Can a Paradigm Shift from Risk Management to Critical Reflection Improve Child-Inclusive Practice?

Abstract

Child protection systems within Anglophone countries have been increasingly dominated by neoliberal managerial, risk-dominant paradigms over the past three decades. Assumed to deliver a cost-effective strategy to increase the safety of children, there are many ways this paradigmatic combination systematically undermines child welfare, participation, and well-being. This paper specifically focuses on the ways that risk assessment, neoliberal, and managerial discourses have infiltrated practice and operate to silence and exclude children’s voices. It draws on two case studies to showcase key findings of a comprehensive, state-wide research project called Empowering Children’s Voices, which was initiated by UnitingCare, a non-government organisation within Queensland, Australia, and conducted in partnership with researchers from Queensland University of Technology. It will be argued that a paradigm shift towards a critically reflective reinterpretation of risk can be far more effective at promoting child-inclusive practice and establishing children’s empowered voices as a protective factor against harm.

1. Introduction

This paper explores the ways that risk assessment, neoliberal and managerialist discourses have infiltrated practice and operate to silence and exclude children’s voices. Drawing on key findings from a comprehensive, Queensland-wide research project, it will be argued that a paradigm shift towards a critically reflective reinterpretation of risk can be far more effective at promoting child-inclusive practice and establishing children’s empowered voices as a protective factor against harm.

The rights of children to participate in decisions that affect their lives have been embedded in Australian legislation [1], following Article 12 of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989) that stipulates ‘that children have the right to have a say over matters that affect their lives, with due weight given to those views’ [2] (p. 955). This makes child-inclusive practice a legal requirement [1,2]. Hearing, and formulating practice responses, based on and informed by children’s participation, is a concept overwhelmingly supported by practitioners, with most affirming the importance of children’s rights to be involved in decisions made about them [3,4,5].

According to Sinclair [6] (p. 329), this shift in thinking to value children’s voices and participation has emerged from the coalescence of several developments: the demands for service user participation from the consumer movement; the promotion of a global children’s rights agenda; and critical approaches to social science that contests the conception of children as ‘incomplete adults’. However, despite these developments and a commitment on the part of practitioners to recognise children as competent social actors, it is widely acknowledged that meaningful child-inclusive practice has struggled to move beyond rhetorical practice (see for example [2,4,6,7,8,9,10,11]). Holt [11] argues that this is because of the tension between the rights versus welfare debate—where children’s participation is considered to over-burden them with adult-like responsibility, which risks their corresponding right to protection and threatens their experience of childhood. Others challenge that notion, maintaining that participation can be protective for children in reducing risk [12] and that failure to hear the voices of children contributes to ‘unsound’ assessments [6] (p. 330). The harms created by this are particularly evident, given that during the period of 2015–16, nine children from Queensland, four of whom were clients of Child Safety at the time, died as a result of child abuse and/or neglect [13] (p. 15).

Reasons for why the commitment to hear and empower children’s voices is not routinely enacted in practice are multi-faceted and related to a range of factors including, for example: adult-centric perspectives on the part of practitioners [6,14]; a lack of skills needed to engage children [6,15]; risk and protectionist discourses that perceive children as vulnerable and incapable [1,2,3,6,16]; and an emphasis on child protection over child welfare [7]. While models of childhood have shifted over time, a western developmental perspective grounded in psychology continues to dominate our understanding of practice with children. Alternative constructions focus on children as social agents, interactively influencing their social lives, rather than being merely passive and silent observers of it [11]. This requires an understanding of children in the context of their social worlds, acknowledging them as ‘experts’ in their own lives and involving them in decisions about how their voice is both captured and represented [11] (p. 140). Bosisio [16] argues that child-inclusive practice is most effective when it includes the direct voice of the child, rather than decisions that are made in their ‘best interests’. Children are capable of both understanding and participating, with being listened to one of their primary needs.

Importantly, organisational barriers implicated in undermining child-inclusive practice are also widely acknowledged in the literature [3,6,7,9,17]. Neoliberal policy and ideology, which have proliferated the human services sector, causing disastrous consequences for practice, are arguably responsible for most of the organisational barriers that undermine children’s meaningful participation in practice. The consequences of this continual transformation of the sector, including child protection and family-focused services, has been comprehensively documented within the international social work literature (see for example [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]). This transformation has produced human service organisations that are forced to operate like businesses, including adopting time-monitored, managerial practices that prioritise economic over social justice principles and therefore undermine effective practice (see for example [31,32,33,34]). For example, social workers in child protection systems are given strict guidelines, shaping how and what a family assessment should look like, and the time spent with families is closely monitored in the name of accountability [35]. Overwhelmed and busy practitioners are required to manage high caseloads within organisations focused on standardisation and performance management, resulting in many practitioners feeling less supported and experiencing greater rates of stress; the result for organisations is a higher staff turnover [36]. van Bijleveld et al. [3] (p. 136) affirm these concerns in observing the combination of ‘high caseloads, the burden of paper work and the lack of adequate staffing … leads to a procedure-driven, child unfriendly environment.’

In addition, neoliberal policies and managerial practices have resulted in organisations adopting technical solutions to complex problems, particularly those considered high-risk areas, such as child protection. Adopting technical solutions to standardise and improve practice efficiency has also resulted in the development of technicist (technique-driven) forms of practice, such as risk assessment and risk management. Indeed, the dominance of risk assessment has become so central to organisational mandates and funding agreements that it has arguably displaced direct contact with families and time spent in relationship building [35]. As Forrester and Harwin [37] (p. 134) argue, “such ‘tools’ are not simply an annoying additional task practitioners have to complete when doing assessments, they are a fundamental failure to understand the nature of social work assessments”.

