Intro:
Welcome to the NSPCC Learning podcast, where we share learning and expertise in child protection from inside and outside of the organisation. We aim to create debate, encourage reflection and share good practice on how we can all work together to keep babies, children and young people safe.
Julian Fabian:
A very warm welcome to the NSPCC Learning podcast. I'm Julian Fabian, consultant social worker in the NSPCC's Quality and Practice team, and for this episode I'm joined by two colleagues, Emily and Damian, to explore the subject of voice of the child in social work practice. So Emily and Damian, why don't you introduce yourselves and tell the listeners a little bit about yourselves, and then we'll dive into today's subject.
Damien Fitzpatrick:
Hi, my name's Damien Fitzpatrick and I'm a consultant social worker based in the Quality and Practice team. I've worked for the NSPCC now for about ten years. Before that I was a local authority social worker. Our main role in the Quality and Practice team is practice development and quality assurance.
Emily Waddington:
Hi, my name's Emily Waddington and I currently work in Childline. I've been a qualified social worker since 2019, and I've worked in the local authority and in the charity sector. I've always been interested in the voice of the child, and previously I've had some work that I've done on the voice of the infant be presented at the World Infant Mental Health Conference.
Julian:
Thanks for that. Lovely to have you with me today. So I thought it'd be really helpful to start off our discussion by building a strong and clear foundation, and really be interested in what you think we mean by the voice of the child.
Emily:
So I think, for me, the voice of the child is about thinking about the young person's experiences, their worries and their wants. And there's a whole host of different ways we can hear and understand the young person's voice. And really, what we mean about the young person's voice and why it becomes so useful is because once we've got that voice of the young person, it means the professionals can start acting in the child's best interest.
Julian:
That's a good place to start. One of the things I'm interested in is why we believe the voice of the child is so important to social work practice.
Emily:
Children and family social work exists to safeguard and promote the welfare of young people and children, and we simply can't do that without an understanding of the voice of the child. So we need that understanding of their experiences, their worries and their wants in order for us to do our job, in order to safeguard them and to promote their welfare. If we try to do that without hearing the voice of the child, we risk practising in a way that's really oppressive. It's important that young people are able to take part in the decisions that we're making about them and that are in their interest.
Damien:
Yeah, I think the voice of the child is central really to what we do in our daily practice and working with children. We want to promote best outcomes for children, and the best way to do that is to hear what the children want and hear how to best engage that child in any intervention, promote engagement and work towards... Work jointly, I suppose, with the child and the family in collaborating towards good outcomes for the child. So it's all about collaboration, engagement and the child's view and wishes and feelings, I think.
Emily:
Damien, just to jump in, that's such a good point, isn't it? We don't want to 'do' to families or to young people. We absolutely want to work together. And yeah, we can't do that without the child's voice.
Julian:
Absolutely, yeah. So there's something about engaging children, collaborating with children, trying to move away from anything that would become oppressive or be oppressive. It makes me wonder about what barriers there might be to capturing the voice of a child, or what things might get in the way of that in social work practice, and how we might address those or overcome those.
Damien:
Quite a few barriers spring to mind, you know. You can have, almost like disguised compliance within families — not even disguised compliance, but not consenting for a worker to actually speak to a child, to speak to a child alone, whether there's a safeguarding issue or a child protection issue. So that could be one barrier: non-compliance and non-consent.
Other barriers could be the type of communication. There could be a learning disability of the child. It could be a non-speaking child. It could be a child that communicates through alternative means. Age — age appropriateness, how to communicate with the child. I suppose it's important to have a varied degree of skill levels in how to communicate in an age appropriate way with a child. Yeah. So quite a few barriers can spring up in the day-to-day practice of a social worker really, I would say.
Emily:
Yeah, Damien, I think you make a really good point about, you know, for example, a child who's not verbal or wants to communicate in different ways. Because sometimes I think one of the barriers to capturing the child's voice is that social workers can be overreliant on the verbal voice only. So social workers might not be looking at behaviours, body language, facial expressions. There's something about being open to the different ways we can get the child's voice.
