Transcript

JENNY SWIFT:

I am Jenny Swift, and I'm the team manager of the Milton Keynes in Bucks FDAC. And I've been there for about six years. And before that, I was a child protection social worker for about 10 years.

I did frontline child protection for about 10 years, all of that in the family courts. And there's such a stark difference to FDAC, and that's why I really like it. Even the really good social workers in frontline child protection teams struggle to work with parents in court proceedings, struggle to have the time to give them, and just don't have access to the resources.

So the fact that in FDAC we've got a multidisciplinary team, there's counsellors, there's drugs workers, there's a psychiatrist, there's social workers, people can really get what they need, and it feels like a proper therapeutic process.

Whereas social work, however empathetic you try to be, you're in court representing the local authority. And if the local authority's case is that these children aren't safe at home, that is what your job is. Whereas with FDAC, our job is to work really intensively with parents and see if they can make changes, give them every opportunity, every ounce of support.

And if they can do that, then great. And if they can't, we work with them on what else life might look like. How can they be there for their kids maybe through contact, or supporting their children to live with a family member? And that's the real difference. It takes all the adversarial aspects out, all of the he said, she said, fact findings in the court, did she or didn't she do this to say, OK, well, that was the baseline. Where can we go? And can we support you on that journey?

So when a family enters proceedings, aside from urgent cases where there's been an injury to a child or a very serious child protection concern, most families will have been working with children's social care for quite a long time. They will have been through child in need processes, child protection processes, and the public law outline, which is access to solicitors before it hits court.

FDAC comes in when the local authority issues an application to the court. So all of our families are in active court proceedings. And at that point, they have a choice between standard proceedings where they would see a judge maybe three to four times through the process, work with their social worker, and normally be seen by an expert in psychology, psychiatry, and have a parenting assessment.

Or they can come into FDAC, which is a non-adversarial way of doing care proceedings. They would get a full assessment by the FDAC team looking at their entire narrative, their history from birth to now, their mental health, their substance misuse.

And if they then chose to come in and agreed with the intervention plan that we suggested, they'd work really intensively with the team, with therapists, with drug and alcohol services, with the fellowship, so Alcoholics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, to really intensively-- it's almost like rehab in the community.

We want people to be doing something about their recovery every day, because if you've been having difficulties, whether that's drugs and alcohol or mental health, you will have those difficulties every day. So you need to do something about your recovery at the same level.

And you get the therapeutic team supporting you. You also get to see a judge every two weeks without lawyers, which is really different to the standard process. And the parents I talked to really value that, knowing their judge. And even if that's the judge telling them this isn't good, you're not doing well, if you keep on this way, I'm not going to be able to send your child home to you. The parents really value that.

And actually, even when the judges have been really clear I don't see enough evidence for your child to go back, the parents still choose to have that judge as their final judge to make a decision about a child. They have a right to have a different judge if they feel the judge might be biased or for any reason. I've never, ever had a parent want to do that. They want the judge that knows them as people with their strengths, with their weaknesses, even when it's going really badly.

The fact that the person making final decisions about their child knows them is massive. I've sat in standard proceedings and had adoption orders, so placement orders are the order you'd get to start to look to place a child for adoption. And the judges have got children's names wrong. They've never met the parents. They're reading things out that they clearly don't understand or have got wrong.

And the parents are understandably irate and feel like, well, if the judge understood this decision would never have happened. And the difference in FDAC is the judge does understand. She knows the kids. They've been speaking about the children, seeing pictures of the children, speaking about the parents, knowing all of the context. All of the little details that we as professionals can say, well, it didn't change the final decision, but for parents are really vital, and it's that relationship with the judiciary, with an authority figure who is going to make that final decision that really kind of tips parents on FDAC, I think, just knowing that the person making those really important decisions knows them and cares.

And even if they're making a decision they don't agree with, they're making it on all of the evidence and out of the best interests of their child. And I don't think parents see that in standard proceedings, even if that's where the judges are coming from. It doesn't come across because they don't know each other.

I think with standard proceedings you can make progress. As a social worker in child protection teams, I have got children home with families, and I've got children who were really, really unsafe out into more safe situations. It's far from perfect. It's very adversarial. I think it adds trauma for parents going through that and for kids who are in limbo and don't know what's going to happen for six or nine months.

And it's also very hit and miss. If you get a good social worker, if you get a judge who's understanding, if you get a guardian who really takes the time to get to know children. Standard proceedings can feel like a real lottery as to whether you get the support or not and whether you do it or not.

There's also a lot of reliance on independent experts. So a psychologist will come in, meet a parent for three hours, write a report. And in standard proceedings, that can be all and end all those three hours and what that psychologist or psychiatrist thinks. And one of the frustrations with that is they will quite often, they won't be from the local area. They'll put out recommendations for parents. So to get your children back, you need to do two years of dialectic behavior therapy. Well, we don't have two years. The child doesn't have two years, and there's no DBT in our local area. And it used to feel like banging your head against a brick wall. And that was as a professional. How the parents must have felt getting this report saying you are wrong in all of these ways and the only way to fix it and be safe is to have this magical therapy which isn't available to you, that must just be soul destroying.

And those were the bits that used to eat away at me, really, and the reliance on external professionals and asking people to do the impossible. You can't do two years of therapy in six months care proceedings.

Relationship-based work should be the foundation of everything, whether it's court work, social work. We're asking human beings in their moments of shame and when life is in crisis to open up. And if we don't have good relationships, then it's not going to work.

And that's where an independent team and a judge can really help with that. And then once parents start to trust the team, they can then move on and make good relationships again with social care and with other agencies where there might have been mistrust. They see that some people are trustworthy and so they're willing to risk it again.