The focus on technicist-driven risk assessment practices in human services as a function of neoliberal agendas began in the early 1990s [38]. However, the increasing dominance of this agenda has raised questions as to whether social work and related professions are becoming so risk-averse that we are losing our autonomy, commitment and imagination for other possible practice responses [31,39]. Despite these concerns, technical risk assessments have become a part of everyday practice in most organisations, particularly those involved in the protection and care of children.

Risk in the context of working with children and families most frequently refers to determining the ‘chance of reducing negative occurrences in the future’ [39] (p. 692), with the underlying assumption being that it is somehow possible to predict and manage risk. Risk assessment tools have been developed to enhance decision-making, and practitioners are asked to consider the likelihood of the harm occurring and the impact on those involved [40].

Practices that aim to predict, measure and manage risk are underpinned by a technical-rational view of the world. Practitioners are expected to prioritise risk in family assessments, which is commonly performed by ‘choosing from a specified set of options’ pre-determined to be risk factors [17] (p. 722). While this approach may be useful in responding to vulnerabilities within the natural sciences, such as the management of environmental hazards, there are profound problems with adopting this same logic to inform social work and human services practice. When families are objectified as potential risks to be monitored and corrected, genuine attempts to engage and build relationships become secondary considerations [41], and it is questionable as to whose needs are being met through this process.

Risk assessment approaches in social services have been the subject of much debate and reflection in the past decade and have evolved into three primary categories: actuarial tools; clinical judgement; and structured professional judgement approaches [42]. Actuarial tools fit with technical–rational approaches as factors determined to measure risk are drawn from scientific styles of research knowledge considered to be ‘evidence-based’, and assessment responses are based on numerical evidence, suggesting reliability and generalisability [35] (p. 690). In contrast, clinical and professional judgement approaches take account of professional knowledge (including practice-based evidence) in determining risk factors and responses are based on situational contexts rather than generalised responses. Actuarial frameworks are popular in practice areas perceived to be ‘high-risk’, and whilst the presumed ‘objectivity’ of these models may offer individual practitioners a form of justification for their decisions, they have also been found to be less effective in working with complex human interactions [10]. Bessant and Broadley [17] (p. 721) describe the issues faced by social workers as ‘wicked problems’; i.e., complex social problems that are difficult to resolve. These are distinct from ‘tame problems’ [17] (p. 721), which are non-social problems seen in the natural world and thus more likely to be understood and resolved by applying technical–rational solutions. As a result, professional judgement and practitioner discretion are needed to conceptualise and respond to risk in complex fields of practice [42].

Despite recognition of the increasing complexity and uncertainty in working with children and families, particularly as burgeoning inequality creates more risk and greater needs [21,31,43], services, including those involved in the protection of children, erroneously rely heavily on actuarial risk assessment tools to standardise practice and assume accountability in decision-making [17,44]. Within this construction, professional competence became predictive risk management practice, whereby ‘problematic’ groups with risk characteristics are identified (i.e., stigmatised) and responded to by designing preventative social programs [35]. However, these assumptions are problematic for child-inclusive practice, and social work practice generally, as predictive analysis works with variables that are disembodied from actual families themselves. In reality, the ‘average’ family, identified by statistical analysis, may not exist. The consequences of this approach may be that an individual or family is falsely identified as requiring assistance, while another is completely missed when intervention is informed by actuarial models of risk assessment [17]. Furthermore, predictive risk assessments assume that past events determine future ones, which often do not materialise, and this can set up practitioners to believe their decisions are grounded in more certainty than is justified [35].

Even if it were possible to quantify and predict risk, ‘in a world of probabilities, the improbable does happen’ [35] (p. 686). Therefore, actuarial risk assessment technologies may provide the illusion of accountability in the prediction and management of risk. However, used in isolation, these technologies are not sophisticated enough to respond to the uncertainty and complexity that they try to eliminate [35]. As McCafferty [6] (p. 332) further explains: the ‘simplistic view that all risks are predictable and therefore manageable’ has resulted in heightened anxiety for practitioners working in child protection fields, who carry ‘unrealistic expectations’ to manage risk in a way that undermines professional vision and judgement (see also [17,41]). Furthermore, Stanford [41] argues this anxiety is driven by a fear discourse in which practitioners are constituted as being fearful for their physical and mental well-being; fearful of being blamed when things go wrong, and fearful of the loss of integrity within our professions, with the risk reorientation of practice thwarting meaningful attempts to respond to need.

The result is what Banks [45] refers to as ‘defensive practitioners’ who will not innovate, who will not exercise professional discretion or autonomy, and who will not seek creative and flexible strategies to meaningfully elicit children’s engagement and participation. Instead, these practitioners ‘emphasise issues of power in professional-client relationships and the over-riding priority of child protection concerns. use a deficit rather than strengths model, which does not promote engagement… [be] child protection focused, coercive, legally driven, bureaucratic, and neoliberal [7] (p. 602) by relying ‘on tick the box assessment matrixes’ [17] (p. 720).