Some of the other things in terms of barriers, one that's probably very familiar to lots of social workers, is feeling like you might not have enough time to build the kind of relationship you want to build with the young person. If we can build meaningful relationships with young people, I think it's going to be a lot easier for us to get and hear the voice of the young person. And another barrier sometimes is that, on a human level, I think sometimes professionals can struggle to understand that abuse is going on. It's a difficult and unpleasant thing to think about, so professionals have to work really hard to make sure we're open to hearing what the child has got to say, to trusting it and really placing value in it, as well.
Damien:
Absolutely, Emily. Just to jump in there, you make an excellent point about the time, you know, and I think the relationship building, building that rapport. And even if you do have time, I think in particularly complex cases, whether it's sexual abuse cases, it could take a lot of relationship building and trust building for a child to feel safe to open up and to really hear that child's voice.
Julian:
Okay, so a range of things that might get in the way of us hearing the voice of the child, whether it's a disability or some medical barrier, whether it's time constraints, whether it's parents or carers having a worry in terms of allowing access to the child, whether it's a child having a worry. So a range of things that maybe need a range of solutions and we can come on to talk about those in a minute.
One of the things I noticed you talked about was about children speaking, or being pre-speaking or non-speaking. I think the previous language we used was pre-verbal, verbal and non-verbal. So I'm interested if you could talk a little bit about the the rationale for the change in language and why that might be helpful.
Damien:
The language has quite correctly changed because a lot of children who are who would have been considered non-verbal now can communicate and actually verbalise their feelings through other means, really, so they can speak. For instance, I suppose a good example of this would be, augmentative communication, where some disabled children, for instance, would use high tech devices to communicate. There's also things like communication books, simple communication, and right down to your simple makaton, stuff like that. So I think we've made a lot of advances. So we moved on and, quite rightly, the terminology has moved on along with that.
Julian:
So we want to move away from language that might potentially be stigmatising or exclude children.
Emily:
Yeah. And I think that helps professionals to be a bit more open as well, doesn't it? Because we're not just thinking about the verbal communication. When we change the language, as professionals you become more open to seeing many other forms of communication, which is totally necessary to help us gather as much information from as many different means as possible about, you know, the voice of the young person, to really help us understand.
Julian:
It's thinking that if we get our language right, we get our thinking right. If we get our thinking right, that affects our practice in terms of improving outcomes for children.
Damien:
And I suppose that adds to the point where communication is not just language and speaking, you know. It's behaviour. Just what's sprung to my mind, it's why observations of behaviour are perhaps key and so important in communication.
Just observing the interactions, the behaviour of the child, how they feel, how they interact with perhaps an adult, the adults around them, how they interact in different environments, how they interact in a school setting or a home setting, or while in dad's care as opposed to while in mum's care, and what those environmental behaviours are telling us about a child's communication and their wishes and feelings.
How do they inform us as our social workers? How do they inform our assessment? How do they inform our work plan going forward, and how we conduct our intervention and how we engage that child moving forward as our work progresses?
Emily:
Yeah. Damien, I think you're totally right and there's so many valid points in there. One thing that I really love and think is so important about considering other forms of communication outside of speaking, is it's something about perhaps taking off the pressure and responsibility of a young person to say something out loud which can just feel so incredibly scary.
Quite often we might have young people who are being abused who feel a sense of loyalty towards the person who is perpetrating the abuse. And if we can be open to seeing and hearing other forms of communication, we can almost take some pressure or responsibility of that young person. So it's not, "why didn't you tell us?" It's "why didn't we look? How can we see more what you're trying to tell us?" And I think that's so important.
Julian:
It feels we're now moving on, having laid the foundations of what the voice of the child is and why it's important and how we talk about children and the voice of child, to thinking about what that looks like in practice. I'm interested in, if I saw you 'doing' the voice of child in social work practice, what might that look like practically?
Emily:
So I used to work in a team where we would have... If there was a professionals meeting, so if it was a case of families and young people not being invited to that meeting, we would have a professional act as the voice of the child in that meeting. And that was so powerful.
