Fifty years of ‘protocolization’. How are England’s child protection social workers navigating procedural gaps and promoting child-centred practice?

Fifty years after the establishment of England’s modern child protection system, the country continues to experience new instances of high-profile child death tragedies where children have been harmed despite practitioners complying with the processes and procedures designed to protect them. This practice perspective article draws from the testimonies of 30 current child protection social workers to identify what they consider to be the continued challenges to achieving child-centred child protection practice in England. It reports on the social workers’ frustration with a system that they see as ‘totally reliant’ on evidencing compliance with procedures, but also highlights several ‘strategies’ that practitioners employ to ‘navigate’ procedural ‘gaps’ and overcome practice challenges, to better promote the individual needs of children. This includes the use of discretion via ‘professional disobedience’; ensuring that decisions are ‘defensible’; ‘Seeing Triple’; adopting a common language for, and understanding of, risk; and identifying a ‘shared goal’ as a means of overcoming resistance. The article considers several implications that emerge from the social workers’ testimonies, including that there is perhaps ‘more to do’ to address underlying factors thought to be impeding individualised child-centred child protection practice; that there should be a targeted emphasis on challenging local cultures preoccupied with evidencing compliance with quantifiable ‘output’ indicators over time spent with children; and that further reviews of the system should focus on the strategies used by social workers to promote child-centred practice and on how these ideas can be better disseminated to enhance the learning and practice of other practitioners.