Troubled Families

1. Confederation of Heads of Youth Services Annual Conference
Good afternoon. I’m really pleased to be here with you at your
national conference, so thank you very much for giving me this slot
on your programme to talk about troubled families.
My job and the task that I’m here to talk to you about, is to lead the
drive to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families by 2015.
When I talk to people around the country and when I stand before
you now, I am up front about the fact that I have never been a
children’s social worker or a youth worker and I haven’t worked
directly in core children and young people’s services. [Reference
Centrepoint night shelter].
I do though have a long memory for regeneration programmes. I
remember City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budgets, I
remember Neighbourhood Renewal and New Deal for
Communities. And all those programmes have transformed
previously run down areas and brought opportunities.
But for all of this investment, there are a group of people that
haven’t been touched by physical renewal, new buildings. People
who didn’t work in the boom times, and certainly won’t work now;
whose parents didn’t attend school and who have never been
helped or cajoled to get there.
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2. And where anti-social behaviour, domestic violence and crime are
part of what they have grown up with and are therefore re-living
with their own children. Generation after generation.
I don’t think any of us can say hand-on-heart that we have dealt
effectively with this problem, which is not about physical
regeneration or new buildings, but something much harder - about
changing people and changing families.
So the aim of the Troubled Families programme is to change the
lives of families who have many problems and indeed cause many
problems by getting to the root causes of what’s going wrong for
them as a family rather than continuing to spend vast sums of
money, frankly, just containing them in a mess.
These are families who, despite the best efforts of many of us over
the years, in government, in local authorities, in the police and
others, have not been changed.
If you asked a long-standing youth worker, I’m guessing they
would say that when they first came into the job, they quickly learnt
the names of the local families where anti-social behaviour,
domestic violence, drugs and alcohol were a problem and the
children and young people were out of control and in need of help.
And that twenty years later, no matter what their current role, they
could tell you the names of exactly the same families with pretty
much the same problems, only now with four or five more children
needing help in the generation that followed.
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3. We all know how resource intensive these families are. As Chief
Constable Peter Fahy put it, there are cases where it would be
cheaper for him to station a police officer full time on a family’s
sofa than to deal with the constant call outs, arrests and every
other demand they place on the police service. The resources that
are spent on young people, trying to help them, when in many
cases the damage has already been done.
Some of the money agencies are spending on troubled families
may be necessary, but it is also largely money that is being spent
maintaining the status quo or mitigating disaster.
You in this room and others in local government and beyond have
run services in times of growth and now in times of austerity and it
is fair to say that troubled families have dominated both.
Budget cuts have been painful, for all services across the public
sector. And of course, we can expect more to come. This will
force radical change even on services that some would deem
minimal and essential.
We can all see that something needs to give and we need to do
things differently. We have to reduce the vast amounts we are
spending right across public services reacting to the problems
these families have and cause.
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4. We have to sort out the families who cause the greatest grief for
themselves, the greatest grief for the people who have to live
around them and the greatest grief to public sector budgets.
For example, one area in the north west has spent a huge amount
of time and effort dealing with two related families in one street
over 8 years. They estimated the costs of agency services to date
at over £1million – that’s £125k per year, nearly £300 every single
day of the year. And no success. Something needs to change
Compare that to the example now, that Lancashire have told me
about - a family where police calls outs to them have dropped by
90%. Where agencies involved with them fell from 26 agencies to
something more like 7 – because the family has been worked with
intensively by a trained skilled worker.
When I talk about changing families, what I’m talking about is
family intervention. In 2006 we had a hunch and instinct based on
work in Dundee and some Action for Children projects that here
was something different and powerful.
We went with that hunch, persuaded ministers to fund it and set up
53 family intervention projects in England over 2006 and 7.
Lots of people in government were sceptical, asking ‘Where is the
evidence for this?’ And there wasn’t much to be honest, other than
a few small scale studies.
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5. But now in 2012 many local authorities have some experience of
running family intervention projects or services. In March 2011,
nearly 9,000 families had been or were being supported in one or
by that kind of approach.
And it’s really striking that there is consistently strong evidence of
the effectiveness of family intervention year after year.
The history of social policy is littered with examples of stunningly
effective pilots which when rolled out, saw their impacts diluted –
but this hasn’t happened with family intervention.
We were on to something then and we need to build on that
approach. The evidence is strong enough for us to go further: To
adapt this model to work at less intensive levels with other families
who are still troubled but whose needs might not require someone
there day in, day out but who still need the consistent, assertive,
practical input twice a week or even once a week to keep them
moving in the right direction.
It is these elements that draw the line in the sand between this
programme and what has gone before.
Whatever level of intervention a family needs, the approach should
be based on proven methods that are about -
• one single case worker who grips the whole family (and doesn't
just work with the teenager who’s on a youth offending
programme or the mother who’s in drug treatment),
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6. • who works assertively and honestly and won't take no for an
answer, telling them the truth about what needs to change with
an authoritative voice
• who rolls up their sleeves, dons the marigolds and gives
practical help to change their ways and not just fill in forms and
makes assessments to tell them what they are doing wrong
• And importantly, who uses sanctions when needed.
In many areas, people have talked to me about the value of an
upfront, honest and assertive approach, which has come from
them asking themselves ‘Who are the families who’ve been on
everyone’s lists for years?’ and ‘What now do we need to do
differently to get them to change’?
The families who seek help or who are immediately open to it, may
not be the ones who need it most. Sometimes it is only when a
family is at serious risk of eviction, childcare proceedings or an
ASBO, or indeed the heat that the police can bring, that they will
accept intervention in their lives.