Everyone would go around and give their updates and their professional opinion, and then the person who was acting as the voice of the child would give a summary, talk about how they think that might have felt for the young person, what they might need, what their experiences are. And this was so powerful. It meant the voice of the young person had the same amount of time, the same weight, the same value as what everyone else was saying in the meeting.
But also for me personally, when I was in that role, I found it very emotional, sometimes quite draining, and that was also such useful information as well. It helped me to maybe understand the young person I was working with a bit more, try to put them in context, increased empathy, increased understanding for them. That's something I've done in meetings before, and I found to be really, really powerful and really useful.
Julian:
So there's something about how that helped to keep the voice of the child or their lived experience, their world, front and centre to your thinking, and your assessment and your intervention.
Emily:
Absolutely. And I think it's also important just to add in that where we've got meetings with the young person and the family there we want to give them that space. Maybe prepare them in advance about what they might want to say, but making sure where there's those meetings where the young person can't be present, that we're still giving them space, room and real validity in those meetings.
Damien:
I agree. It's very much about treating the child like they're an expert in their own life, really, and about including them in all of the work, whether it is your assessments, your work plans, your desired outcomes, and at every point in your intervention, perhaps getting the child's views on that piece of work.
As a consultant social worker reviewing casework, some of the most impressive cases are those where the practitioner will actually sit with the child, go through their assessment point-by-point, and get the child's views about that point, whether it's a risk or whether it's a desired outcome. And all of that can be directly linked to the work plan then. Any of the cases that I would deem outstanding will have that voice of the child element in them from the beginning of the case right towards the end. And at every junction of the case where the child is actually, kind of, almost consulted and collaborated in all of the work, and can actually direct the work to an extent to meet a need that they've identified themselves.
As I say, treating the child like an expert in their own lives, you know. What I would say practically too, in casework, because of what we've just said — about the many barriers, for instance, the many types of communication — is it's always good to consult a fellow professional, whether it's a speech and language expert or a teacher at school or someone else that will have a greater degree of knowledge in how to best communicate with that child or a parent. So taking on board that and learning new skills as you go along in your work. So an almost, kind of. Reflection and action aspect about it.
Emily:
I love how you describe that. That's so, I think, humble from a professional point of view. So you're going in to see this young person. Who else knows this young person? How can they help you build a relationship with them, which is great, but also about them being the expert in their own lives? I think that comes through so strongly in how you talk, Damien, but especially when we're thinking about about the voice of the child, it's always got to be about that collaboration and that informing the work that we do, rather than is excluding the child from this completely thinking we know best, which is much more damaging, unhelpful and ultimately ineffective. I think it's how I've described it. It's really helpful.
Julian:
So where you as a social worker aren't able to sit in the room with a child — because I think the example you gave Damien was really helpful about the the worker sitting in the room with the child and speaking to him and listening to him. Where that's physically not possible, what might capturing the voice of the child look like in social work practice?
Damien:
For me, observation is key. What immediately would spring to mind is perhaps an unborn child, if you're working with a pregnant mum, for instance. So a lot of observation about the preparation for the unborn child, the level of support of both parents and how they talk about the unborn child. So all are indicators. You can indicate what would be safe for this child, what is good for this child and what this child wants. Ultimately what the... If we're talking about an unborn child, they want to arrive into a safe, secure and happy environment, you know. And a lot of your observations, as a practitioner, you will have a fair amount of indicators of that, that you can then build into your analysis to paint a picture.
Emily:
Yeah, I think for me it's about getting those observations where you can. And also I think trying to offer different means of communication, like if you can't be there in person talking to the young person. I've had young people who might find video calls maybe a bit overwhelming or a bit frightening. So they prefer a voice call, or they might prefer to even text sometimes — which is, I think can be limiting in terms of what we can get.
But there's something about having a conversation with that young person about what is the best way for us to communicate with you. I really want to hear what's going on for you, what feels easiest and and most helpful and most meaningful to each young person.
