Findings from a thematic analysis of Child Practice Reviews in Wales
Following the first thematic review of a range of Safeguarding case reviews the NISB commissioned a second review, this time of Child Practice Reviews. We asked the researchers to use three professional lenses when coding the reviews – a lawyers, a Social Work practitioner and a Social Work academic and then check their findings with practitioners across Wales from all the agencies involved to see if it rang true with those on the front line.
The 4 main cross cutting themes are:
- Greater weight is given to some professionals and family members knowledge This hierarchy of knowledge led to ‘tunnel vision’, where certain attitudes are formed and then become hard to challenge. The views of mothers tended to be privileged over both children and fathers.
- Information sharing within and across agencies.
- Faulty assessment was prevalent with practitioners sometimes evaluating people as individuals not the wider domestic/family context.
- Children’s voices or the perspective of the child were sometimes missing and/or not always central to practice.
See the recommendations from the research – from creating a repository of Safeguarding reviews to increase our access to the learning from the reviews, to should we, as agencies, routinely have multi-agency supervision.
Thematic Review of CPR 2019