Many practitioners will be familiar with their own multi-agency links through children’s centres and relationships with local health visitors and GPs. But not all are aware of multi-agency safeguarding hubs (MASHs). The first of these was created in 2010 by Devon County Council. MASHs, which include social workers, police officers, education and health workers, may have slightly different focuses and memberships, but all aim to improve child protection. Early years workers can seek information, advice or guidance about a safeguarding concern if they have identified a child who may be at risk, before deciding whether or not to make a referral to the local authority. They may also have to respond to a request for information about a child who has been referred to the MASH.
There are no up-to-date figures on the number of MASHs in the UK, but in 2014 there were 40, with many in London. They are designed to provide a single point of contact and to process referrals in an integrated way, with all relevant agencies able to share information quickly and securely. They are different from safeguarding children boards, which are comprised of senior representatives in an area making strategic decisions about how to co-operate to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.
Training Depot Day Nursery is a member of the MASH in Luton, having had to amend policies, go on relevant training and add safeguarding-related questions to the setting’s registration form. Staff co-ordinator Sandhya Godhania says, ‘We can go to meetings and have an open discussion about the [safeguarding] difficulties we are facing as a nursery. A social worker is there, and the chair, who tries to get a feel for if what they are doing is making a difference.’
While MASHs themselves are not well known, there are also common misunderstandings about what they are for, according to Nicola Francis, family services director in the London Borough of Barnet.
Speaking last year at a conference on the subject, she said some professionals were worried, wrongly, that the act of referring constitutes a crime report or social services referral. ‘For example, professionals will at some point soon have a legal obligation to report to the police cases of under-18-year-old girls who are known to have had FGM [this law came into effect in October 2015]. Colleagues in the NHS who are writing the guidance for health professionals wanted to know whether a referral to MASH counted as a police report,’ she said.
Of the various MASHs around the country, each has a slightly different composition. In Camden, for example, the MASH deals with local children for whom there are safeguarding concerns, which includes all e-CAF referrals. A report on the Government’s Multi Agency Working and Information Sharing Project from 2014, which resulted in the creation of a centre of excellence for information sharing, states, ‘The purpose of the MASH is to improve the identification of unknown risk by building up a picture of the child’s journey in addition to ensuring that the family receive the right service first time.’ Following the introduction of the Camden MASH, the borough has had 90 per cent of its most serious cases being completed within four hours. The report states, ‘This is a significant improvement as prior to MASH, assessment team social workers often had to wait for one/two weeks into their assessment for our universal services to get back to them.’
A more intensive approach
In some areas, a more strategic and intensive approach is needed. One of these is Blackpool, where 30 per cent of babies are born into poverty. As the sixth-most-deprived local authority in the UK, it has the highest number of looked-after children in the country. On the ground, this translates into higher than average instances of child abuse, domestic abuse, family conflict and substance misuse. Around one in 20 local girls under 18 conceives each year – the national average is closer to one in 50.
Now, though, the area is one of five across the country to be sharing a national fund of £215m (£45m in Blackpool’s case) as part of the programme ‘A Better Start’. In Blackpool, the programme is led by the NSPCC alongside the local authority, clinical commissioning group, hospital trust and police.
The aim is to increase the health and well-being of 3,000 children and their families per year, from pre-birth to three, over a decade. At the ‘nerve centre’ is a new Centre for Early Child Development, which, through designing and implementing several programmes, intends to ‘become an internationally recognised and renowned source of expertise and innovation’.
Centre director Merle Davies says a crucial part of the programme is it is ‘evidence based’. She adds, ‘We talk about the toxic trio of mental health, domestic abuse, substance misuse; in Blackpool we can add to that social isolation.’
The first place to target is the beginning – to ‘get a better gestation and birth’, says Ms Davies. She says that for women who had been sexually abused, pregnancy could be a particularly difficult time, adding, ‘There is very little for victims of child sex abuse once they become adults.’ But, she says, ‘We have a new programme for women with post-traumatic stress who were abused in their own childhood. When you are pregnant the body is changing, and if they had a bad experience when they were young, this can damage the likelihood of a successful gestation.’
The programme, Survivor Mums, which pilots this month, has the overall aim of reducing the stress that can be engendered by pregnancy examinations and which can damage the foetus. It will offer mothers one-to-one counselling and involves input from Professor Julia Seng, a trauma specialist from the University of Michigan. Full roll-out is set for next year.
Another programme is the NSPCC-led Baby Steps, which will provide pre- and antenatal care for ten weeks from September. Involved are health visitors, midwives and family engagement workers (defined as people with a lot of experience in the field but not necessarily with qualifications, or newly qualified social workers, for example). The programme helps new parents understand how to care for their baby and what services are available to support them, as well as focusing on health and well-being.
So how does the early years fit into all this? According to Ms Davies, ‘Nurseries and children’s centres are key to making all this happen. ‘We’ve had a lot of conversations with practitioners and they want to be more engaged with parents and to work in partnership to support them. How do we get parents more engaged, and not think they have to cope all on their own?’
Priorities are diet and nutrition, PSED and speech and language, and enabling children to be ready for school. Child development training is also a focus, with monthly ‘twilight sessions’ on the latest child development research presented to professionals and, potentially, members of the community. Ms Davies says, ‘We want to develop the best workforce in the country. We want to know that everybody who is working in early years is using best research to make a difference.’
Interestingly, some of these projects are open to members of the public as well, as their aims are not just to tackle key risks, but also to involve and empower the community – the final ‘agency’ to be added into the mix. Ms Davies says, ‘The community have said they want to do more and not be done to.’ A group of local parents and community members called Community Voice was actively involved in applying for Blackpool’s A Better Start funding and is involved in deciding how best to invest the money.
One example which involves parents is a programme designed to get fathers more involved. Ms Davies says, ‘Dads are saying that a lot of interactions are levelled at the mum. They feel completely disempowered. They feel that people and experts think they are not doing things right.’
So, a dads group in a children’s centre has teamed up with Blackpool’s illuminations department and an interior designer to make cosy reading spaces in libraries for 0- to three-year-olds. The dads are going into libraries overnight to help build them.