The Munro Review of Child Protection [10], commissioned by the UK government, highlighted the importance of moving away from risk-averse actuarial approaches to keeping children safe. Munro [10] found that the demands of the child protection bureaucracy, with a focus on standardised practice, had reduced the capacity of practitioners to work directly with children, young people, and families and highlighted the need to move from a compliance culture to a learning culture. This involves moving towards professional judgement approaches used in other fields of practice, with a focus on self-reflexivity, or the ability of practitioners to critically reflect on their own position in relationships of power and interrogate how they construct their own interpretation of reality (see for example [36,46]).

The process of understanding risk can never be entirely objective (nor apolitical), as we cannot remove ourselves from the judgments we make, nor from the range of responses necessary for the presenting needs [35]. The role of the critical practitioner is to honour the complexity and the multi-layered identities of those experiencing oppression, such as the strengths located within vulnerabilities, in their constructions of risk [47]. This critical perspective highlights the ethical and political dimensions of conducting risk assessments and reminds us that actuarial tools used in isolation are an inadequate substitute for critical analysis and reflection.

2. The Empowering Children’s Voices Research Project

The Empowering Children’s Voices (ECV) research project arose from an identified need within UnitingCare, a non-government organisation operating in Queensland, Australia, to improve ways for children’s voices and experiences to inform all aspects of service delivery. The decision to initiate a research project to drive this change was broadly informed by the findings of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse [48] and the publication of the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations [49]. It was also prompted by recent cases within Queensland of children being harmed while they and their families were being supported by an early-intervention family support program. Despite concerns for the child’s welfare representing the pretext for service engagement in these cases, consistent with the literature, it was evident that children themselves had remained somewhat invisible as clients within actual support provision.

The ECV project commenced in July 2018 and was conducted in three stages designed to elicit the experiences of practitioners and children while building evidence about what needed to change and how. The research focused on two programs funded by the (then) Queensland Government Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women that had been established in response to the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry [13] and concerns about increasing numbers of children who are in the care of the state. Both programs aim to strengthen a family’s ability to keep children safe at home by preventing children’s entry into the statutory system (the focus of Intensive Family Support Service (IFSS)) and reunification of children who had been removed back to their family of origin (the focus of the Family Intervention Service (FIS)). Both programs are standardised, process-driven, and directed by funding department guidelines, similar to features identified by Blackman and Featherston [35].

In Stage 1 of the research, 46 IFSS and FIS practitioners were engaged to unpack the barriers and enablers to hearing children’s voices in family support programs. A total of five WorldCafé workshops were held across two metropolitan and three regional locations. Practitioner experiences revealed four broad, intersecting barriers to child-inclusive practice, including conceptual, organisational, programmatic, and direct practice skills and resources [8]. While some pockets of child-inclusive practice were evident, indicating significant potential for expansion, there was an overall lack of intentional engagement with children as a consistent feature of practice across program sites. The reasons for this were complex and certainly beyond decisions made by individual practitioners. As Stafford et al. [9] indicate, the practitioners found it challenging to include the children’s voices due to: ‘a lack of time, including increased time needed for travel (especially in regional areas); a great number of children per family; and challenges co-ordinating school, family, and work timetables combined with higher caseload numbers and their increasing levels of complexity’. Highlighting the challenges of working in managerial environments, they note that one WorldCafé participant commented:

‘You haven’t even finished the paperwork pile on that case, and you’re allocated a new one so there’s no space for reflection to occur, or learning’.

[9] (p. 9, italics in original)

Stafford et al. [9] (p. 10) also note that the factors undermining child-inclusive practice intensify ‘when participants felt they were at capacity without relief and where systems were inefficient, especially where there were duplications in recording data’. As noted above, this observation aligns with other research findings that suggest high caseload practitioners, feeling pressured and overwhelmed, and with increasing complexity within the presentation of families, all combine to create barriers to hearing children’s voices (see for example [3,50]).

Stage 2 of the ECV research involved participatory, activity-based interviews with children aged 6–17 years whose families were current or recent clients of IFSS or FIS. Feedback from children identified that they were largely excluded from decision-making and planning that affected them and their families [8]. Their feedback related to service providers in general (including adults in helping roles, such as health professionals and educators), with some children able to recall times when they were asked to leave the room when a practitioner was present in the home. In contrast, children viewed themselves as holding relevant, experience-based knowledge about their family. They argued that if their voices were appropriately engaged, this knowledge could inform a change process for their family.

Following Stage 1 and 2, UnitingCare understood the need to challenge itself to move away from seeing children purely in terms of vulnerability towards a more complex view that recognised children as possessing both agency and capacity and requiring protection with participation. This led to Stage 3 of the research: professional development workshops for practitioners and frontline managers of IFSS and FIS, using critical reflection to expand practice and enable the voices of children to be heard.

The remainder of this paper focuses predominantly on Stage 3 of the research, which at the time of writing, is still being undertaken. Stage 3 is led by Author 1 (externally) and Author 3 (internally) and is seeking to build on and translate the research findings from Stages 1 and 2 into practice by devising new strategies to empower children’s voices in IFSS and FIS practice at UnitingCare.

3. Methodology

Given the identified gap between practitioner’s intentions to meaningfully include children’s voices in practice, critical reflection was employed as both a research and educational strategy as it has been shown to effectively transform practice and address issues that concern both organisations and practitioners (see for example, [46,51,52,53,54,55,56]).

