Enhancing the delivery of safeguarding services: A role for volunteers?

Abstract

• Summary: This article reports findings from an evaluation of the Volunteers in Child Protection (ViCP) pilot study commissioned by Community Service Volunteers (CSV) and conducted in two English authorities. The study examined expectations, experiences and identified benefits for three stakeholder groups – families, volunteers and social workers; and offered an opportunity to explore the implications of developing an expanded role for volunteers, within child protection services. The study sample comprised the first 14 families in the two authorities to be matched with a volunteer, and including the respective social workers and volunteers, in all 21 individuals were interviewed at two points in time.

• Findings: Conclusions to be drawn are that the ViCP project was successful at recruiting and mentoring volunteers to work with families with complex needs; and their contributions suggest that local authority social work could draw on such initiatives to provide support functions. Its inputs could mitigate the negative effects of frequency of change of social workers, and help reduce the increasing dominance of a narrow model of child protection.

• Applications: 1) There is an inevitable inter-dependent relationship between the culture of local authority children’s services departments, including the point at, and frequency with which, social workers can access supplementary family support services, from a voluntary sector agency such as ViCP. 2) A ‘shared ownership’ model of social work (Laming, 2009) is explored whereby mentored volunteers help to broaden and enlarge the evidence-base on families to enable improved decision-making and risk assessment.