The Supervision of Child Protection Work

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Abstract
It has frequently been recommended that statutory child protection services in Great Britain need greater provision of specialist supervision to support front line social workers. This qualitative study, based in social services departments in London, used the focus group method to explore the provision of supervision by team managers in a very pressurized work environment. The study highlights the difficulty of protecting adequate supervision time but shows how supervisors can use their skills to conduct case related discussion concerned with developing professional skills. ‘Inquisitorial’ and ‘empathic-containing’ functions are identified and an approach is proposed for combining them in training courses for child protection supervisors. The paper recommends that supervision training needs to be expanded, to be more precisely targeted, and that outcomes need to be rigorously and appropriately assessed.

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