Domestic Violence and the Impact on Children One Day Course

This One Day Course will help you increase your knowledge and understanding of Domestic Violence, and how this applies to working with children and young people. It will help you define domestic abuse, prevalence, myths & facts, the dynamics of control, the impacts on adults & children, asking the question, appropriate responses.

Aims:

The aims of the training would be to enable delegates to:

Safeguarding Children & The Internet

This one day course will help you and your staff develop awareness of the most current safeguarding issues faced by children and young people who access the internet through a variety of mediums including computers, mobile phones and gaming.

You will learn about safeguarding issues relating to gaming, social networking, cyber bullying and accessing inappropriate material. You will also learn how to develop effective policies and procedures to increase the resilience of children and young people in your organisation.

Children are now born into a digital world, growing up surrounded by and immersed in the technology and tools of the digital age. Children

Children lack awareness of cyberbullying and its impact

Children must be taught how to recognise harassment online, academics at the University of Bedfordshire have warned.

Social workers lack time to work with children

Nearly four in 10 social workers do not feel they have sufficient time to work effectively with children and young people, a survey by Ofsted has found.

The study was undertaken as part the High Expectations, High Support and High Challenge report, which examined how frontline social workers can be supported to provide better protection for vulnerable children.

More than 500 social workers were questioned for the study and out of 449 respondents, 38 per cent did not agree that they had enough time to effectively work with children and young people or support staff that they manage, compared to 18 per cent who did.

However, 53 per cent said they received regular, dedicated time for supervision and review with their line manager, compared to just eight per cent who did not.

A further 63 per cent said they felt there was appropriate challenge from partner agencies when they make decisions about children and young people.

John Goldup, deputy chief inspector at Ofsted, said: “Social workers do an incredibly difficult job, often in very stressful circumstances. I hope this report will provide valuable insight into the best ways of supporting these frontline staff in their roles as they work to improve the lives of some of our most vulnerable children.”

A further questionnaire of social work managers revealed that out of nearly 150 managers, more than a quarter (27 per cent) did not believe there were sufficient numbers of suitably qualified staff in their team to meet the needs of children and young people.

However, nearly 60 per cent felt their local authority was open to new ways of working and also believed their colleagues provide professional support for each other

Adoption service inspections not tough enough, Ofsted concedes

Inspections of adoption services have been too lenient in the past, the deputy chief inspector of Ofsted has admitted

Addressing delegates at the inspectorate’s first annual social care lecture, John Goldup said that adoption service inspections have not always focused on the right judgments.

“People are quite reasonably saying, how can it be true that 80 per cent of local authority adoption services are good or outstanding – which is what Ofsted inspection judgments say – when the number of children adopted from care is falling, when there is huge variation between authorities in the time it takes to place children for adoption and when the government is identifying a national crisis in our adoption system,” he said.

“I think these are very complex issues, and there are no simple or simplistic answers. But I do say, as far as inspection is concerned, I’m not sure we have been looking at the right things, at the things that make the most difference.”

He insisted that the quality of adoption service inspections has nothing to do with the ability of Ofsted inspectors, but argued that the old national minimum standards on adoption were unfit for purpose.

He added that it was wrong to try to evaluate adoption services within “the inappropriate straitjacket” of the Every Child Matters outcomes.

“Actually the outcome that matters most for these children is the decision that they need a new family being made early enough and purposefully enough, and asking whether they are getting that life-changing opportunity as quickly as possible,” he said.

Responding to Goldup’s lecture as part of a panel debate, Matt Dunkley, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said he had “a longer list of where Ofsted has got it wrong in the past”, aside from adoption services inspections.

“I do think the current safeguarding and looked-after children inspection model is still based on a deficit model,” he explained.

“The current social care inspection model is good at identifying failure. We’ve seen that 18 authorities out of 93 have been rated inadequate so far in this inspections cycle, but is it really true that only two out of 93 are outstanding?

“I don’t think the current inspection model is good at identifying different grades of success above the level of satisfactory or adequate. If it’s going to be part of a dialogue about improvement, it needs to move away from a deficit model.”

He went on: “A climate of fear is not good for the sector.