As a research methodology, critical reflection fortifies the link between research, theory, knowledge, and practice [51,57] by enlisting the research participants as co-inquirers [58] to generate effective practice strategies [46,51,53,54,55,56]. In this research, critical reflection is being used to address the difficulties identified in implementing child-inclusive intentions into practice. As Morley and Leggatt-Cook [59] note: ‘Practitioners are caught in the same neoliberal web, which impacts their thinking in multiple ways, including undermining their capacities to undertake child-inclusive practice’. The goal of critically reflective inquiry is to build an evidence base that is instructive for practice that effectively improves practitioners’ capacity to empower children’s voices and increase their meaningful participation in service delivery.

The research involves a pre-test/post-test design that aims to capture the impact of the research intervention: practitioners’ participation in three days (total) of critical workshops, structured across two 1.5-day workshops. The learning that occurs from participation in the workshops generates the data and creates practical processes necessary to transform practice, whilst simultaneously serving as a valuable professional development opportunity for participants. Through participating in the workshop, participants also experientially develop the skills to engage in and potentially lead critical reflection processes with and for others, hence building the capacity of UnitingCare to embed a critically reflective culture and continue to develop new knowledge by reflecting on practice into the future.

Rather than simply collecting narratives about practice, the purpose of critically reflective research is to generate new understandings of practice and new possibilities for empowering children’s voices that address some of the barriers previously identified. This can be challenging because embracing a critically reflective stance requires confronting (and changing) deeply held assumptions and practices [60]. These assumptions and practices are often so deeply entrenched that they operate in ways that are invisible to practitioners, prior to critical reflection. Identifying and taking responsibility for implicit assumptions can be personally and professionally confrontational (see for example [59]).

The critical reflection workshops employ transformative learning techniques that enable practitioners to re-author a narrative about their practice (focused on a specific critical incident) that generates new understandings and subsequent practice options. Re-authoring the practice narrative involves uncovering new interpretations of the critical incident and letting go of assumptions that do not fit with the practitioner’s intended practice. As Bay and Macfarlane [61] (p. 756) state: ‘Critical reflection is not just a tool to justify one’s practice or make one’s position invisible, but to productively and honestly acknowledge and interrogate it’ [61] (p. 756). Most of the participants chose to reflect on practice incidents that did not go well, and it was clear that some felt vulnerable and uncomfortable about exposing their practice in this way in front of their peers. While the research was purposely designed to ensure that no supervisors or managers were present in the practitioners’ workshops, within the neoliberal frame of individual responsibility, some practitioners who already felt scrutinised, blamed, and overworked experienced engaging in critical reflection on practice with their peers as ‘unsafe’ [59]. Moreover, managerial constructions of ‘best practice’ may fuel the view of practice that is never quite good enough.

It should be noted that feedback about participants’ experiences of the workshops was not always available at the time, and, in fact, much positive feedback was received [59]. Once it became clear that not all participants were experiencing the workshops positively, UnitingCare worked with QUT researchers to redesign the research strategy. It was at this point that the project was reconceptualised to focus on cultural change that is championed by leaders in UnitingCare. There was an acknowledgement that ‘In hindsight. our ground-up approach. may not have been the right choice for our organisational context. Ultimately, felt safety for a practitioner is a product of feeling supported and valued by supervisors, team members and organisational leaders. we resolved that our next attempt should include a prominent focus on developing critically reflective practice within our executive and senior leaders, asking them to lead the change by demonstrating the humility and openness that we are asking of our practitioners’ [59].

This is consistent with Macrae et al. [60], who similarly facilitated critical reflection workshops with child protection practitioners in Scotland as part of a transformative research project. While they too reported that ‘practitioners all felt challenged in various ways by the project’ and that this was both experienced as ‘positive and negative’ [60] (p. 189), they came to the conclusion that ‘Transformational change’ requires ‘a shift in attitude amongst senior managers and an investment in and commitment to engaging line managers much more, involving them in the process earlier and in more meaningful ways’ (p. 194).

The first 1.5 days of the workshops focus on introducing research participants to the model of critical reflection and deconstructing the (pre-written) critical incidents that are presented by practitioners by identifying implicit assumptions and analysing their (often unintended) implications for practice. The second 1.5 days focus on reconstructing practice narratives by incorporating critical analysis. Further details regarding this structured, two-stage analytical process, deconstruction and reconstruction, are outlined by Fook [60]. Ethics approval was provided by QUT’s Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number 1900000967) and UnitingCare’s Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number Morley 17102019).

While the workshops were intended to offer a positive, professional development experience for participants, some staff struggled with the process [59]. Acknowledging how assumptions shape the limits of practice requires humility and openness. However, this reflexive stance is not supported or valued by neoliberal and managerial discourses, making open and honest reflection difficult for participants due to the fear of being judged unempathetically [59]. Such observations provide insight into the strength and impacts of neoliberalism and neoliberalism on practice.

The workshops were scheduled to occur approximately 4–6 weeks apart to allow appropriate time for reflection and learning in between. Four deconstruction workshops were held in early 2020, with 6–12 participants in each. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 and the limits on social distancing that were imposed, the workshops had to be suspended from March 2020. When the workshops were due to reconvene more than 12 months later than planned, 5 out of the 38 participants elected to participate in the reconstruction process.

