Abstract

Concerns about a minority of families have resurfaced in social policy at key moments throughout recent history. Whether these families are viewed as having ‘needs’ or ‘problems’; and whether they are seen as primarily ‘troubled’ or ‘troublesome’ shifts and changes along with the solutions put forward. This article considers the ‘Troubled Families Programme’ (TFP) in England as a contemporary response. It draws on research commissioned by a city local authority concerned with profiling key aspects of the needs of 103 families worked with in the early part of the first phase of the TFP.  While research and policy have frequently underlined the multiple needs and high level of service involvement characteristic of these families, remarkably little is known about the lived experience of multiply disadvantaged families and the wider context of their lives.  In this paper, we place the 103 families’ circumstances within a temporal context by presenting unique historical data on their service involvement. We focus in particular on families’ contact histories with Children’s Social Care. The research presented in the article reveals an extraordinarily high level of involvement with social services across generations among the families referred to the TFP. The article argues that there is a need to better understand families’ pathways through the life course and outwith immediate referral criteria. It also raises important questions about the respective roles for the TFP and social workers.

Introduction

Concerns about a minority of ‘problem’ families have a long history and resurface in social policy at key political moments. The way in which families are characterised and solutions put forward varies according to the wider contexts within which they are embedded (Cairney, 2019; Crossley, 2018). This has led to a range of policy developments, including family intervention projects (FIPs) and the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) designed to address multiple and complex needs through whole-family, multi-agency working.

The TFP only operates in England, other countries of the UK have a different approach to families with multiple needs. It was devised on a Payment by Results model, with local authorities (LAs) paid an attachment fee for each ‘troubled family’ they worked with, and a further allocation of funding dependent on certain outcomes being met.  The primary target groups were highly specific – families with co-occurring problems of household welfare reliance; school exclusion, truancy and persistent school absence; youth convictions or youth and/or adult anti-social behaviour; and being in receipt of out of work benefits (DCLG, 2012a). The expansion of the programme to include another 400,000 families (about 6.6 per cent of all families) was announced very quickly (HM Treasury, 2013) and the second phase of the TFP was started early in 2015 in some LAs (ahead of the national evaluation and any independent evidence about outcomes). The funding per family for phase two was halved but the remit was expanded to include younger children, families in debt, drug and alcohol misuse, domestic violence, and mental and physical health problems (DCLG, 2015). Central to the TFP has been the idea that a single point of professional co-ordination and contact within a ‘whole family approach’ will be a better experience for families that should lead to less need for high cost services, such as care and custody.

Research and policy narratives have frequently underlined the multiple adversities of families referred to the TFP, together with the high level of service involvement these families have prior to their engagement with a TFP. Yet, despite such assertions, remarkably little is actually known about the lived experiences and pathways across the life course of families referred to the TFP.  It has been argued that there is a need for more research that better understands ‘troubled’ families within their wider context, spatially and temporarily (Jupp, 2017). This article makes a contribution to this ambition by providing important quantitative evidence on service involvement.  Drawing on key service data in relation to 449 individuals from 103 families, the article illuminates the extraordinarily high level of social care contacts among families referred to the TFP in one local authority area. It presents unique historical data that illustrates the depth and range of needs, and the long history of social services involvement in most cases.  In so doing, the data highlights the extent of the significant overlap between TFP and Children’s Social Care (CSC) populations, and with that the nature and extent of the needs of the family. This also prompts debate about the relationship between social care and the TFP (Davies, 2015).

The paper begins by providing an overview of the TFP, drawing particular attention to its relationship with social services. It goes on to present findings from the study concerned with better understanding the histories of key service involvement of a sample of families referred to a TFP. It draws on research commissioned by a city local authority that profiled key aspects of the needs of 103 families worked with in the early part of the first phase of the TFP. In the final section of the article we discuss the questions that the findings raise and highlight what implications the data has for a future research agenda.  We repeat calls for more research into the lived experiences of families including longitudinal or biographical research into the pathways between childhood and adult experiences (Spratt, 2011).

Multiple needs and the TFP

The Coalition-government (2010-2015) brought together a number of familial adversities under the umbrella term ‘Troubled Families’ when it launched the TFP in late 2011 as a way of responding to a range of inter-connected and persistent family-based welfare problems. The first phase (2012-15) of the TFP in England started with the premise that a small number of families (120,000 or nearly two per cent of families) have multiple problems but also cause significant problems; and, that in turn they cost the taxpayer an estimated £9 billion a year, or an average of £75,000 per family (DCLG, 2014).

