Analyse and evaluate the ideas and practises involved multi agency working, with regards to your setting

Authors Avatar by jnaholland (student)

The concept of Multi agency working (MAW) has been around for quite a while (1970's) but it was formalised in the Childrens Act 2004 which introduced 'Every Child Matters' (ECM) and the 'Common Assessment Framework' (CAF). MAW includes different professionals all from different services that come together to help support children, young people and families.

For the concept to work each member of all the agencies needs to have a general knowledge of the range of organisations and individuals working with children, young people and families. Also to know of the roles and responsibilities of other professionals.

The child protection system has developed over the past three decades. Major changes and developments to the system have usually arisen as a result of public scandals and intense media pressure on one or other aspect of the system. These scandals then led to public inquiries which made recomendations for tightening and refining the system. (Herczog 2001)

"Working Together to Safeguard Children", issued by the Department of Health in association with the Department of Education (DofE), sets out how all agencies and professionals should work together to promote childrens welfare and protect them from abuse and neglect.

All agencies working with children, young people and their families take all reasonable measures to ensure that the risks of harm to children’s welfare are minimised. Where there are concerns about children and young people’s welfare, all agencies take all appropriate actions to address those concerns, working to agreed local policies and procedures in full partnership with other local agencies. (www.nspcc.org.uk/inform)

The goverment have put great emphasis on the integration of services to make sure children are recieving the help they need, however in some cases relationships between agencies have proven to be difficult and led to disastourous results.

One of the motions for this was the torture and murder of Marie Colwell in Januaray 1973, her step father was found guilty for her death.  Then in 2003 Victoria Climbie was also tortured by her aunt and her aunts boyfriend. Both girls were 8 years old. In both cases agencies were already involved in their lives however it seems that the MAW system had let them both down badly. An enquiry into both deaths highlighted the lack of communication and agreement amongst all the professionals involved, it was damning in the extreme. Repeated inquiries into child abuse cases have highlighted the failures of multi-agency working.

Although in the above two cases not enough had been done to protect these children there was the infamous Cleveland case in 1987 were there was an apparent over intervention of agencies. Dr Marietta Higgs who believed that by using a new diagnostic practise called RAD (reflex anal dilatation) she could detect whether children were being abused. Children were brought into hospital to be examined. The choices of who the children would be would be determined by hospital reports for bruises etc. 121 children were taken away from their parents within the space of five months. This case caused so much contreversy for the state and an enquiry into the cases led by Judge Butler-Shloss found that majority of the aquasitions were unfounded.

 Early intervention is one of the main priorities in supporting children, however in the above case it was taken too far. Many believe because of the embarrassing Cleveland incident people were then to scared to make judgements to determine whether a child needed help, hence more and more children being let down once again by the system.

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 Lord Lamings Green Paper was published in 2003 however since then there have been other cases highlighted in the Media; so does this mean that the MAW is not working or just that they have not got it quite right yet? There was the death of Baby P in 2007 which then sparked more contrversy regarding social sevices. This lead to Lord Laming creating a progress report in 2009.

In an interview to BBC Radio 4 Lord Laming said  " children are still paying the price for organisations failing to do their duty." In this interview Lord Laming also told ...

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