While pausing the workshops clearly impacted participant attrition, it also enabled the research team time for reflection and reorientation. The observations from the research that highlight the impacts of neoliberalism and managerialism in closing down the opportunities for reflection, and thereby undermining practice, are already being acted upon within UnitingCare. In recognising that leaders play a fundamental role in promoting and creating safe and open organisational cultures [62], UnitingCare has now adopted a leadership-led, critically reflective approach across every level of the organisation ‘where mistakes and missed opportunities are embraced for their learning possibilities’ [59]. This has involved a resolution to ‘include a prominent focus on developing critically reflective practice within our executive and senior leaders, asking them to lead the change by demonstrating the humility and openness that we are asking of our practitioners’ [59]. As such, an organisational strategy underpinned by critical reflection has been developed to recruit senior managers and regional managers within UnitingCare as research participants before work with practitioners is continued [59].

The following findings represent a work in progress. Drawn from two case studies that are representative of the same issues raised by most of the participants in the study, they are characteristic of the pre-test narratives that were captured prior to the commencement of the first critical reflection workshops. In order to collect the pre-test data, participants were issued with the following instructions to complete the pre-test written exercise:

Please recall and reflect on a professional experience from your own practice in relation to working with children and families or managing practitioners who do this work, that typically expresses some of the enabling factors you have observed about meaningfully including children’s participation in service delivery, or some of the barriers and challenges associated with this. This may be a practice incident/example that you would like to learn more about it; may have raised issues for you, challenged your beliefs or values or just given you pause to think. It may also be an example from your practice example that you thought you did particularly well.

Write a brief account of your experience in a few paragraphs (1–2 pages). In describing your example, please consider ways to protect the confidentiality of any people discussed as part of your narrative.

Your narrative should include a description of the practice (with as much concrete and specific details as possible) as well as the context (relevant background information) in which the practice occurred. It may also be helpful to include your initial reflective analysis of the practice. Some questions that might help with this are:

• Why did I choose this practice example?
• Why is it important to me?
• How do I feel about it now?
• What do I hope to learn by reflecting on it?

Please email your response to the research team.

4. Findings from Deconstruction of Case Studies

The following two case studies provide insight into the effect of neoliberal and risk discourses in the delivery of family support practice. The outcomes from the deconstruction of both case studies problematise implicit assumptions, point to different ways of working, and are therefore instructive for future critically reflective practice to bolster child inclusion, both for the practitioners concerned and potentially for others engaged in working with children and families.

4.1. Case Study 1

I was in the assessment phase of casework and had met with the family numerous times to build engagement and discuss referral worries, though I was concerned about parental lack of understanding about the possible impact of their parenting and expectations of the children. During these sessions I had interacted with the children in a friendly and playful way and been interested and enquired about what had happened during the day of my visit. The family were sporadic in the engagement with the service.

In order to gather information from the children about their worries and hopes for the future, I planned to work with each of the 4 children individually on the ‘Three Houses’ tool which discusses their house of good things; house of worries; house of hopes. On this visit I observed green coloured bruise on youngest child’s left forehead. Child reported that he bumped the wall. Mother reported that the children did not attend school today as the family slept in. I observed scratches on 2 of the children’s hands, children reported that they were from the kitten.

I discussed this tool and the purpose with the parents and requested that they consent for me to meet with each of the children alone to reduce disruption and provide each child with individual opportunity. Parents agreed and I offered the same information to the children who also agreed.

The children and I headed downstairs and sat on the driveway with pencils and coloured paper. [The children] presented as excited to engage with [case worker] as they were speaking a lot, interrupting regularly. While the 3 youngest children played, I met with the oldest child and explained the activity and asked if she would like to draw or write words. She asked me to write. I observed that the father had followed us downstairs. He appeared to be cleaning his car internally though regularly looked over at us and seemed to be observing our interactions and within earshot of our conversation. I reminded the father that I was working individually with the child to allow her to be open however he did not respond. I suggested that we move to the backyard and we quickly completed the assessment activity. A few minutes later the father followed.

I moved back to the driveway with the children and the father followed and sat down at the bottom of the front stairs. The mother also came downstairs. I was uncertain whether to continue the assessment activity as I was worried what the father may do with the children after I left the home visit. I asked the children if they wanted to continue and they agreed. We spoke quietly and completed the activity together.

Analysis

In this account, the practitioner constructs a narrative that problematises the parents, while privileging a narrative of risk over the children’s voices. In deconstructing the narrative, this risk lens appears to paint the parents (particularly the father) as potential perpetrators of child abuse, despite the family engaging with the service voluntarily and there being no history of violence or child safety involvement within the family.

While the practitioner’s assessment of the situation may well have been entirely accurate and complete, postmodern theory suggests that each time one privileges a particular interpretation of reality as ‘the truth’, other interpretations of the facts are rendered invisible and inaccessible to the practitioner [51]. Without wishing to diminish the potential child safety risks in any way, viewing the situation disproportionately and/or exclusively through a risk management interpretive lens may arguably jeopardise practitioners’ capacities to engage in child-inclusive practice.