Julian:
Thanks, Emily. That's helpful. The other thing that popped into my head was something that Damien referenced helpfully around biases. And I think some people might say, "well, hang on a minute. I'm a qualified professional social worker. I'm aware of myself as an individual. I don't have any biases or they don't influence me." But I'm interested in the biases we might carry in terms of working with the voice of a child and how we might manage those or attend to those so they don't get in the way.
Damien:
I think reflection is the key word, you know. Just reflect on our practice, reflect on our feelings, reflect on our assumptions. Use supervision, I think, to discuss any biases, as we all have them. So I think it's about understanding the child's identity, the child's background and factoring into your reflections any biases you will have regarding identity, cultural background, sexuality, any of that. And using the supervision process to tease all of that out and reflect on that.
Emily:
It's something that we actually need to own, that we do have biases. Because once we do that, we can engage much more effectively and honestly in all the things Damien is talking about. So once we can say, "do you know what, this is something that I sometimes trip up on or a bias that I hold", we can then take that to supervision and talk about it in a place that feels safe and much more constructive. But yeah, I think for me, reflection has got to be the most important place to be.
Julian:
Yeah, that's helpful. So there's something about being self-aware, and about working in an environment of high support and high challenge, and to make sure biases are brought to light and managed. So we've referenced, in passing, record keeping. But I wanted to spend a little time thinking about the records we keep, and particularly what the voice of a child might look like in good record keeping, but also why that's important.
Damien:
I think record keeping is extremely important. What springs to mind is perhaps a child brought up in the care system, or a looked after child, who request their records. What you've got to think as a child care professional, as a social worker, is what will these records tell this child? What are they going to look like when the child requests these records and looks back and wants to know about their life and their identity and the really, really, really crucial and important decisions that have impacted on their life. I think the records need to be accurate. The language needs to be thought about. They need to be quite transparent towards the child.
And I think that's why things like the voice of the child needs to be threaded throughout our records so that the child can see on a page their life, you know. What they've contributed to their life, how their wishes and feelings were respected, how decisions were made with them included in the decision-making process. And the rationale is built into the records that any decisions that were made were made in the child's best interests, and that is evident when they're reading them retrospectively.
Emily:
The other things that I would add in terms of recording, and making sure we are getting the voice of the child in recording, is having prompts. I find prompts on systems useful to talk about — what did you observe — as a little reminder that we're expanding out beyond what has a child said. What have we seen? What have we observed? What do we think that means? So I think having those prompts feels really useful.
Again, we're talking about young people accessing records, which is so important. We hold so much information that is really sensitive, intimate, personal to that young person. So we really need to be showing that we've made every effort to that young person to really understand what was going on for them, and to really show how hard we have tried to make things happen in their best interests.
And again, just going back to the bit about observations, there is something for me about writing in a way that makes sure we don't, again, place that burden or responsibility on the young person to tell us everything. Tell us about, you know, these scary things that are happening. And we need to be really careful when we're wording that in our recording. So it's not that just because the child hasn't said something doesn't necessarily mean that everything is fine. Our openness to other forms of communication and reflecting that in recording really shows we're working with the young person, and I think reduces responsibility and pressure on them to have been the ones who are keeping themselves safe. When, actually, that's the job of professionals and parents and families.
Julian:
There is something important also by the sounds of it about capturing exactly what children say on their records, using their actual words. And then when we make the jump between what they say and what that might mean, and being aware of our biases in terms of how we interpret that and therefore what we do about that.
The other thing I'm interested in is, going back to the issue of assessments, why the voice of the child is so important to assessments. Or, another way, what's the impact of having the child's voice central to your assessment?
Damien:
I think it's really, really important in terms of... Depending what the assessment or the focus of the assessment is. Speaking to the child alone, I think is a crucial element to any assessment so that you can kind of ascertain their wishes and feelings about a particular subject. Very much a child will get to the nib of a problem and give you their interpretation of it, you know.
