“Being a social worker is core to my identity,” Ann Graham, ADCS President

For Ann Graham, being a social worker is about much more than holding a professional qualification. As President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), the values of social work continue to shape her approach to leadership, from tackling exploitation and violence to improving the support available to adolescents.

“Being a social worker is core to my identity,” Graham told Social Work Today. “I've been a social worker for a significant period...for decades.”

She said social justice, supporting people and helping them achieve their best remain central to her professional identity.

“Becoming a qualified social worker sort of fitted neatly with that,” she said. “So my work in helping supporting people to do their best. I love and enjoy and I'm very proud to be a social worker.”

Graham said the values of social work are also embedded in her work as a director and in the leadership roles she has held.

Her presidency of ADCS has placed a particular focus on adolescents and the ways in which children and young people can experience harm outside the family home.

Speaking to senior leaders in children and young people’s services for the ADCS conference in Manchester in July, Graham announced an updated ADCS position statement, ‘What is Care For?’, asking difficult questions about whether care is always the right response for young people experiencing serious harm.

“We’ve not shied away from the hard questions of ourselves either, like, is care always the right or best response to a young person who is being criminally exploited or making attempts on their own life? In the absence of an alternative, sometimes, we find, it’s the only available option,” she said.

Graham has argued for a “safeguarding in place” approach to adolescent safeguarding, recognising that many risks faced by young people occur outside the family home and across different locations and contexts.

She believes this requires agencies and local authorities to look beyond the individual child and consider the places and circumstances in which harm is occurring.

“We know that for adolescents, it is a lot of extra familial harm that they face. It's risks outside the home,” she told Social Work Today.

She gave the example of two children from different local authorities who had been stopped together and were also living in the same residential unit. While each authority responded appropriately to its own child, Graham said the two authorities had not initially considered the wider context in which both children were experiencing risk.

“The fact that they were in the same place and space was what was triggering the issues in the 1st place,” she said.

For Graham, safeguarding in place means agencies working together to understand and address those wider risks rather than responding separately to individual children.

“It would be good if we came together to address the issues so that not only our two children benefit, but all the others around,” she said.

The approach is particularly relevant to the challenges posed by criminal exploitation, missing children and violence. Graham told the Manchester gathering that children who go missing from one area can be missing alongside friends from another, with some being criminally exploited to transport and sell drugs.

“Children exploited in this way are often also exposed to violence, which has become normalised in society. I think this is shocking and often wonder how did we get here?” she said.

Graham believes keeping children engaged in education is a key part of preventing violence and exploitation.

“As a sector, we know that a critical protection against violence and exploitation is reducing school exclusions so that children remain in education, with the support of all agencies working together; schools, social care, early help and health services, this can be done. This is challenging, collaborative work,” she said.

She said action was needed across society, involving children, parents, professionals and schools, to move away from the normalisation of violence. “We need to have an approach whereby we move away from that normalised violence,” she said. “But that's a challenging one.”

Graham also used her speech to highlight structural inequalities in children's services, including the relationship between socio-economic circumstances and the level and type of intervention families receive, as well as racial disproportionality in the youth justice system.

“Socio-economic status can drive the level and type of intervention children and families receive, whether that be higher intervention of children’s social care where there are indicators of social disadvantage, ongoing racial disproportionality in the youth justice system, particularly for our Black and mixed-heritage boys, or how racism and discrimination is experienced both by families, and staff, in maternity services… It can feel challenging to raise these issues in a political and diverse world, but we mustn’t shy away, it’s incumbent on us all to strive to do more,” she said.

Early intervention and family hubs also have an important role to play, Graham said, arguing that the focus should be on building resilient communities rather than simply providing services to individual children.

“The early years is where we can collectively set the foundation for the best start in life, working with parents and in wider family contexts, to build the resilience and stability children need to thrive in childhood,” she said.

“There is great work being done in family hubs up and down the country and with a commitment to full roll out, more areas are set to benefit from this way of working.

“But this is about more than buildings and individual children, it’s about community resilience.”

Graham also expressed concern about the pace and volume of reforms currently affecting children's social care. While the reform programme is generally viewed as a positive step, including greater investment and a stronger focus on early intervention and prevention, she warned that the sector needs time to embed changes.

“The layering of significant reform which we are currently experiencing is like nothing before, it is overwhelming and we have been raising the alarm with government,” she told the ADCS gathering.

“We are in the process of change but we are changing cultures as well as systems. And culture change takes time!”

In her interview with Social Work Today, Graham said the sector needed reforms to be paced in a way that allowed changes to become embedded and sustainable.

“What the sector needs is for reform to be paced so that we can embed and sustain change,” she said.

She said the opportunity presented by increased investment could be lost if too many changes were introduced too quickly.

“What we do in the sector, as you'll know, is we make cultural change in our own organisations and within our own local areas,” she said. “So we need the time to make those changes.”

Graham also addressed the issue of children deprived of their liberty, arguing that the underlying problem was the availability of appropriate placements.

Despite the scale of the challenges facing children's services, Graham's outlook remains optimistic – and her optimism is rooted in one of the simplest values of social work.
“What gives me optimism? I think it's the kindness of individuals. I think it's the kindness in people,” she said.

She reflected on the universal experiences of children growing up and the importance of loving and caring environments.

“Always there will be hope,” Graham said. “Because, you know, children generally don't come with ills, they come with hope and curiosity and love and joy, and so at the end of it, it's kindness that is within us all.”