Evaluation of the Safeguarding Children Assessment and Analysis Framework, a randomised controlled trial
Geraldine Macdonald
Bristol University
Geraldine Macdonald is a Professor of Social Work at the University of Bristol. She has had a close involvement with Cochrane since the mid-1990s and has served as the Archie Cochrane Research Fellow at Green College, University of Oxford. Her particular research interests include critical thinking and decision-making in social work; the evaluation of social welfare interventions; cognitive-behavioural therapy, and child protection and ethics.
Stephen Pizzey
Child and Family Training
Stephen Pizzey has been a practising social worker in the field of child care since 1976. He was the Head of the Social Work Department at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and shared responsibility for child protection at the hospital. He has been the Independent Chair of an Area Child Protection Committee and held a part time position as a lecturer in social work. Now he undertakes a range of independent social work assessments in care proceedings, reports in actions for damages against Local Authorities including cases of historical abuse and prepares Serious Case Reviews under Working Together to Safeguard Children.
Abstract
Serious case reviews and research studies have indicated weaknesses in risk assessments conducted by child protection social workers. Social workers are adept at gathering information but struggle with analysis and assessment... [ view full abstract ]
Serious case reviews and research studies have indicated weaknesses in risk assessments conducted by child protection social workers. Social workers are adept at gathering information but struggle with analysis and assessment of risk. The Department for Education in England and Wales wanted to know if the use of a structured decision-making tool such as the Safeguarding Children Assessment and Analysis Framework (SAAF) (Bentovim et al 2009, Pizzey et al 2014) could improve child protection assessments of risk.
The SAAF is a structured decision-making tool designed to improve social workers’ assessments of harm, of future risk and parents’ capacity to change. Barlow, Fisher and Jones (2012) reviewed a range of analytical tools and found that the SAAF was the “only one of the family assessment tools that we identified [that] included an assessment of the possibilities of future change and how success or otherwise might be gauged” and was “consistent with the Assessment Framework; assessed a much wider range of domains compared with other available tools” and as such is “more comprehensive”; and “compared with current practice [it provides] practitioners with clear guidance about what to assess, and how to analyse and ‘make sense of’ the data collected”.
This is a multi-site, cluster-randomised controlled trial (RCT) in which teams of child protection social workers, stratified by site, were randomly allocated to one of two arms:
- SAAF training followed by implementation of SAAF in complex cases;
- Management as usual in complex cases.
An implementation evaluation ran concurrently with the trial to explore the experience of using the SAAF, how it was integrated into working processes, and the barriers and facilitators to successful intervention. The study explored participant social workers’ experience of taking part in the trial (MacDonald et al 2014).
This presentation will report on the initial findings of the study.
Authors
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Geraldine Macdonald
(Bristol University)
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Stephen Pizzey
(Child and Family Training)
Topic Area
Multi-disciplinary Interagency Approaches (MDIA) and Child Protection Units [Micromanageme
Session
Oral4 » Session1-Multidisciplinary Interagency Approaches (11:00 - Monday, 2nd October, Europe 1 Room)
Presentation Files
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