from the right person, they can change. We can’t get all these children into care, we need something else.”

Quarriers has been able to get close to families and gain their trust by a combination of respectful treatment, working together to tackle problems and sometimes sheer persistence, she said. “Sometimes it is about not giving up in the face of closed doors.

The big challenge now is to maintain funding for the scheme. After a trial year West CHCP is funding Quarriers, albeit at a reduced level, to continue the work for another year. But Ms Glasgow adds: “This work needs 10 years’ funding, probably, to make a difference. One of the big dilemmas on taking this on was that we are establishing these very intensive relationships with families, when funding may run out. I hope that won’t happen, because this work is not very expensive in terms of what we are doing.”

This point is picked up by Ms Walker, who says the cost of the scheme should be compared with the likely cost of taking children into care without it. “It depends where your priorities are. If high-risk families like those in the study have access to a service like this. they will manage to come through and if not the kids will go into care, but putting children into care is very expensive.”

The next phase for the FSP, Ms Glasgow says, is to get alongside the children and work more closely with them. “We already know that these children often love their parents. They are scared when they’re under the influence, but they don’t want to be take away, they just want their parent to get better. And the parents don’t want any less for their children but a whole bunch of stuff gets in the way.”