Hi all,
Hope you are well and enjoying all the summer sunshine (with a few showers interspersed!).
I recently read a great report put together by the NSPCC and I thought the key messages were worth sharing with all my subscribers. The report was an analysis of several serious case reviews which highlighted the importance of listening to the voice of the child. Sadly, because the focus was on a collection of serious case reviews, which are usually commissioned when mistakes are made.
As a result, children weren’t protected, and many lost their lives as a result. It all makes for very compelling reading.
The learning from the reviews highlights that professionals should seek to hear and facilitate the voice of the child by:
- understanding the different ways children communicate including non verbally
- including the child’s voice in assessments and arrangements
- gaining appropriate skills and knowledge to help understand and reflect on the voice of the child
- building trusted relationships with children.
What do we mean by hearing the Voice of the Child?
Hearing the Voice of the Child in safeguarding means seeking out children’s views, opinions, and preferences (especially when safeguarding decisions affect them) and paying due attention to them. The right of a child to be heard is included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s also referred to in the key statutory guidance Working Together To Safeguard Children 2023, which makes it clear that one of the core principles of effective safeguarding practice is a child centred approach which aims to understand children’s lived experiences. The NSPCC report emphasises that the voice of the child isn’t necessarily verbal, it can refer to paying attention to their behaviour. Listening to the child’s voice depends most of all on developing trusted relationships and creating environments in which children feel comfortable and confident sharing their thoughts and experiences.
How do adults get it wrong?
The NSPCC report lists several reasons why professionals fail to listen to children. They include:
- lack of confidence and competence to communicate with children who had disabilities
- too ready to accept what parents said on behalf of their child
- making assumptions about a child’s feelings or wishes
- simply not seeing children who weren’t regularly in school
- failing to build the confidence that children needed to speak out
- not speaking to children independently of other adults in their lives
- not exploring different ways to speak to children who were difficult to engage
- focussing too much on the needs of adults at the expense of the child
- failing to develop a trusted relationship with the child
- not giving sufficient weight to third party reports of disclosures made by the child.
There are many other barriers to listening to the voice of the child, but these are the ones that resonate in the range of serious case reviews I have read in the course of my work as a safeguarding consultant. They emerge time and time again.
A good example of this is in the following serious case review which I came across by accident in the very useful online library of serious case reviews held by the NSPCC. I often share it with the safeguarding professionals I work with because it is full of valuable learning points. The story is briefly this: a father is accused of sexually and physically abusing his six children by their estranged mother, who says the children have disclosed the abuse to her. Social workers dismiss this evidence because it is not corroborated by the children, who do not engage well with their straightforward questioning in front of their father. The children continue living with their father and are exposed to severe abuse over a number of years. Further disclosures of abuse are made by the children and signs of abuse are observed, but the children are threatened by their father to say nothing to investigators and are always questioned in his presence.
Eventually, a social care worker does a detailed signs of safety assessment with the children, and she also picks up on the body language of the children towards their father, judged as ‘cold and rigid’. Later a social worker sends the children a simple booklet which explains her role in protecting children, and then visits to talk sensitively to them on their own, prompting the children to consider telling. The safeguarding lead at the older children’s secondary school spends years building up a trusted relationship with the children. After reading the booklet and thinking more about it, the oldest child then tells the school safeguarding lead that he was physically abused and that his younger sister was raped by their father over the weekend. He then encourages his sister to also tell what happened to her.
The father is convicted of sexual abuse over several years of his children. The serious case review praises the actions of the professionals who found a creative way of communicating to the children and who had built strong, secure and sensitive relationships that had allowed them to disclose safely. As the serious case review concludes:
‘When Sibling 4 was asked what made him trust the Safeguarding Manager at his school he said: “She was nice…she knew, but she didn’t know.” The trusting relationship this member of staff built with Sibling 4 and his siblings at the school was critical, and so when the foundations of a platform for disclosure had been laid…, this opened the door for Sibling 4 to disclose to his trusted adult.’
For more details read: 2018NorfolkCaseYOverview.pdf (nspcc.org.uk)
To read the report in full: The voice of the child: learning from case reviews | NSPCC Learning
To explore the online library of serious case reviews held by the NSPCC: NSPCC library catalogue
To sign up to NSPCC newsletters: CASPAR | NSPCC Learning
Mandy Parry Training 2024 – 2025
It’s also time to share with you my new training brochure for the next academic year. Please click the button at the top of the page to view the new training brochure.
As usual, I can offer inhouse training direct to organisations throughout the year and will organise the date, venue and content directly with them. Do contact me if you want to find out more.
And in addition, I am continuing to offer scheduled open courses throughout the year. These are all coordinated by my partner organisation Delegated Services (DS). DS also offer a diverse range of other related training).
Find out more about the range of services they offer here: Delegated Services | Home – Delegated Services
Remember I also offer a range of consultancy safeguarding services to settings also, including supportive safeguarding audits, policy writing, a safeguarding subscription service, and non-managerial safeguarding supervision.