Essex Children’s Services. A relationship is not a process. Reframing children's safeguarding in a way that emphasises the essential relational practice needed in public service delivery.
FRAGMENTS was a research, design and exploration project with Essex County Council. It was funded by the DfE.
The goal was to create space to think outside organisational structures and think about more effective ways to deal with risks in the community.
Academics call this contextual safeguarding. Essex County Council calls it risk in the community. Most people would probably call it "keeping an eye out for things going wrong".
fragments.ff.studio and artwork.ff.studio attempted to lionise the often hidden people, services and humanity that support the vulnerable in society at a local level.
– Ben Unsworth, Director of Service Transformation - Essex County Council
Maybe we don’t need a map?
The project started with a common request of design agencies: “Can we have a map?”. But when we brought skilled technologists, designers and social care practitioners together, something made us uneasy about lots of red dots on a map.
Intuition made us feel that there was more to the problem than simply plotting the as-is or to-be state of a service.
– John Chadfield, United Tech and Allied Workers
Social work is an extension of what used to be the community
Community safeguarding is not a transactional service to be “solved”. Our work explored the reality that keeping young people safe is a shared responsibility. Yet the legislative requirement to protect still ultimately rests with the council.
Conforming to the legislation, norms and expectations put upon local authorities whilst also experimenting with service approaches is a tricky balance to achieve.
We argued that the council can show both leadership and a convening role. Use its space in the community to bring people together and amplify the voices of communities. The people closest to young people who need support often find it the hardest to have a voice at formal gatherings.
So statutory professionals and people with informal roles must collaborate to make the difference between a good situation improving, or a bad one getting worse.
A project in two parts
The first half felt like a very traditional discovery project. Interview people, visualise the problem and illustrate the opportunities before committing.
By the mid point of the project we had four directions to choose from:
Making better use of information to be more proactive
Designing the conditions for good collaboration between partners
Bringing in the view of young people and engaging the community
What if the goal is creating momentum and change
Our final direction was a bit of a curveball, but ultimately it was the one we all agreed we should go for.
We outlined a set of options – from incremental service improvements to more difficult to define ideas like building momentum around new models of delivery.
This was repeated during the project, hope and storytelling drove the second half of the project forward.
Our weeknotes and collaboration sessions helped to elicit common ideas and goals from everyone involved. Experimenting with the tone of our communication created space for people to speak more freely and for the project to evolve.
Before the final research write up, we ran a series of research workshops with experts. Each of these took place over two blocks, each of about 3 weeks, and included a diverse set of professionals from across the council’s care departments and Community Safety Partnership teams.
The workshops encouraged them to think outside their current roles and reflect on how they could collaborate better with each other. What tools, services and practices would need to change? How could they work together to achieve common outcomes?
Our research found:
The professional responsibility to identify and respond to community-based risk is distributed (but not evenly). Lack of clear role expectations and differing risk thresholds contribute to less effective collaboration between professionals.
Expanding the influence of informal actors would make community safeguarding more effective. Members of the informal sector can often establish a trust with Young People that members of the formal sector cannot. People who are the most familiar with communities’ needs often have the least access to training and communication channels.
Existing practices and processes hinder contextual thinking and responses. Disconnected data management systems, performance indicators and traditional ways of perceiving risk reinforce the tendency of teams to think in silos. Relying too heavily on formal referral processes can limit people from both accepting responsibility and increasing their understanding of the larger context.
Multi-agency partnerships and ad hoc working groups enable collaboration in ways that formalised processes do not. Trust and valuing the expertise of others are essential to effective collaboration and data-sharing between teams, and will improve the response to evolving risks.
– Gemma Copeland, Designer
Project credits
FF team
David Marques
Eliot Fineberg
Georgina Bourke
Kirsty Jordan
María Izquierdo
Micki Semla
Sarah Read-O'Toole
Client team
Ben Unsworth
Chloe McSweeney
Dawn Attreed-James
Harriet Pickering
Kay Harrop
Padraig Cotter-Boston
Sally-Ann Millar
Shane Thomson
Tamsyn Basson
A map would be too reductive for a project which explored a hard-to-describe spot between the informal and formal parts of Children's, young people's, and families' service delivery: the human aspects of the service.
🔗 Keeping young people safe is a shared responsibility.
🔗 Informality has a role.
🔗 Including more perspectives.
We experimented with how to dream bigger than service optimisation and “digital”. Our goal was to create the conditions for conversations that did not naturally fall within everyone’s formal responsibilities, because we felt better outcomes would be made in precisely that space between formal and informal.
🔗 What if young people were employed by the council?
🔗 What if council workers had to dedicate 20% of their time to preventive community projects and voluntary groups?
We planned a 12-week “discovery and alpha”. The subject matter was fractal and everything was connected. So we went with the flow, guided by the brilliant practitioners involved.
🔗 Widening perspective.
Our outsider status helped us to work without any preconceptions. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so we carefully centred on our job as designers-as-facilitators.
It was refreshing to work at the intersection of service design, technology, research and artwork. Art and culture change people’s minds. Case management systems don’t fix social justice issues.