Are Local Government Children and Family Services suffering from Institutional Trauma?

This year I brought my first stint in local government children's services to an end. I found it an incredibly profound 18 months, both personally and professionally, and if truth be told I don't think I've ever worked in a (sub)sector that has made me question daily whether I am doing the right thing. Far far wiser and more experienced people will have far more credible and nuanced reflections on the local government support system for children and families in England, but now that I've had a few months away, I wanted to share my main reflection from my exposure to the support that is offered. I will also caveat the following with a full recognition that "children and family services" is a vast term that covers a huge diversity of interventions and roles, and my exposure to the full range of these is inconsistent.

One of the things that I am most grateful for as part of my experience is being introduced to the concept of "trauma-informed practice". I've always been a fan of asset-based approaches to social support - moving away from "what's wrong" to "what's strong" - but I've also felt at times that those conversations can feel a little idealistic and naive. My feeling is that the trauma-informed angle "what happened" is a really important piece of the puzzle and helps both professionals and peers to better interact and build relationships with someone. Explicitly recognising and understanding the trauma that someone might be carrying, not to fix it but to provide a more detailed map of how to navigate around someone, intuitively makes a lot of sense to me and helps to answer a lot of questions as to why certain forms of support may or may not work. If you've not had too much experience with this concept, I'd encourage you to do a bit of research and reflection.

As more of a strategist/policy wonk, I couldn't help but wonder if a practice applied to individuals in the social services arena could be applied to organisations in the social sector, particularly with a view to better understanding why some service transformation works and some doesn't. Of course it can, and if you are someone looking to drive change/transformation in an organisation I would heartily recommend you spend time thinking about the trauma staff might have gone through in previous change programmes and how this is explicitly acknowledged.

With a bit more perspective, I know wonder if thinking about trauma at an organisational level is too narrow and whether an entire sector can be suffering with trauma. If so, what would be the impact of that both on the people who work in that field, and the people they support?

I'm fascinated by the idea that we use "the frontline" so much in public services. "Frontline workers" is a commonly adopted phrase and odd that we would readily accept a term normally associated with battle/combat. I'm undecided if it is a healthy term or not, but it is possibly more useful than we think for understanding how and why trauma might be building up in children and family social services. In the armed forces, the "tour of duty" system is used to prevent both mental and physical exhaustion - based on the experience that armed forces personnel at some point will become too tired to make good decisions and that inevitably will have a deadly impact for other personnel. This is in the context of a group of individuals who can potentially be exposed to some of the most traumatic things a human being could be exposed to. "You will need to take a break, and you can't be relied upon to know when to take that break, so we'll force you to".

Contrast that with your typical social worker, or early help worker, who enters a career and is expected to be "on it" all the time, day-in-day-out quite often being exposed to extremely traumatic situations. As a wider public, we hear about the extreme cases of child deaths but in reality we have colleagues in our social services who are exposed to extremely difficult and disturbing living conditions for young people and families on a regular basis that can be just as traumatic (if not more so) than a child's death. They are given annual leave entitlements, but also the autonomy to take this leave when they feel appropriate rather when they need it. This can mean leave not being taken when case-loads are high, working from home during annual leave or on a more basic logistical level, taking leave when it suits their family commitments rather than when it suits their health and wellbeing. Staff are allowed to become exhausted and traumatised by a system that prioritises the "battle plans" more than the people who are asked to carry out those plans. I've no doubt that in some areas it feels akin to the trenches in World War One, with the acceptance of high casualties off-set by constant recruitment drives for fresh young staff (Newly Qualified Social Workers) to keep the ranks filled.

The consequence of a system like this to me seems two-fold - firstly a cohort of people who become burned out and leave the sector at best disillusioned and at worst professionally broken carrying their trauma into future jobs. Secondly a cohort of people who survive and climb the ladder within their field, however ALSO carrying their trauma into future jobs. In the latter case, there is a real danger that the trauma being carried forward manifests in an unhealthy and dangerous way for those they are leading. Those that survive in this system can develop a toughness that at times strengthens the perceived benefits of the system "I survived it fine and my career is doing well so it can't be that bad" and weakens the perceived qualities of their colleagues "perhaps they're not cut out for this role". Does that toughness make for better decision-making? Or is it another form of exhaustion and trauma that leads to poorer decision-making?

My hunch is that it is the latter. That isn't to say good decisions aren't made, however emotionally exhausted leaders aren't objective heroes who can see past subjective influences to get to the right answer. They are just emotionally exhausted and we wouldn't expect emotionally exhausted parents to be making the best decisions...

In combat, poor decision-making costs lives. In public services, occasionally it can cost lives, but almost always it creates more work. Either it creates more work to correct a mistake, or as has become standard in many settings, an expectation of poor decision making will lead to a suite of bureaucratic processes to make sure that those poor decisions are capture at the earliest stage possible. When public sector workers complain about paperwork getting in the way of doing "real work", more often than not they are talking about work generated to mitigate the poor decisions the system expects them to make. And when the worst decisions to sneak through, and the impact is that a child dies or suffers in an unacceptable way, the whole system absorbs that trauma and responds in the only way it knows how - to either walk away in shame or to add another layer of toughness over its already thick skin and re-double its efforts.

This is no-one's fault. If I am right, it is a heartbreaking tragedy to see such a vicious and cruel cycle play out because there is no space in our society take some of our most dedicated and big-hearted people out of the firing line to look after them. One could point to a number of different sectors (health workers, care home workers) and see similar patterns of institutional trauma, and in every case of services and systems that are over-stretched and under-performing there'll be some clever high profile individual writing a report on how that system is broken and needs a huge overhaul before things will get better. And that report will get talked about and shelved until the next one.

But what if instead of writing a report on fixing the system, next time a clever high profile individual took a trauma informed approach, brought to life for everyone what has been experienced and why it affects how our social support looks, and then used this picture of institutional trauma to help us all navigate a more positive way forward? Like all the best social work, our public services don't need to be fixed or given the answers, we need the support to better understand ourselves and the conditions to use that knowledge and understanding to improve our ability to thrive and not just survive.