In unpacking the previous statement further: The child reported that he had ‘bumped’ his head on a wall, and when asked, the children indicated ‘scratches’ on their hands were from their ‘kitten’. The practitioner seemed to be dismissing/disregarding the children’s voices, even though it is possible that the children were telling the truth. If the practitioner had believed the children, it is unlikely she would have included her concern about the bruise and scratches in her account. Further, also noteworthy is the practitioner’s focus on the Three Houses tool, which is a requirement of the IFSS program. This tool was designed as an information-gathering tool to inform risk assessment [63], but in this narrative (and others collected in this study) it appears that the tool is being applied in an administrative way. This formal process leads the practitioner to assume that the tool itself can capture children’s voices, and, as such, places less weight on information gained through other conversations she has had with the children. With regard to the completion of the tool, the practitioner places more weight on the process of tool administration over the building of relationships with the parents. If she felt the parents had concerns about her completing the tool with the children, perhaps these would have felt more manageable if she had clarified her assumptions with them and openly discussed the parents’ concerns (if indeed her interpretation was accurate). Implicit in the narrative, the practitioner does not engage in this conversation with the parents because she assumes they are high-risk (and perhaps untrustworthy).

Furthermore, the practitioner’s initial account includes reference to the children’s non-attendance at school due to sleeping in to add weight and legitimacy to her construction of a concerning narrative, particularly about the parents’ capacities to be responsible and care for the children. In this case, the parents had voluntarily engaged with the service, had no prior history with child safety, and consented to her undertaking the Three Houses assessment. However, the practitioner indicates that she does not trust their consent. She moves away from them, outside to the driveway. She assumes the father is watching them, rather than cleaning his car. She assumes he did not respond willfully—not because he did not hear. She believes he did hear because she assumes he is in ‘earshot’ and therefore she moves again with the children to the backyard. When the father appears in the backyard, she assumes he is surveilling her conversation with the children. We cannot confirm this. It is possible that he was, but she also interprets this negatively, rather than considering the possibility that the father is showing concern or being curious about her work with the children. The worker is acting defensively; coming from a place of ‘concern’, but has not considered that the father may actually perceive her behaviour as suspicious, given that she keeps moving away with the children to avoid him and is now speaking ‘quietly’ as if she potentially has something to hide.

The critical reflection workshop process aimed to assist this practitioner to develop a more holistic picture of the family, which might then ultimately change the nature of the interaction that she has with the parents, and therefore the children. Some questions that were asked of her in the workshop included:

• What assumptions did you make about the green-coloured bruise, the scratches, and the fact that the children had missed school because the family had slept in?
• How did these assumptions shape your picture of and engagement with the family?
• What are some possible explanations other than the ones you have privileged?
• What assumptions did you make about the father following you and the kids?
• How might your conclusions operate to reaffirm a pre-determined view that you already held about the parents?
• How might this disrupt your capacity to build rapport and a relationship with them?
• What might be some other interpretations of the father’s behaviour? For example, if you understood his behaviour as watching over the kids (and you) to potentially act protectively towards them, how might your practice potentially change?

A further line of enquiry designed to assist the practitioner to reconnect her practice narrative with a sense of agency was to ask whether it was possible for her to abandon the assessment tool (given the adverse circumstances she was describing), to focus on building relationships with the children, and completing the tool another day, when she did not feel like she had to hide from the parents. It is possible that this change in her approach may have significantly changed her interaction with the family, and her assessment of risk.

4.2. Case Study 2

The referral came from Child Safety and it was identified that we would need to continue to work on parenting skills, household relationships, parent carer mental health and parent carer alcohol and other drugs misuse with the household.

At my initial visit with the family I identified that domestic violence was also a big factor on the household relationships, budget and mental health of the family members. During our intervention I noted numerous occasions where the mother was more focused on the child being scapegoated, as the problem, rather than addressing her own obvious needs.

During meetings and visits she continued trying to deflect and refocus attention away from her and her parenting and general behaviours, drug use and domestic violence towards the child being the issue, and I found myself having to spend most appointments re-stating purpose of [our service], recontracting with her on what we were focusing on and repeating this process, never moving to case planning or interventions with her and the children.

Using my strength[s] and trauma [informed] lens I attempted to interweave our worries around these areas at each meeting to be presented with the mother changing the subject, becoming agitated, presenting either drug affected or coming down from drugs and having crisis and active engagement being the only means of having regular contact with the family.

With this family they have three generations of coming from being in care in their family and they are focused on not being the fourth generation. The mother presents as wanting to work with [our service] in the guise of ‘disguised compliance’ and has shielded the children from our service for approximately 5–6 months.

I have worked hard to connect with the mother and engage with the children through meeting with the school, Service leader consults, [and other relevant stakeholder] consults, joint [meetings] with senior staff and unannounced home visits.

I spent time trying to shift the approach I was talking with the mother. I spent time reflecting with my manager on how to engage and work effectively with the family and trying to partner with the mother and understand her story and her goals.

Ultimately after almost 6 months it has been decided to close the family referral to our organisation as this is not the right time for the family with a therapeutic letter to the family inviting them to come back when they are ready to work with us. I have found this case has challenged me in relation to my core values around capturing the voice of the children and access to engaging with the children.

Analysis

This narrative, and many additional examples from the deconstruction data, specifically construct the parents as the problem, activating a risk-dominant lens that leads to practice that seeks to build evidence against the parents, rather than a relationship with them that would potentially support them to mitigate risk and become a protective factor.

In this example, the practitioner’s commitment to connecting with the mother is evident and explicitly stated in that she has ‘worked hard to connect with the mother and engage with the children’ and consulted with various stakeholders about how to best advance this, including engaging in supervision with her ‘manager on how to engage and work effectively with the family… trying to partner with the mother and understand her story and her goals’.

