An Open Letter to Social Work Professionals

What If We Don’t Know Enough?

Dear Social Work Professionals,

I want to ask a difficult question. What if the knowledge underpinning our professional practice is not enough? Not because social workers do not care, and not because someone has failed to follow a process, but because the knowledge needed to understand the child in front of us has not always been sufficiently embedded in our training, our assessments or our practice.

I ask this as a social worker myself. I have had to recognise gaps in my own knowledge and seek out additional learning because I wanted to understand more. The more I have learned about trauma, neurodevelopment and child development, the more I have found myself looking differently at children and families I have worked with. It has been uncomfortable at times. It has made me question things I once thought I understood. It has also made me wonder how many children may have been misunderstood, not because professionals did not care, but because we did not always have the knowledge or the tools to see the harm and understand its impact.

That, for me, is at the heart of Harm Seen.

A child’s history does not disappear when permanence is achieved. Permanence can provide safety, stability and belonging, but it does not automatically bring recovery, nor does it remove the impact of what happened before. Children who have experienced abuse, neglect, loss and rupture may also carry the effects of prenatal exposure, neurodevelopmental differences, sensory difficulties, chronic stress and other experiences that can influence how they develop and function. These things do not exist in isolation. They interact over time, and their impact can become more apparent as a child grows and the demands placed upon them change.

If we are going to understand the child in front of us, we have to be prepared to look at what came before them.

Harm Seen asks us to look beyond what is immediately visible. Hurt, Abuse, Rupture and Memory are not simply things that belong in a chronology. They are part of understanding the child we are working with now. Seeing the harm means thinking about what a child has experienced, but also what those experiences may have done to their development, their relationships, their regulation, their understanding of the world and their ability to manage what is being asked of them.

This is why I believe we need to think much more carefully about disrupted childhood development. We can become very focused on what a child is doing, without always asking what has happened to the child and what that history may have meant for their development. A child’s chronological age does not necessarily tell us how they are functioning. Difficulties with memory, regulation, communication, executive functioning, relationships or sensory processing may be understood as behaviour when they may instead be telling us something important about the child’s developmental experience.

For children living in permanence, this matters enormously. The fact that a child is now safe does not mean that the effects of earlier harm have ended. A child may appear to be managing at one stage of their childhood and then struggle considerably later when developmental expectations increase. What can look like a change in behaviour may actually be a change in what the child is able to manage. If we do not understand the developmental journey, there is a danger that behaviour becomes the explanation rather than the starting point for curiosity.

This is where Harm Seen has to become more than an idea. It has to influence how we practise.

It means being willing to pause before deciding what a behaviour means. It means asking whether we have considered the child’s history, their development and the cumulative impact of what they have experienced. It means considering neurodevelopmental differences alongside trauma and adversity rather than assuming that one explanation will account for everything. It means looking at the environment around the child and the demands being placed upon them. Most importantly, it means remaining curious about what we might have missed.

The PATCH System Review has identified concerns about behaviour taking priority over underlying need, services working in isolation, blame replacing curiosity and support arriving only when difficulties have already escalated. These are not necessarily failures of individual professionals. They can be failures of understanding within the system. When an explanation for a child’s difficulties becomes established, it can follow them through assessments, reports, meetings and records. Families may repeatedly try to explain what they are seeing, while professionals can understandably rely on the information already available to them. Over time, the narrative about the child can become more powerful than the child themselves.

I think we need to be brave enough to challenge that.

Not by dismissing behaviour, risk or professional judgement, but by asking whether we have understood enough before reaching our conclusions. Have we seen the harm? Have we understood its impact? Have we considered how the child’s development may have been disrupted? And are we confident that the explanation we have reached really accounts for the child in front of us?

I also think we need to look at ourselves as professionals.

I do not believe every social worker can or should be expected to become a specialist in every aspect of child development. But I do believe we have a responsibility to keep learning and, importantly, to take ownership of the knowledge we need. We should not be afraid to say, I don’t understand this well enough yet. We should be able to ask for better training, seek out evidence, question what is being offered to us and ask whether it is giving us what we actually need to understand the children we work with.

Professional development should not simply be something that happens to us because a course has been placed on a training calendar. We are professionals. We can decide what we need to know more about, ask difficult questions and push for training that reflects what we now understand about trauma, neurodevelopment, disrupted childhood development and the lasting impact of early harm. We can challenge ourselves to keep developing rather than assuming that qualification means we have finished learning.

There is something powerful about taking responsibility for our own professional development. It means recognising that the children we work with deserve more than what we happened to learn at the point of qualification. They deserve professionals who remain curious, who are prepared to update their understanding and who are willing to say, I need to know more about this child before I make a judgement about them.

We should be asking our employers, our organisations and our profession for the right knowledge, but we should also be asking ourselves. What do I need to understand better? What evidence am I relying on? What has changed since I qualified? What training would genuinely change the way I see and respond to a child?

Because professional curiosity should not stop at the child. It should include ourselves.

The more we know, the more we can see. And sometimes, learning something new does not just give us more knowledge. It changes the child we are looking at.

This is not an attack on social work. It is a reflection on a profession I care deeply about. We are working with some of the most vulnerable children in our society, often trying to understand complex lives with incomplete information and within systems that are under enormous pressure. That makes our ability to remain curious even more important.

For me, genuine reflection asks more than whether I followed the right process. It asks whether I really understood the child. What did I know about what had happened to them? Did I see the harm? What did I understand about its impact on their development? What did I assume? What might I have missed? And, knowing what I know now, would I make the same judgement again?

Children living in permanence deserve professionals who can see beyond the behaviour in front of them and understand the journey that brought them there. They deserve us to recognise that development can be disrupted, that harm can remain relevant long after the original experience has ended, and that permanence is not the end of a child’s story.

Perhaps the hardest question is not whether social workers know enough.

It is what happens to a child when we don’t.

And what we are prepared to change so that the next child is seen differently.

Fiona Wells
Founder, PATCH – Passionate Adopters Targeting Change with Hope
www.ourpatch.org.uk