The challenge of partnership in child protection

Fostering a culture of collaboration and partnership in child protection and family support

For many of us working in child protection and family support, there is a somewhat ubiquitous question that often overhangs the work that we do, and that question is ‘Why am I here?’

The work itself is often complex, difficult, emotionally tiring and mentally taxing. It can often leave us considering why it is that we care at all about the vulnerability of the families whom we are trying to serve, or the life outcomes of the children with whom we have contact. It can leave us supremely frustrated at the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that ‘the system’ throws in our way, and in the way of vulnerable and marginalized families.

In the face of this difficulty, and in the context of a system that is often geared towards ensuring that the most vulnerable families will not receive the support that they need to raise their children in a way that assists them to flourish, it is all too easy to succumb to the thought ‘Do I care enough to keep trying to make a difference?’

For many of us, the will to keep going is underpinned and guided by a deep connection with a series of values that have shaped our sense of our place in the world, our sense of right from wrong, and our motivation to dedicate our time and energy to trying to make life a little easier for those who are doing it tough. We, for some reason, are drawn to vulnerability and disadvantage because of a deep-seated desire to change it.

Values can be defined as individual beliefs that motivate people to act in one way or another; they serve as a guide for human behavior. Some values have intrinsic worth, such as love, truth and freedom. Other values, such as ambition, responsibility and courage describe traits or behaviors that are instrumental as a means to an end. Simply stated, intrinsic or ‘inherent’ values are those that motivate us from within; extrinsic values tend to incentivise certain behaviors or decisions by virtue of the rewards or outcomes that are attached to them.

Many of us are aware of our inner-most values and the hold they have over our motivations and decision making, but we may have trouble pinpointing exactly what they are. We also might struggle to answer seemingly basic questions like ‘Why does this kind of work matter to me?’, ‘Why do I care about what sort of life children have?’, and of course, ‘Why should my life be spent in the service of others less fortunate?’

The answer to these questions lies in being able to articulate and define what our intrinsic values are. As discussed above, these are the values that have an affective component; love, care, compassion, humility, freedom, wisdom, happiness, honesty, thoughtfulness and pride. These values are the ones that point us in the direction of causes that may appear to require selflessness and acts of service, and for many of us working in the human services, these are values that are held in abundance.

Extrinsic values are important as well, as these are the values that are intimately connected to outcomes and rewards, and they are also the values that social systems tend to draw upon and reinforce. Extrinsic values are often linked to incentives and both individuals and systems will behave in such a way as to maximize these incentives. Values such as co-operation, quality, efficiency, efficacy, accountability, innovation and entrepreneurship are all extrinsic values that have sizable effect on our behavior and decision making given the potential rewards that they offer.

In a discussion on the challenges of fostering an authentic culture of collaboration and cooperation in the child protection and family support sector, why might all of this matter? Why might it be important to take as our point of departure a position on values and how they are manifest?

The answer to that question is that the industry within which we are situated is heavily value laden, value oriented and value driven. We are all of us, each and every day, involved in making values-based decisions around subjective concepts such as optimal child well-being, normative standards of parenting, acceptable thresholds of parenting behavior and what ought to constitute a good life trajectory and life outcome for a child or young person. Our industry is embedded within a broader social system that values the presence and absence of certain conditions within the family environment such that children and young people can survive and thrive within nominal standards.

If our industry subscribes to certain values and is oriented around them, what might those values be?

We may well cite values such as beneficence, social justice and equity of opportunity, respect for human and children’s rights, charity and altruism as guiding values that help to organize the behavior of the sector, and hope that these are reflected and translated in social policy and commissioning frameworks that seek to improve the lives of vulnerable children and their families.

To what extent is this true though in the Australian context?

The way in which social policy makers (Ministers and senior bureaucrats) conceptualize of ‘need’ and desired responses to need involves a whole host of very explicit value judgement. Social policy makers will often define policy problems in terms of more desirable social alternatives, and the problems themselves are often described or represented in terms of the ‘ideal-world’ state dichotomy, that is to say, policy is often represented as a ‘what-we-have-now-versus-what-we-need’ state of affairs.

When we consider the multiple interests and perspectives that exist within the child safety and family support sector, we need to allow space for divergence and disagreement around what the problem is that we are trying to define, and what commissioning and policy alternatives may be available to address them. This is a supremely difficult task when there are multiple perspectives on what the ‘solution’ might be. Conflict over decisions that affect resource and funding flows are values oriented, and when there is mis-alignment around what the outcome ought to be, we are most likely to experience friction and disagreement about how and where resources are allocated.

Social policy makers and social policy influencers have exceptionally important roles to play in directing the investment of social (collective) resources to addressing problems deemed worthy of government attention. Social policy makers are charged with identifying problems that need to be ‘fixed’, and invariably these ‘solutions’ are designed via commissioning and procurement processes via contracting.

It has been the case for almost six decades that social policy making that occurs at the interface between the state and civil society has been uni-directional; that is to say that the role of government has traditionally been to design the social policy solution and then to fund it via a process of procurement and contracting. It has been the role of civil society, and the ‘third-sector’ as its representative to carry out the implementation of the policy solution that has been prescribed by government, and to behave as the passive recipients of both resources and policy direction.

