‘We can’t see level of risk’: Social workers fear ‘virtual visits’ mean they miss warning signs

‘When we go into a home, if [parents] are smoking cannabis we can smell it, or if they’re drunk we can see it in their manner. You can’t always see those things virtually,’ says one social worker

Government guidance allowing video calls to replace in-person visits was introduced during first lockdown (Getty/The Independent)

Starting out as social worker just weeks before the first Covid-19 lockdown, Laura* was acutely aware that one of the biggest challenges she faced was spotting the subtle signs that a child was at risk. Her job was about to get a great deal harder.

As the virus led to sweeping lockdown restrictions in March 2020, much of Laura’s work visiting vulnerable families and children moved online overnight – replaced by “virtual visits” via video call. With it, the tell-tale clues that often allow social workers to uncover what is going on inside a home were lost. The condition of the surroundings. The smells. The atmosphere in the room.

“I had one family where the mother was an alcoholic and on drugs, but when I wasn’t able to see that family face-to-face, I wasn’t able to see that she was using,” Laura says. “When we go into a home, if they are smoking cannabis we can smell it, or if they’re drunk we can see it in their manner. You can’t always see those things virtually.”

That case was one of many in her local authority, she says, escalated from being a “child in need” to a “child protection” case – deemed to be at higher risk – when she and her colleagues began entering homes more frequently again after the first lockdown.

The government issued guidance on 6 May last year effectively leaving the door open to interpretation for local authorities, stating social workers and their managers were “best placed to make professional judgements of risks and protective factors in place and to decide what form of contact they need to maintain with children and families”.

The guidance created confusion, according to Laura. “Some managers were saying you need to go into the home, some were saying you need to do it virtually,” she says. Many of what would typically have been visits to homes subsequently became conversations over WhatsApp, FaceTime and Zoom. It made it difficult to assess whether children were being neglected or abused, Laura says, adding: “There was also an issue of confidentiality. If I was talking to Mum and there was a potential domestic abuse situation, the partner was usually home… so Mum couldn’t say what was happening.”

Laura was sometimes able to carry out some socially distanced visits outside the house, but this also had limitations: “We can’t really see the level of risk from the doorstep. You need to see the child’s bedroom, the child’s behaviour, the condition of the home. Sometimes where there’s a question of whether the child is being neglected, we have to look in fridges and cupboards.”

Some 52 per cent of social workers agreed or strongly agreed that they had encountered more difficulties monitoring safeguarding access or carrying out effective adult and child protection visits due to limited face-to-face access since the start of the pandemic, according to a survey of 1,119 carried out at the end of last year by the British Association of Social Work (BASW).

Rebekah Pierre, a BASW professional officer who spent the first two months of the pandemic working as a social worker in London, tells The Independent she and colleagues had to balance the risk of potentially transmitting Covid-19 with the level of risk to the child.

“Some of our visits did turn digital but where we deemed there to be high risk, such as in every child protection case, [they] still went ahead face-to-face,” she says. “So we made enormous efforts to try and be creative with that […] I’d go physically sit in the garden with this young person, sit two metres away from them, was covered in PPE and had to be really creative about how to still engage with this child in a meaningful way...” Some even went out without proper PPE, she says, even resorting to using gardening gloves.

A Department for Education survey of English local authorities found after an increase in face-to-face contact following the first lockdown, from January to February 2021 some “indicated that they were making a return to using virtual visits for some children”. As the year went on, more councils said face-to-face visiting was “normal practice”.

Sara*, a London-based social worker, says she constantly feared an abusive adult could be “lurking” in the background of virtual visits during the first lockdown. “There was always the added question of how private are these conversations? I think I saw the child alone, but someone could have been on the other side of the phone nudging them,” she says.

While she now does all of her safeguarding visits face-to-face, Sara says many social workers do not: “I think people got into the habit of doing them virtually. Some people thought it was easier. You don’t have to travel.”

A third social worker, based in London, says she too was aware visits were sometimes still being carried out virtually. “There are many social workers who have hardly been out at all. There are others who go and stand at the front door. What good is that? You see they’re alive – that’s not establishing a relationship.”

The Department for Education said between May 2020 and July 2021 around 95 per cent of children on a “child protection plan” had contact with a social worker in the previous four weeks – however, a spokesperson conceded the department included virtual visits as part of its definition of “contact” and did not provide a breakdown.

For Laura, the benefits of face-to-face visits are clear. Earlier this month, she was told by a manager to carry out a virtual visit to a family because the parent said the children had Covid. But, trusting her instincts, she decided to do an unannounced doorstep visit instead. What she found vindicated her actions: a man who should not have been in the home. “Had I done a virtual visit, I would not have known,” she says.

*Names changed