Melanie Watts

Keeping children and young people safe from harm and making predictions about risk is a challenging endeavour. Often it requires practitioners to form judgements based on incomplete and unknowable outcomes, it is fraught with levels of uncertainty. In England Practitioners from across a range of professional disciplines, including child protection social workers, police and health colleagues share responsibility for safeguarding and are required to work together to uphold this function. To operationalise this, many have adopted an interdisciplinary model of practice, called multi-agency safeguarding hubs (MASH). This study uses ethnographic, mixed-method approaches to examine one case study site. The site is a MASH interdisciplinary team housed in a local authority office in Northern England. Direct observations of practice took place over a period of three months in 2019 and 11 practitioners were interviewed to gather data to inform this study. Emergent themes identified that the contemporary MASH model is process-driven and directed by external contextual factors of auditing and control. This process seeks to enforce risk elimination by imposing time pressures on decision-makers, who must work at pace to keep up. To manage high volumes of data practitioners employed vertical decision-making as a form of accountability. The pace of practice produces emotional strain, with a fear of getting things wrong weighing heavy on professionals. Decision-making in this setting although directed by process, took place in action via informal and formal reflective sensemaking. Practitioners relied on each other and collegiate sensemaking was an important facet of professional judgement in this working environment. This study contributes to the knowledge base of decision-making in child protection settings and offers practice and policymakers important insights on the optimum working environment.