I suppose what's key, what is a key issue, it's really important what questions you ask the child as well. So what are you asking them, and what are you asking of them, and what's your observation of their response can inform your assessment in great detail and ultimately lead to a clearer outcome.
Julian:
So there's something about perhaps the language you use when we ask questions of children, so it's clear and understandable and accessible. But also perhaps there's something about ensuring we're not leading them somewhere they may not want to go. So, not providing them with questions that almost assume the outcome, assume the answer. So we're being as clear and transparent and open to their voice as possible.
Emily:
I do sometimes think where it feels age appropriate, there's something about context as well. I've worked with young people who have said, you know, "last time I said something to a social worker, they took it out of context and they wrote it down, and all these things happened that suddenly felt out of control, or I wasn't being heard or listened to." So I do think where it's age appropriate. We can talk to young people about, you know, the context and maybe sometimes why we're asking those questions, what we're looking to learn and how it might inform how we try to help or support the family.
And then, in terms of the importance of a child's voice in an assessment, I don't think we can get an assessment right without the child's voice. Everything that Damien said about a child being an expert in their own world, we can't understand their experience, their wants, their wishes without the child's voice. And then if we get the child's voice and we listen to it, I think we really increase the likelihood that we can create positive change for a young person and their family. You know, are we offering intervention that meets the child's or young person's needs? Is it what they want to happen? And also does it offer validity?
Sometimes there might be disagreement about what a young person needs or about what intervention would be useful. But actually, if we can say, you know, this is what we think the young person wants based on what we've seen, what we've heard, what we've observed, I think it really makes the whole assessment more robust when we've got and the person's voice running all the way through it.
Damien:
Just to jump on that a little bit, Emily, is the demonstrating to the child, kind of, you said, we did. "You said this, this is the outcome of our assessment, you know, which was directly influenced by you." So I suppose promoting that trustful relationship, you know. This was your voice. This was the impact of your voice. And this is the outcome of my assessment. And it's quite evident that you're a very, very important person in this assessment process, and you have influenced it.
Emily:
Absolutely. The assessment is the first part of the relationship with the young person. And if we can build trust and show their importance there, that really sets the scene.
Julian:
And practically, thinking about how we close the loop, that can include: we ask questions of them or we have a discussion; they give some feedback; and then there's how we share our information with them to check is fair and accurate, to check we haven't been influenced by our biases, to engage and empower the young person that they feel part of the process and that it's representative. So we close the loop in terms of capturing the voice of the child accurately.
Finally, what I would like to ask the both of you is: what's the one key takeaway you'd want to leave listeners with in terms of the voice of the child in social work practice?
Damien:
Mine would be not to get caught up on adult issues. You know, we do have biases. We do have relationships with adults. We have all of these various pressures in work and families. And I think my one key takeaway would be go straight to the heart of the matter and go straight to the child, and there is a font of knowledge waiting right there in your level of communication with the child. As we've discussed earlier, that child might be non-speaking, there could be learning disability, but there's ways around that and there's ways to capture the child's wishes and feelings. So go straight to the child I would say would be my one take away.
Emily:
Oh, I just so want to squeeze two in.
Julian:
I can allow you two.
Emily:
Very generous, thank you. So my first one is to remember that the voice of the child is more than just speaking. Please look. Please observe. Write down what you see, think about what it might mean, and consider that together with something speaking, if that's available to you.
And then my second point is just to borrow from Damien, which is that the child is the expert in their own world. I think if you use that as a guiding principle, you are going to work really hard to capture the voice of the child in a really meaningful way for the rest of your work as well.
Julian:
Great. Thanks Damien and Emily. It's been really good to have you with me today to explore the key issue of voice of the child in social work practice. I think it will be really helpful to our audience. So thanks for being with us.
Damien:
Thank you very much, Julian.
Emily:
Thanks, Julian. Thanks, Damien.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to this NSPCC Learning podcast. At the time of recording, this episode’s content was up to date but the world of safeguarding and child protection is ever changing – so, if you're looking for the most current safeguarding and child protection training, information or resources, please visit our website for professionals at nspcc.org.uk/learning.