The 2011 riots in English cities were an important part of the initial political context for the TFP represented by (then Prime Minister) David Cameron (2011) as symptomatic of a moral collapse within a ‘Broken Society’. The latter was given definition within a narrative of blame and individual deficit that drew heavily on an underclass discourse.  The (then) Department for Communities and Local Government (DGLG) (2014: 11) later characterisation of ‘troubled families’ as having ‘multiple and layered problems’ did recognise that some problems are a manifestation or consequence of another – such as behavioural problems in school or poor school attendance when children have witnessed domestic violence.  Similarly, in her personal ‘research’ study Listening to Troubled Families, Louise Casey (DCLGb: 2012) suggested that the most striking common themes across the families she interviewed were: a history of sexual and physical abuse, inter-generational transmission of problems, time spent in the care system, having children at a young age, violent relationships, children with behavioural problems ‘leading to exclusion from school, anti-social behaviour and crime’ (DCLG, 2012b: 1).  The government narrative however both overstates some problems and potential connections, and overlooks other crucial structural issues entirely, such as being out of work, relative poverty as well as poor health.  The potential for stigmatising is also apparent from both the decision to characterise families as ‘troubled’, yet focus on ‘troublesome’ behaviour to the neglect of other issues, circumstances and needs (Wenham, 2017; Levitas, 2012).

Whether the problems families face are primarily understood to be a result of social and economic disadvantage and marginalisation; or, fecklessness and irresponsibility, is a long running debate (Welshman, 2008). Yet notwithstanding the controversy and disparity around definitions of ‘multiple adversities’ (Bunting et al, 2015), there is wide ranging evidence both about the proportion of households in the UK who have multiple needs associated with disadvantage and the negative impact of adversity. For example, the Social Justice Strategy acknowledged that 11 per cent of adults (5.3 million people) in the UK experience three or more of six broad areas of ‘disadvantage’ at any one time. These include: education, health, employment, income, social support, housing and local environment (DWP, 2012: 8). Academic research evidence also suggests that it is the number of problems or issues present in families that is predictive of poor outcomes (Feinstein and Sabates, 2006; Spratt, 2012).

Within the prevailing discourse, families referred for intensive support are not only characterised as having multiple and inter-related support needs, but needs that have not been adequately addressed by other agencies. The TFP is rationalised, in part, therefore as a response to the inability of agencies to support these families: “…public services have previously failed families who have multiple problems because they operate in a siloed and mostly reactive fashion” (MHCLG, 2017a: 10). Although reference is often made to the long documented problems of coordination across agencies, the policy rhetoric commonly places the emphasis not on the failing of state and non-state agencies but as a failure of families’ ability or willingness to engage with welfare agencies and previous state interventions: “they are difficult to deal with” (Respect Taskforce, 2006: 22; Crossley, 2018; Bond-Taylor, 2015; Parr and Nixon, 2009).

As a response to the ‘problems’ presented by families with multiple needs, the TFP represents a non-statutory intervention that is often institutionally located within specific services such as FIPs (run by the statutory or independent sector), although in some locations mainstreamed as the main mechanism for delivering services to the most vulnerable children and families (Batty et al., 2013; Day et al., 2016). Phase one of the TFP was essentially focussed in Tier 3 services in England (see SCIE, 2012), that is referred services such as social services and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). They were originally positioned below the threshold criteria for social services involvement and child protection concerns which were not part of the initial focus. Families were asked to sign up to the programme, rather than being told that they must accept the help. However, such families could also be facing other types of more coercive response at the same time, such as a threat of eviction because of rent arrears or prosecution because of persistent absence from school.  As such, signing up to the programme was not totally voluntary nor totally coercive, despite some of the tough talking from politicians early on in the programme (Bond-Taylor, 2014). The semi-voluntary nature of the programme is both an advantage of the TFP but also an inherent tension (Parr, 2011). For example, child welfare concerns are likely to be present in many (probably most) of the households and statutory services (such as social services) may have to become involved. Hence, in part, the TFP represents another way of delivering state services to complex families with multiple problems that may initially bypass social services and other types of statutory intervention.

