Supervision and support - what can I expect?
Supervision and Support
All organisations across the partnership have a duty to support practitioners with effective supervision in which they can critically reflect on their findings and strengthen their analysis. This includes the many voluntary, charity, social enterprise (VCSE) organisations and sports clubs that provide education and activities for children as part of their work. Staff and volunteers working with children in these settings often play an important role in building relationships, identifying concerns, and providing direct support to children; they can often be the first trusted adult to whom a child reports abuse. Therefore, many of these organisations will have a crucial role to play in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and...
“Effective supervision can play a critical role in ensuring a clear focus on a child’s welfare and support practitioners to reflect critically on the impact of their decisions on the child and their family”
(Working Together 2023)
The national child safeguarding review panel suggests that all “practitioners must feel safe to express concerns, talk about difficult issues and have access to the very highest support and supervision.” Nationally, reviews continue to identify that good ‘professional curiosity’ and critical thinking is not always underpinning work with children and families, resulting in assessments and interventions that are not as robust and effectively focused on potential risks of harm to children as they need to be. Previous national panel reports have also highlighted a lack of challenge between professionals and an apparent reluctance to escalate concerns.
Our aim, across the partnership, is that all practitioners have access to regular, high quality supervision with managers providing robust oversight, good support and challenge.
The revised Working Together guidance (HM Government, 2023) has introduced new national multi-agency child protection standards in relation to supervision
- Managers must ensure their teams have time to engage in peer learning and knowledge exchange, peer audit, group supervision and observation
- Lead practitioners should have access to high quality supervision. All lead practitioners should also continue to receive appropriate supervision and support for continuing professional development and to maintain professional registration, where appropriate, within their existing line management arrangements.
- Practitioners’ analysis should be supplemented and challenged by others working in the multi-agency team, including the social work qualified practice supervisor or manager, with the family and/or in their teams and management chain. Critical reflection through supervision should further strengthen the analysis.
- Practitioners should be given sufficient supervision and support to fulfil their child welfare and safeguarding responsibilities effectively.
- And all organisations have a duty to ensure appropriate supervision and support for staff, including undertaking safeguarding training.
The NHS intercollegiate professional development documents also make it clear that appropriate reflective practice should be embedded in the organisation, that supervision should provide advice on child protection situations and that safeguarding focused supervision and support is provided for health staff at all levels within organisations that deliver health services.
Reflective practice, peer support and effective supervision can enable practitioners to remain healthy, curious and objective, to ensure that children are not rendered invisible or held responsible for their actions that may be perceived to put them at risk. It is an opportunity for managers to support practitioners to avoid using language that reinforces these views and challenge it where they encounter it.
Reflective supervision
Reflective supervision is a key tool for analysing and hypothesising about a child and family’s lived experience. Reflective and appropriately challenging supervision or other safe spaces can help ensure that practitioners consider…
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- not only individual vulnerabilities but how these might impact on family dynamics
- the extent to which language, interpretation and information sharing is examined and how these impact on practice
- the potential to become to numb to frequent episodes of particular behaviours e.g., self-harm or missing episodes
- the importance of continuity of care and practitioners who have a relationship with and knowledge of the family
- remaining fully equipped and alert regardless of timing of calls e.g., when responding to late night or weekend calls professional, parent/carer and child may all face potential tiredness
- how practitioners gain the skills and capabilities needed to work with diverse communities through providing space for practitioners within supervision to reflect upon their own identities and beliefs and how this may influence their practice
Resources and Tools for Practice Supervisors
Managers could think about developing good practice activities such as opportunities for peer-to-peer support and group supervision across agencies. This will help to
- increase practitioner confidence to be professionally curious
- enhance peer learning and support a learning culture
- promote understanding of other agency processes
- provide safe and constructive, critical friend, spaces for challenging other practitioners and considering whether ‘group think’ might be affecting decision-making
These resources are written from a social work perspective and provide useable and transferable information for all practice supervisors Resources and Tools for Practice Supervisors