There is a contemporary question then about the applicability of traditional arrangements for social policy making; what have these arrangements meant for collaboration and partnership between governments, the public service and the third sector?

The question can be further explored in terms of how conceptualizations of solutions to child safety and family well-being have differed between the state and the non-government sector, and how this has resulted in divergence of perspective about where resources need to be most urgently allocated. This is an especially poignant conversation when applied to the domain of primary and secondary intervention activities and prevention investment as alternatives to overwhelming expenditure in tertiary child protection.

As much as we might like to try to propound the simplicity of proposed policy solutions, it is absolutely the case that we are all inherently involved in a project of bio-politics, whether we mean to be or not. Bio-politics is anything that is involved in the administration of processes of day-to-day life of specific populations, communities and the families who reside within them. Governments, within a bio-political framework, will attempt to rationalize the problems that are presented to them by specific cohorts of the population and will attempt to adapt existing social policy to better respond to their bespoke needs.

When we think about child protection and family support, it is very difficult to separate the work itself from a bio-political agenda. We are everyday involved in social engineering in practice, and we are actively engaged in a struggle against societal architectures that leave some families so vulnerable and marginalized that they cannot actively create and maintain safe and nurturing environments for their children.

Social policy makers and politicians will often defer to the rationale of commissioning to address and solve social problems; in this vein, commissioning is involved in the analysis and explication of social pathologies and the proposed antidotes to them. Procurement and competitive tendering have been used to secure efficient and effective market-based responses to social policy problems, and this is the hallmark of new public management and administration – the market is deemed to be the best positioned apparatus to effectively solve the social problems with which we are faced. The question becomes then, ‘How well can the market respond to issues that are more complex than simple supply and demand?’

In the context of a competitive tendering environment which has become the hallmark of neo-liberal governments world-wide, how can the third sector effectively position itself to respond and add public value where there are issues present related to deep-seated poverty and economic disadvantage? How might such a response be conceptualized in the context of child protection, child safety and family support?

One way is to view the ‘industry’ as one that is experiencing steady growth. Nationally and internationally the number of children and young people in out-of-home care continues to grow at a rate of around 10 percent per year; child protection can be conceptualized as a growth industry, and there will be absolutely enough work for all of us in the next three decades.

Competition as core component of marketized government procurement of services and social policy outcome has become normative, and it is certainly not going anywhere. Efficiency and value for money have become just as important as quality and accountability in the debate about ‘public value’.

For those organisations who are situated in the non-government sector, sustainability is set to face us as a ubiquitous challenge; we are all just as concerned about organisational survival, longevity and legacy as the quality and efficacy of the services we are providing, and it could be argued that this may, on occasion, cloud our judgement around service expansion and service development.

In the context of the child protection and family support environment, there are ways in which partnerships can be highly protective. Alliances and business partnerships can be sources of strength and support and there are numerous examples of pro-active, mutually beneficial partnerships within the sector in South Australia that have both increased competitive advantage, reduced costs of delivery and expanded the delivery of public value (not to mention good outcomes for clients).

It is a challenge to be taken up within the third sector to embrace competition around better-quality service provision and the realization and achievement of better outcomes for vulnerable families. No longer is it going to suffice that we compete to deliver the same set of services on a region-by-region basis. More and more, we are going to need to compete on the basis of competitive advantage, and we are going to need to develop and refine a specific set of services and interventions that are based in evidence and which meet the specific criteria of our commissioning agents. Governments are not going to stop being principally involved in setting the social policy agenda and subsequent commissioning and procurement frameworks, and in order to secure a sustainable third sector we are going to need to be responsive and competitive.

The challenge that faces both government and the third sector in the child protection industry is unique, because the ‘policy problem’ has often been ill-defined. Locational disadvantage, poverty, inter-generational unemployment, educational disadvantage, mental illness and addiction have all been variously blamed as facets of the pathology that pushes children in to state care. The various levels of agreement that currently exist around policy solutions to these issues seems to diverge most significantly from the most obvious, evidence-based policy solution: investment in prevention and early intervention supports for families who are at risk of coming in to contact with the child protection system.

What is needed is a radical and values-oriented agreement between government as the social-policy and commissioning agenda-setter, and the third sector as the deliverers of change. Such an agreement needs to be premised on the following tenets:

1.      Our collective values need to be brought closer in to alignment such that policy makers understand the nuances of the issues and complexities involved. If we collectively care deeply about good life outcomes for vulnerable children then we will all (politicians and Ministers included) take some time out to understand the complexities that face vulnerable families and the reasons by which they cannot care for their children; we will also commit to understanding the impact of complex trauma and the current inability of the system appropriately address and ameliorate the life-course repercussions of trauma

2.      The third sector needs to bring their intrinsic values in to alignment with the extrinsic values of governments; beneficence and social justice need to exist alongside efficiency, creation of public value and accountability for the use of scare public resources

3.      We must as a sector accept the challenges of marketization and contractualism; we need to do this bravely and with a view to improving business structures and processes; the third-sector must evolve in order to survive

4.      We must remember that in all of the complexity, that we are fundamentally concerned with the well being and flourishing of children; small human beings are relying on us all to get it right for them.