However, it is likely the deficit-based assumptions that are presented in the narrative about the mother (e.g., the practitioner’s repeated reference to drug (mis)use and the mother’s ‘obvious needs’) and the practitioner’s sense of frustration (e.g., repeated references to the ‘time’ she had ‘spent’ and her ‘hard work’ with the mother) would have operated to undermine the practitioner’s intentions to form an effective working relationship with the mother. Compounding this view, the practitioner assumes that the mother is deliberately thwarting her work and obstructing her access to the children (e.g., describing the mother’s participation as ‘disguised compliance’). It is probable that this combination of unhelpful assumptions did not aid in building the trust with the parents that was necessary to hear and empower the children’s voices. It is also not clear how engaging in ‘unannounced home visits’ would be conducive to partnering or enhancing the relationship with the mother.

Some of the questions posed to this practitioner during the deconstruction workshop (which incorporates reference to some of the additional information she offered during the presentation) included:

• How did your focus on risk shape your construction of the critical incident?
• Was your focus on risk amplified because the referral came from Child Safety?
• How might this have led you away from your strengths-based, client led, trauma-informed practice?—And resulted in you prioritising other factors?
• How might this prioritisation of risk have led you to interpreting mum’s behaviour as ‘blocking’ you or ‘deflecting’?
• What purpose does this use of language serve? How might your narrative potentially change if you saw the mother’s behaviour as protecting her child, rather than blocking you?
• How did your sense of ‘frustration’ shape your construction of the mother and your narrative about her?
• How did interpreting the mother’s behaviour as ‘disguised compliance’ impact on your capacity to build an authentic, supportive relationship with her?
• And how did viewing the mother’s engagement with you/your service as ‘disguised compliance’ lead you to take on a more investigative-oriented role?
• Similarly, how did interpreting her interaction with you as consisting of ‘veiled threats’, ‘non-engagement’ etc, lead you to experience a sense of ‘frustration?
• How might you have (albeit inadvertently) contributed to a sense that you were caught in a power struggle with mum?
• What might change in your thinking and practice if you shifted your initial narrative about the mother? e.g., from ‘disguised compliance’ to a woman who desperately wants and needs help, but does not know if she can trust you (perhaps because she can feel you have shifted from building a relationship with her (i.e., strengths-based) to building evidence about her (i.e., investigative))?
• How might risk discourses have informed your practice—intentionally or otherwise?
• Weaver [64] reminds us that we see what we believe, rather than believe what we see. How might this free you to think and potentially engage with the mother differently?

Indeed, if the practitioner was able to shift her frame of reference, it is possible that this may have reorientated her work to focus on building a trusting relationship with the mother. In turn, this might have enabled the mother to trust the practitioner rather than blocking her (if we accept the practitioner’s perception of this interpretation of the mother’s behaviour is accurate). Building a partnership with the mother may have enhanced the practitioner’s opportunities to engage in child-inclusive practice. Critical reflection seeks to create opportunities for change when these do not seem possible [51]. It is clear that the unreconstructed narrative resulted in much frustration for the practitioner, and according to her own account, a lot of wasted time and effort for little gain.

4.3. Limitations

The key limitation of the data presented above is that accounts of reconstructed practice are not yet available. Ideally, we would have liked to present the pre-test data alongside the post-test data (in the hope that that would indicate the potential changes achieved by the deconstruction and reconstruction process). However, given the decision to revise the research strategy to offer workshops for managers in the first instance, following the practitioner feedback, workshops with managers are currently taking place before the practitioner workshops will continue. The presentation of this data, therefore, represents a moment in time and a work in progress.

Another limitation of the research is the possibility of researcher bias. Positivist researchers believe that objectivity is possible and desirable. However, the research undertaken within constructivist and critical paradigms instead privileges reflexivity (i.e., explicit acknowledgement of the researcher’s underpinning theories and assumptions, and awareness of how knowledge is produced (not found) by researchers) as a measure of quality, over traditional positivist notions of objectivity [57]. In addition, the findings do not try to explain cause and effect but rather generate new understandings of social phenomena [51]. Hence, as critical researchers, some of us may have had a pre-existing analysis of neoliberalism and its impacts on practice, which may have influenced our interpretation of the data. That being said, all members of the research team were expecting to find similar observations as noted in the literature and Stage 1 and 2 of this project, such as adult-centric discourses and paternalism. This is part of the story but not the main finding. It is also worth noting that the UnitingCare researchers took a slightly different (more sympathetic view towards the practitioners) than the QUT researchers in interpreting the data (who were perhaps more focused on critical analysis of the text). Our presentation of the data in this paper is our shared representation of these differences, which offers a more holistic account of the data.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

This paper has explored the impact of risk dominance and neoliberal and managerial discourses on practitioners’ capacities to foster child-inclusive practice. It has presented the narratives of two family support practitioners regarding their attempts to empower children’s voices in service delivery. The narratives formed the case study data that we analysed in this paper, using Fook’s [60] model of critical reflection. Findings from this study cannot be generalised and must remain tentative, particularly given that reconstruction data was not available for the case studies presented. However, deconstruction analysis of the initial narratives provided by research participants raises some interesting questions about the possibilities for practitioners to conceptualise practice differently and implement changes to practice on that basis that have potentially major implications for improving child-inclusive practice. As part of its effort to leverage change based on these research insights, UnitingCare has committed to an implementation project that will hold critical reflection at the centre of the change process while also addressing other identified barriers to hearing children’s voices [59]. However, these implications relate not only to the work of UnitingCare practitioners involved in the study but are instructive for all practitioners and organisations who work with children and families.

