Social work services must play a full and active part in a public

sector wide approach to

prevention and earlier intervention. This requires:

● increased long term investment in prevention and early intervention; ● joined up approaches to

prevention and intervention; ● prevention to be part of

everyone’s job; and

● the development of anticipatory services to improve outcomes for people with predictable needs. With rising levels of demand, social work services seem to be increasingly

responding to crises at the expense of planned pieces of work and early intervention. Services must continue to play a vital role in stepping in to help people at times of crisis in their lives. However, members of our users and carers panel spoke of the need to engineer a crisis in order to get any response. Aside from the personal toll, by the time people reach crisis point, helping people to make change can be more costly, time consuming and less effective. The evidence base for early intervention in social work is not well developed. It is difficult to make a strong economic case for the potential savings of more timely support. However, the financial costs of intervening late can be huge and life-long.

Barnardo’s Scotland and Edinburgh City Council work with 10 primary schools to support an average of 33 children with emotional and

behavioural difficulties at risk of exclusion from school. The

multi-disciplinary team aims to keep children in their own family and school, with an impressive success rate. Evaluation shows 87.8% of children still in mainstream school at the end of the intervention, with 76.5% still there 3.5 years after the end of the intervention, resulting in significant savings compared to the cost of residential school.

Investing in prevention and earlier intervention

Developing sustainable, effective services for the future requires us to find ways of identifying potential problems and preventing them

(prevention). We also should respond earlier to emerging problems before they reach crisis (early intervention). Achieving this goal will require a long term commitment across the public sector at both national and local levels. In particular, developing social work services’ contribution will require investment, enabling a focus on earlier intervention while continuing to support people with the most complex needs.

A public sector wide approach

Much preventive work is not the primary responsibility of social work. Education, health and early years services, who have contact with the whole population are much better placed to lead this work. What is needed is a joined up approach to prevention, in which social work services better support universal services to pick up and respond to the early signs of problems as well as tackling the complex problems of some individuals and communities.

Prevention as part of everyone’s job

Everyone in the public, voluntary and private sectors has a role in prevention, looking at the whole person in the context of their environment. That may mean, for example, a community care social worker taking action to support a young person whose mother is suffering from depression or a care worker being alert to health and safety hazards in an older person’s home. By regarding prevention as part of what everyone does and ensuring that they are both alert to this and able to respond appropriately, services will be more aware of emerging problems and better able to respond.

Joined up approaches to early intervention

Walker (2005) concluded that clarifying the nature of links between social work services and other agencies was a vital pre-requisite for effective early

intervention. She identified that social work interventions are more effective

Targeting effort

Many needs or potential problems may be identifiable earlier. For example, research by the Scottish Children’s Reporters Administration on children identified as persistently offending and involved in the recent Fast Track Hearings Pilot found that 62% of

persistent offenders were first referred to the Children’s Reporter on non offence grounds. 44% of persistent offenders were first referred to the Children’s Reporter before they were 8 years old due to concerns about their care and protection (SCRA 2003). With targeted support this group may be prevented from having further problems later. This emphasises the value of an integrated system of care and justice. Such anticipatory approaches are entirely in line with the recommendations of Delivering for Health (2005). By bringing

“Services should be there at the outset to prevent a crisis happening.

We expect them to be co-ordinated and accessible in the community.”

Users and Carers Panel

when:

● problems are developing rather than entrenched;

● assessments are well-informed; ● interventions are based on logical

reasoning as to why they should be effective for a particular child or family and are tailored to suit individual needs;

● there is an inter-agency response; and

● a key worker provides consistency and continuity.

These principles should be used to re­ design services with a greater focus on social work services’ contribution to early intervention and the social worker’s role within this.

together intelligence and expertise from across partnerships, social work

services can be much better placed to anticipate future needs and organise services in such a way as to prevent or minimise them. Predictive technologies can help to use this data to make informed plans focused on prevention.

In Moray, a child and family social work team in Forres worked with education colleagues to put together a transition programme for a small group of P7 pupils whose behaviour and history indicated a high risk of problems on transfer to secondary school, establishing relationships in P7 and sustaining them into S1.

4. Social work services must