Evaluative studies of the TFP (and FIPs before them) have provided qualitative and quantitative evidence on the prevalence of family problems (usually in the 12 month period) before and at the point of referral, including levels of service contact (e.g. Day et al., 2016; White et al., 2008). Further, there is now a large and growing body of work that has sought to critically examine the role of the TFP in supporting multiply disadvantaged families (Crossley, 2018; Davies et al, 2015; Hayden and Jenkins, 2014; Parr, 2011). Within these studies, there has been some attempts to understand multiple adversities from the accounts of families (Wills et al, 2017; Bond-Taylor, 2016; Bunting et al, 2015); better understand families multiple needs (Boddy et al., 2016); as well as their experiences of multiple service use (Morris, 2013). However, to date, our understanding of the complex realities of families’ lives including their contact and relationships with state agencies and interventions and, in turn, the nature of their support needs has been limited (Jupp, 2017). Indeed, the large majority of scholarly work on ‘the family’ has tended to focus on ‘ordinary’ families and, by contrast, there is limited research that focuses on those that are highly vulnerable (Morris, 2013; Wilson et al., 2012). This article provides important quantitative evidence to this emergent and necessary area of research focusing in particular on social care involvement.  While the national evaluation of the second phase of the TFP (MHCLG, 2018) is one of the few studies that has collected data about child safeguarding problems in families referred to the TFP, the data reported in this article goes much further. In what follows, we present findings from a study that interrogated CSC data in considerably more depth looking not just at the number of families that have had involvement with CSC and the nature of that involvement but charting the number of referrals for each family.  It presents a detailed examination of the histories and extent of families’ social work involvement, and in so doing gives a unique insight into the needs of the most disadvantaged families.

Researching a local TFP

The data in the article are drawn from a LA funded research project which concluded in 2015. The LA area has a total population of over 200,000; of whom approximately 46,000 are aged 0-19. The population is predominantly White; Black and Minority Ethnic groups make up about 11 per cent of the whole population; and, 14 per cent of children and young people. There are about 86,000 households and 30,000 contain only one person. The city is in the top 100 most deprived local authorities in England and has pockets of severe deprivation. The city scores low (over 300, out of 354 districts, where 354 is the most deprived) on the composite index of child wellbeing developed by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). The number of children taken into care or custody is between 60 and 70 per year. At any one time, well over 200 children are in care and up to 20 are in custody (under one per cent of all 0-19 year olds).

The overall aim of the research was to provide a statistical profile of the needs of a sample of families referred to the TFP and the history of their key service involvements before referral. This was achieved through an interrogation of the organisational records and administrative data of key LA services. Data analysed included: referral data to the local TFP and CAF (the Common Assessment Framework document) at the time of referral; as well as historical searches on records relating to CSC involvement; educational problems and needs; and, youth offending history. The research was intended to provide insight and understanding about the complexity and intensity of the support needs of families. The research was not concerned with evaluating the TFP service.

The purpose of the research was explained to the families by their TFP support worker and the families gave their informed (signed) consent for the researchers to have access to their data. The research was ethically reviewed by the University of Portsmouth. Gaining signed informed consent from families and then verifying information about family members was a time-consuming process. However, once data on family members was verified with the family’s key worker, historical searches (focussed on social services involvement, youth offending and educational issues within the families) was undertaken by staff within the LA. Data on each family/family member was then passed to the research team who compiled a dataset for further interrogation and analysis.

103 families gave their consent to take part in the research. The 103 families had been referred to the TFP between 2012 and 2014 and represented nearly a fifth of the original target (550 families) for the city.  The sample comprised 449 individual family members. In addition, a purposive sample of ten of these families were chosen in order to move beyond statistical profiles of the families and provide further insight into the dynamic and complex issues within individual cases.

The following section reports on key findings from the research, focusing on the nature of CSC involvement with the families. This is supplemented by illustrative evidence from case files. The article then opens up the discussion about what this data might tell us about the needs of TFP families.

Profiling the TFP Families

Multiple Needs

We begin by providing a broad overview of the families and the level of identified need at the point of referral.  Although the configuration of multiple and layered problems is specific to each household, the research revealed commonalities across the families.  Figure 1 illustrates that some combination of educational need (indicated by persistent absence, special educational need or exclusion from school) was the most common issue across all families (88, 85.4 per cent). This is not surprising as it was one of the national criteria for referral in Phase One. The second most common issue was involvement is crime or anti-social behaviour (76, 73.8 per cent); again this is one of the national criteria.  Worklessness, similarly one of the national criteria, was an issue in nearly six in ten families (61, 59.2 per cent). A range of other issues were highlighted by the local referral criteria for the TFP: domestic abuse (45, 43.7 per cent); multiple interventions apparent in the family without any sustained change (37, 35.9 per cent); one or more of the children known to be a ‘child in need’ (36, 34.9 per cent) and substance misuse within the family (31, 30.1 per cent).  These latter issues are all national criteria in phase two of the TFP. In a minority of cases the child was already on a Child Protection Plan (CPP) (7, 6.7 per cent) when referred to the TFP.