Analysis of the case studies demonstrates that both of the practitioners had expressed a strong commitment to hearing children’s voices in including them in their practice with families. This aligns with the literature, which confirms that there is broad consensus that children should have a right to participate in decisions that affect their lives (see for example, [5,6,8,9,15,65]).

However, despite the practitioners’ commitment to child-inclusive practice, this intent was not consistently evident in their narratives about their work with families. The findings from the deconstruction analysis of both case studies highlight and problematise the impact of implicit assumptions and demonstrate the ways in which these were operating to undermine child-inclusive practice (and potentially child-protective practice). Arguably, in attempting to valorise children’s voices, both practitioners engaged in instrumental forms of practice that were based on preconceived constructions of risk rather than listening to children or, indeed, parents. This is consistent with Schon’s [66] observations when pioneering his model of reflective practice: espoused theory does not always align with actual practice. Evident in the practitioners’ narratives were constructions of parents as a problem to be managed, or as a source of frustration, which interfered with the practitioners’ capacities to gain access to the children, and therefore engage the children to hear and meaningfully include their voices in service delivery. Toros et al. [7] (p. 603) confirms risk-dominant perspectives that are embedded in ‘[f]orceful child protection discourse decrease engagement, as parents feel disempowered and disenfranchised and lack trust in the system. Many parents find assessment processes to be intrusive and that this undermines engagement.’ This aligns with Smith et al.’s [67] (p. 973) findings who drew upon the work on Pierre Bordieu ‘and especially his notion of social suffering, which suggests that workers may feel compromised in fulfilling the moral and emotional dimensions of the job as a result of the demands of a neoliberal state.’ The findings of their paper suggest ‘that critical reflection may provide some limited possibilities to destabilise dominant practice orthodoxies and cultures and, in so doing, encourage culture change in organisations’ [67] (p. 973).

Harris [7] similarly highlights that an overreliance on risk-dominant child protection discourses often results in parents becoming suspicious and therefore not cooperating with agencies. Another study observes that child and family practice in recent years has become ‘overly procedural and compliance-based, within which relationships between social workers and clients are characterised by mutual suspicion and animosity [67] (p. 973). Both practitioner narratives appear to illustrate this point. Paralleling this, Bessant and Broadley [17] (p. 721) argue the ‘negative impact on the ability of workers to engage in a flexible, and perhaps meaningful way with many families’… due to ‘child protection systems [being] obsessed with the language of ‘risk’, and with developing and refining limited and technocratic risk assessment tools’.

As the practitioners in both case studies described, this combination of factors limits engagement and undermines their ability to undertake effective assessments [7]. Indeed, the literature suggests that the personal relationship between the practitioner and the family is one of the most crucial factors for facilitating child participation [3] and is therefore fundamental to improving assessment practices.

Although not explicitly stated, the practitioners in both case studies indicate that they were experiencing a level of powerlessness, as they both perceived the scope for meaningful engagement with children to be limited. Despite the families in both case studies voluntarily agreeing to engage with the services, both practitioners judged the parents as insincere in that engagement, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly for Case Study 2, where the organisational engagement with the family ended. It was also clear that the parents and workers in both case studies appeared to struggle negotiating the dual roles held by the practitioners: ostensibly supporting families on one hand, while also risk-assessing and managing families to ensure the children’s safety on the other, which is another complexity of this work highlighted in the literature [7].

In addition, deficit-based descriptions of families (despite a commitment to strengths-based, trauma-informed practice), were also prevalent in the practitioners’ accounts of their practice. These descriptions/assumptions arguably became most impactful when they were overlayed with a risk-dominant lens that prompted the practitioners to objectify families and privilege danger in their accounts [41]. Emphasising the child protection concerns and perceived deficits of the parents combined to adversely impact the practitioners’ capacities to include, communicate with, and effectively engage children in their work with families. As Toros et al. [7] (p. 598) note: ‘Aspects of traditional child protection discourse still tends to dominate engagement practices, including the over-riding priority of child protection concerns; authority-based, coercive, and bureaucratised methods of engaging clients; children’s participation as perfunctory rather than an important aspect of the process; limited information from the workers to children and families; and processes that are stigmatising, focusing on families’ deficits rather than strengths’. While not the focus of this paper, given that neoliberalism has also colonised education [68], our study also holds important implications for the fundamental importance of critical analysis and reflection in curricula and teaching.

Ultimately, the deconstructed data unearthed new ways of working that transcend the risk-dominant lens and point to a critically reflective paradigm for engagement that may bolster the conditions and opportunities for child-inclusive practice, both for the practitioners concerned, and potentially for others engaged in working with children and families. The findings of our research paper support other studies that identify the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ [7] (p. 598) and affirm the need for a critically reflective reinterpretation of risk. Based on the data presented here, it is suggested that a critically reflective approach to risk may be more effective at promoting child-inclusive practice and establishing the children’s empowered voices as a protective factor for the children’s safety and well-being. As with the intended, future path we have adopted for our research, Cree et al. [69] (p. 533) suggest that ‘the managers who have the courage to support the development of the human face and reflective space of social work build a culture of confidence in practice.’ This has direct implications for potentially mitigating the most destructive elements of neoliberalism and transforming practice towards being more child-inclusive.