Yes, it's about supporting families and giving them the help they
need to change, but this time round, we can not and must not
leave behind the children in those families whose parents “do not
want to engage”, who refuse help or evade this programme. Their
children deserve better.
We simply can not allow this programme to be more of what has
gone before, of making services available and hoping the people
who need them turn up.
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7. This programme has to be different. For the first time, we will
actively identify the families who will be targeted. We have to be
clear about who the families are that most need help to change
and we have to be bold about getting past their front doors and we
have to be tough about the consequences for them if they say they
don't want help.
In one area where they were running family intervention services
for years, I asked them if any family had ever refused them. They
said one family had. They’d been threatened with eviction, they’d
evaded that eviction, they’d not accepted help and the family were
still in a mess.
This time round, consequences need to be actioned if they still
refuse help. This programme will not accept that families stay in a
mess. The consequences for their children are too great.
This is a tough job and tough jobs need good leaders.
And I’m hoping that you as leaders in youth services will make the
decision to be part of this. In fact of course, you are already part of
this - your staff could name off the top of their heads a good
proportion of the young people who will be on the lists of families
your local authorities will be working with.
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8. Lists that will include children who aren’t in school and who are
already involved with youth offending services and may also
include young parents.
We know that through family intervention we can reduce truancy,
reduce crime and anti-social behaviour and I hope also that we will
see an impact on teenage pregnancies – so that young people see
options for themselves beyond becoming mothers – or indeed
fathers - at 14 or 15 years old.
We know from evaluation of Family Intervention Projects that there
are high numbers of working age dependent children in the
families they work with: 29% of families include dependent children
who are 17 or over.
We set the programme up so that as well as being able to claim
payments for getting children back into school and crime and anti-
social behaviour down, councils can claim payment from us when
they help someone in the family off benefits and into work.
And that means includes anyone over 17, so those older
dependent children as well as parents.
So in a family where, for example, getting a job isn’t realistic for the
35 year old mother with three small children to look after, her 18
year old son could perhaps be helped to cast off that label of
NEET.
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9. So I am asking you to be part of this because the youth sector has
something really important to offer in terms of that upfront,
assertive and honest approach I’ve talked about - something a
successful youth worker knows all about.
When you hear, ‘You are stigmatising people’ or ‘We are already
doing all that’ or ‘We will still need to have an assessment
meeting’ perhaps you could be the person who stands up and
questions that – because if no one does, there’s a real danger that
things will go on as they have before.
And that just isn’t good enough for the children and young people
born into troubled families.
Before I draw to a close, I want to pause and look for a minute at
the recent serious case review into the baby who died after being
given methadone by his parents.
I’m not suggesting that I know whether that baby’s life could have
been saved by taking a different approach in that case, but there
were some very familiar things said in that review - parents not
‘engaging’ so being left, multiplicity of agencies all over the family
but no-one gripping what was really going on, parents knowing
how to play the system, lack of information sharing, lack of a
‘family focus’.
But what struck me this time, was something that cropped up
again and again, and here today I am quoting directly:
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10. “Practitioners need to improve their ability to challenge families
and to challenge within the multi-agency arenas.”
“The extent of the parents’ lack of engagement, avoidance and
dishonesty grew over time and although this was recognised by
practitioners there was insufficient challenge by professionals and
no sustained, planned approach to protecting the children.”
“However a better planned and authoritative approach to the family
may also have prevented his death.”
“What was lacking was the authoritative challenge to this lack of
cooperation there was a lack of enforcement of consequences.
There was a lack of challenge by practitioners across the range of
agencies.”
“There is a sense that practitioners had a view that the sharing of
information with the social worker absolved them of responsibility
for authoritative action.”
Quite clearly this lack of sanction, this lack of challenge, this lack
of authority is not something unique to this sad case – and I think
many of us here do recognise it.
If we’re talking about using sanction, challenge and authority that
means workers using their beliefs, their values and yes, their
judgements. That will take honesty, but we have to have the
courage of our convictions.
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11. So it’s OK for us to say that it should be the norm for every child to
be in school every day and full time.
It’s OK for us to say that we should have aspirations for these
families beyond a life spent on the settee.
It’s OK to stand up on behalf of their neighbours and the wider
community when some of these families are making their lives hell.
And we should be looking to use this programme to slash the
number of children of care – not for the wrong reason, by changing
the threshold at which we remove a child, but for the right reason,
because we are changing the family and changing the generations
that come after them.
I know I’ve talked quite a lot about the financial cost of troubled
families. So I’d just like to bring it back to what drove me to take
this job and probably part of what drove you to take yours.
The reality of the lives of troubled families was brought home to
me very starkly when I interviewed 16 highly troubled families for
the report I published in July. I don’t mind admitting that as battle-
worn as I am, I was in fact shocked by some of the things they told
me.
And you might be forgiven for thinking that some families’
problems are just too complex, the people in them are just too
challenging, that they can’t be helped, but these 16 families were
coming out the other side.
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12. They were well on the road to changing their lives. I’ve seen it,
many of you here have seen it and it can be done. Yes, these
families are troubled but their lives can be turned around with the
help of effective family intervention.
I look at the woman I met who said she felt sorry for her kids for
being born to such a bad mum and I think, I don’t want another
generation of women who feel like that.
I think we have a chance here that may not come again and I think
the prize is worth the fight. But it won’t happen without the support
of people like you in this room - so I’m asking for your help, to
consider whether you could to be that authoritative and challenging
voice - and I hope that you’ll make that decision.
Ends
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