How do the Family Support Team and service users, at a Childrens Centre in South West Birmingham view the effectiveness of implementing the Common Assessment Framework in assessing and supporting the needs of children and families?

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How do the Family Support Team and service users, at a Children’s Centre in South West Birmingham view the effectiveness of implementing the Common Assessment Framework in assessing and supporting the needs of children and families?

ABSTRACT        

This report examines the views of the Family Support Team and service users at a Children’s Centre in South West Birmingham, on the effectiveness of implementing the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) in assessing and supporting children and families. The aim of this report is to gain an insight into the views of the Family Support Team and service users, on the effectiveness of the CAF and the evidence to support these views, by looking at its objectives and evidence to support or disprove these objectives are being met. It presents the findings of a small scale case study employing a purposive sampling strategy and presents data generated by interviews, observations of practice, and documentary analysis of current guidance and legislation. Findings suggest both the Family Support team and those using the CAF find it an effective tool for assessment and describe the process as positive. Service users report that it has had a positive effect on their lives and the Family Support team feel that it has been useful in developing further practice. The formal approval of Newman University College Ethics Committee has been sought in the design of this research project, along with written informed consent from all participants involved.

KEYWORDS

Common Assessment Framework (CAF), Family Support Team, Children’s Centre, South West Birmingham.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all the participants and contributors to this study, without whom this report would not have been possible.

INTRODUCTION 

This research report focuses on examining how the Family Support Team and service users at a Children’s Centre in South West Birmingham view the effectiveness of implementing the CAF in assessing and supporting the needs of children and families. The aim of this report is to gain an insight into these views and the evidence to support them by looking at the original objectives set out by the CAF and why, and evidence to support or disprove that these objectives are being met. The CAF is an important part of the procedures for integrated assessment in multi-disciplinary working, envisaged in the government’s Every Child Matters: Change for Children agenda, launched in 2003, shortly after publication of the Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbé, which had placed great emphasis on the need for improvements in interagency working and information sharing (Laming, 2003), and backed by the legislative spine of the England and Wales Children Act 2004 (DfES, 2003) and is therefore integral to the Family Support Teams remit.

The entrenched multi-disciplinary nature of the Children’s Centre setting has played a major role in the rationale of this report, along with the desire for emersion into contemporary and reflective practice in family support. This report will provide an opportunity for reflection on specific incidents of practice implemented by South West Birmingham Children’s Centre featured in this research. This report will also review current literature surrounding the CAF, providing a summary of relevant issues and setting the context for this report, and will include an analysis of the methodology and methods employed and the findings of these methods, presentation and analysis of these findings and critical reflection on the research process and skills gained.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The CAF is the government’s latest development in the assessment of those children and families whose needs are not being met by universal services (Children’s Workforce Development Council, 2008). The development of the CAF and the establishment of lead professional working were announced as central elements in the government’s strategy for more integrated children’s services in 2003. The government considers Every Child Matters not only to be the name of the agenda, but to be their belief, and considers Children’s Centres and their multi-agency approach, to be at the core of achieving this wider vision. Children’s centres are considered by the government, to be the key mechanism for improving outcomes for young children and families and will help, they say, to reduce inequality of outcomes between the most disadvantaged and all others, resulting in an end to child poverty (DfES, 2006). Children’s Centres, like the one examined in this report, provide services to their local communities in a multi-agency context, with many co-located agencies, the Family support Team, being one such agency located at the Children’s Centre in South West Birmingham. Family support has been identified as an increasingly important strategic approach to welfare services for children and families and reflective practice is an invaluable tool in the evaluation of service delivery (Dolan. et al. 2006, pp. 11-27).

Early common assessment is part of the government’s strategy to shift the focus from dealing with the consequences of difficulties in children’s lives, to preventing these difficulties from arising, by supporting and empowering families and support workers to resolve issues when they emerge. According to Brandon. et al. 2006, the governments objectives set out by the CAF are to enable practitioners from a range of agencies to assess the additional needs of children and families for services at an earlier stage, more effectively, to develop a common understanding of these needs, and to agree a process for working in partnership to meet the needs identified. The aim is to provide more effective services earlier, eliminating the need for families to repeat their story in a number of different, repetitive assessments, aided by the identification of a lead professional who role it is to co-ordinate the actions set out by the CAF. The lead professional can be described as the practitioner who acts as a single point of contact for a child and their family, when a range of services are involved and an integrated response is required. The lead professional role is to support the child and family in getting the help they need and is intended to reduce repetition and inconsistency between practitioners and services.

The CAF guidance was published nationally in April 2006 and its standard approach to conducting assessments was piloted across Birmingham between April 2006 and March 2007, with full implementation being achieved by April 2007. The CAF was fully implemented across all areas of England by the end of 2008 and according to government claims, is potentially revolutionary in providing positive outcomes for children, young people and families. However, according to the findings of Gilligan and Manby (2008), in their recent study, the general transformation envisaged is likely to be dependent on much than the introduction of a new common framework or the commitment of the lead professional and other agencies involved. The study explores the extent to which the actions of practitioners and the experiences of service users coincide or differ from those expected, in view of the content of government guidance and policy documents. Their findings were generated from an evaluation of CAF processes in two locations over a period of six months. Acknowledgement that such findings are not conclusive and are likely to be unrepresentative nationally or even of the two localities at other times has been made, however the study serves to highlight issues that have arisen from actual experiences of practitioners and service users in reality. One such issue being that tensions may arise from any discrepancy between government policy and expectations that may result, and the actual experience of policy implementation. In the experience of Gilligan and Manby (2008) such discrepancies frequently result in mismatches between policy rhetoric and everyday practice.

There are as yet, very few published studies of the implementation and evaluation of the CAF process with much of the relevant literature focused on exploring the content of the CAF documentation. It is useful then, to look to the study carried out by Pithouse (2006) on the framework piloted in Wales, which revealed that the process facilitated better information sharing with social services and appeared to promote a more targeted service response to referrals, however, this study also revealed a limited capacity among some occupational groups to engage with the assessment fields set out by the CAF. These findings are supported by Brandon et al. (2006) who studied a selection of CAF’s and Lead Professional activity in 12 areas selected to trial these processes ahead of the national roll-out. They examined professional opinions surrounding factors that help or hinder practitioners in implementing the CAF and Lead Professional role over the period of September 2005 to March 2006. Their key findings identified factors such as enthusiasm for the CAF and Lead Professional role, shared perceived benefits for children, young people, and families, a positive cycle including a professional heritage of good multi-agency working, good training, support and supervision, and a willingness to learn from others, as having a positive effect on the implementation of the CAF, while factors such as a lack of joined up working and shared vision on the part of some agencies, a lack of professional trust, skills or confidence gaps and anxiety about new working practices and anxiety about increased work load, having a hindering effect.

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Katz and Hetherington (2006), note that European perspective on integrated services for children, suggests that the provision of resources and time for both formal and informal communication between practitioners from different agencies and professions is a priority for making integration work for the principle of providing services to the whole rather than the sectoral child. However, they report,   differences remain between agencies particularly in relation to threshold and intervention decisions.

Mason et al. (2005) conducted a research study which entailed the analysis of case file records from all referrals made to child and families teams in Oldham ...

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