Using knowledge exchange to bring about culture change in children and families social work departments

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Child protection systems across the English-speaking world have been subject to damning critique in recent decades, to the extent that some commentators conclude that they may be doing more harm than good. A recent UK government-sponsored review conducted by Professor Eileen Munro argues for fundamental change in child protection practice and culture. Specifically, Munro argues that 'Local authorities and their partners should start an ongoing process to review and redesign the ways in which child and family social work is delivered, drawing on evidence of effectiveness of helping methods where appropriate and supporting practice that can implement evidence based ways of working with children and families' (2011, p.13)' Munro identifies the need to 'help professionals move from a compliance culture to a learning culture' (2011, p.6). Munro's recommendation forms the central objective in this proposal: to help children and families social workers in two local authorities review and redesign their services in line with evidence of what is known to be effective and to do so in the context of a learning culture. The project partners include social work and knowledge exchange (KE) academics at the University of Edinburgh and key managers and practitioners in two neighbouring local authorities, The City of Edinburgh and East Lothian.The proposal builds upon a previous successful project, which involved academics and social work practitioners from six local authorities working together on small pieces of practitioner research around effective practice in working with involuntary social work service users, involuntary being understood as those whose contact with social work was mandated. The focus of three of these projects was on children and families social work. This new proposal takes the findings of this project forward, casting the spotlight across a wide spectrum of social work practice with children and families. Historically, social work agencies have invested in training events and initiatives in the hope that learning on these might be cascaded from participants into wider organisational structures. The evidence for this sort of transfer of learning is not strong. On the contrary, it is known that very little training activity results in positive changes to practice. One of the reasons for this is that training often occurs as a free-standing activity that is not clearly linked to organisational or practice objectives. Models of knowledge exchange, through recognising the prior knowledge, skills and values that practitioners bring to a subject, are considered to be more effective than traditional training initiatives in getting knowledge into practice. In this project we will utilise specific knowledge exchange activities, derived from the literature and shown to be effective in our previous project, to help bring about cultural change in the partner local authorities. Our proposal consists of three strands, a horizontal one that will operate across organisations to discuss key themes relating to the current discourse on child protection; a vertical strand, which will aim to support practitioners develop examples of what is known to be effective practice and a third strand, which will work with managers around effective learning transfer. Together, the various strands are in line with Nutley et al's (2007) organizational excellence model of knowledge exchange whereby organisations, working in partnership with universities, become the locus for local experimentation, evaluation and practice development.Our project will offer pointers and models about how cultural change in child protection might be brought about more widely. As such, it will be of interest to local authorities and to Government bodies across the UK and thus holds out the potential to evidence demonstrable social policy and practice benefits.