Multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) practitioners are unsure over when and how to seek parental consent to share information, a study has found.
This was particularly true in cases where practitioners needed more information to determine whether children were at risk of significant harm, said the report, published by sector what works body Foundations.
The Department for Education-funded research also identified variations in MASHs, between a focus on assessing risk or on identifying families' needs in order to intervene early.
The report, by academics from University College London and Newcastle University, comes with the DfE rolling out extensive reforms to children's social care, designed to both improve support for families and enhance the quality of child protection.
On the back of the study, Foundations said safeguarding partnerships needed to be clear about the role of the MASH within the reformed system and minimise duplication between hubs and new family help and multi-agency child protection teams, respectively.
About the research
The study was based on a review of existing literature, a 2023 survey of English councils, a detailed examination of MASHs in three areas, workshops with practitioners and leaders and engagement with families with experience of social care involvement.It was designed to investigate the features and functions of hubs, their perceived impact, contexts in which they did or did not work well and their outcomes for families, in order to inform government policy on MASHs.
The 2023 survey, by the same research team, found 103 of 111 respondents (93%) had a hub or other multi-agency front door service, mostly created between 2011 and 2016, with 60% of these calling this service a MASH.
In most cases, the MASH, or equivalent, was the front door for all families referred to children's services and the gateway to both children's social care and early help.
Core features
The research identified several core features of MASHs, including:- The involvement of children's social care, education, health and police.
- Initial triage of referrals by a social worker to assess potential level of risk to children, along with families' needs, and determine whether the case was passed to the MASH and the timeframes for a response.
- Very short timeframes (two to four hours) to respond to cases that may require a child protection response, with timelines of 24 to 36 hours for cases that may be child in need, and longer periods, of up to 10 days, to respond to cases likely to result in a non-statutory response.
- Each represented agency gathering, analysing and sharing the information they have on the family in question.
Two models of MASH
Beyond these similarities, the research identified two models of MASH, with hubs existing on a continuum between each:- Risk assessment: the role of the MASH is to accurately assess a referred children's risk of significant harm where this is unknown or uncertain, with needs assessment or service planning located elsewhere in the children's social care system, such as with locality assessment teams.
- Needs assessment and service planning: here, the MASH aims to assess the holistic needs of referred children and their families, across the whole spectrum of risk, including in relation to early help.
Avoiding harm or intervening early
In the first site, the focus was on avoiding missing any child who might need to be protected from harm, which was often framed, including in focus groups, as preventing a local child safeguarding practice review into death or serious harm from being needed.Only cases where more information was needed to determine whether they met thresholds for child in need or child protection went through the MASH process, with others diverted to early help.
By contrast, in the other two sites, MASH processes were used for the whole spectrum of children referred to the front door of children’s social care, with one in particular having a focus on offering early help support in order to prevent escalation of needs to a statutory level.
Reflecting their broader focus, the second and third sites had more agencies involved with the MASH compared with the first.
Practitioners support broader-based MASHs but raise resource concerns
Workshops with 35 practitioners found that MASHs commonly combined needs assessment and service planning, with risk assessment, with fewer examples of hubs at either end of the continuum and the pure risk assessment model being least common.Practitioners were more supportive of the needs assessment and service planning model due to its potential to promote early intervention to prevent families' needs from escalating.
However, several practitioners highlighted that it may not always be feasible because of resource demands.
The value of staff co-location and skills
Research participants highlighted the value of staff from different agencies being co-located for at least some of the week, to facilitate a shared ethos, mutual respect and peer support, as well as the informal sharing of intelligence.They also highlighted the skill and experience required for practitioners to be able to select, interpret and analyse information from their agencies and then effectively share that with their MASH colleagues, to support effective decision making in a given case.
This was more challenging when the MASH had a needs assessment and service planning function, where the information gathered was more wide-ranging.
Challenges around parental consent
The research team found significant confusion among practitioners in relation to the issue of when to seek consent from parents, legal guardians or older children to share information.While practitioners were clear that they needed seek to consent where cases clearly did not meet statutory child protection thresholds, there was doubt about how to handle situations where more information was needed to determine whether a child was at risk of, or suffering, significant harm.
One site took the approach of always seeking parental consent where there was uncertainty as to risk. In another, researchers heard that the urgency of cases was sometimes reclassified to provide practitioners with more time in order to gain parental consent.
In the same site, staff voiced the view that it was good relationship-based practice to gain consent to share information, though researchers surmised that, in some cases, seeking consent was not clearly distinguished from informing parents about what was happening.
Another source of confusion related to how consent was obtained. Across all three case study sites, the referral form into the MASH included a box to indicate whether parental consent had been gained. However, practitioners were unsure as to what parents had consented to if this box were ticked and if such consent was informed.
The impact of MASH practice
Practitioners saw several benefits to MASHs, including keeping children safe and ensuring families received support more quickly than would otherwise have been the case, because of agencies giving a co-ordinated response.They also reported that MASHs supported professionals' wellbeing, by enabling them to debrief with one another, and helped them feel safe and assured about their decision making.
Another plus cited by research participants was MASHs' role in triaging support, which prevented children's social care from being overwhelmed by referrals that did not meet threshold, and also meant early help did not receive large numbers of cases that merited a statutory response.
However, parents who took part in the study reported that professionals sharing information about them felt "intrusive" and that they were "under surveillance", while making them feel excluded from decision making about their families.
In addition, practitioners highlighted groups who did not benefit from the MASH process, including care leavers and families with no recourse to public funds.
Impact of children's social care reforms
The report comes with the DfE rolling out reforms to social care, including the creation of multidisciplinary family help teams, to support families across targeted early help, child in need and child protection, and multi-agency child protection teams.The department's guide to the programme states that councils and their partners should "move towards [having] an integrated front door" and explore how MASHs can be more strongly aligned with other points of access to services for families, such as separate early help front doors.
The Foundations report said that the DfE's vision was consistent with a needs assessment and service planning model of MASH, but stressed the challenge of implementing this model for areas with relatively low-resourced MASHs, high rates of adversity in the population and high referrals of children with uncertain or unknown risk.
It also pointed out the potential overlaps between MASHs and multi-agency child protection teams, for example, in relation to strategy meetings, and said more work needed to be done to disentangle these.
Implications for policy and practice
On the back of the report, Foundations produced a paper detailing its implications for policy and practice.The what works body said councils and their partners should assess the risks of duplicating functions between MASHs, family help teams and multi-agency child protection teams.
It also proposed that guiding principles should be developed to help ensure effective multi-agency working at the front door of children’s social care, drawing on the research and some principles produced earlier this year by the Vulnerability Knowledge & Practice Programme.
Foundations suggested they include the importance of a skilled and stable workforce, with strong professional relationships, co-location, clear information sharing processes, co-produced thresholds, a shared strategy at senior levels and a functioning IT system.
However, it warned that resource constraints and capacity issues significantly affected the operation of MASHs, and said the DfE needed to be mindful of the significant workload and resource pressures on safeguarding partnerships and the impact this could have on their ability to implement the reforms.
