Professor Ray Jones makes some good points in his article in
the Guardian about how to improve inadequate child protection services.
Top of my list is his insistence on an ‘honest and open’
culture.
Jones argues that it is likely that services will have become
inadequate because there is a pre-existing “culture of top managers being
uninformed”. Thus there is a need:
·
To build trust
and commitment
·
For managers to be visible and available
·
For there to be reduced distance between tiers of management
·
For “difficulties to be heard, rather than to
remain unspoken”
What Jones does not explore, however, is why these factors
are so often absent. The list above sounds eminently sensible, but all too
often we encounter organisations providing children’s services in which top
managers are remote and sometimes even arrogant. Elaborate hierarchies have
developed and senior managers do not want to hear about difficulties. As I was
once told by a senior manager when I was a team leader, “We don’t want to hear
about your problems, we only want to hear about successes”!!
The greatest dangers are encountered in the territory of
admitting to mistakes and errors. Recent experience suggests to me that there
is still little national or local commitment to developing cultures in which
people are not just allowed to talk about errors and failings, but positively
encouraged and rewarded for doing so. But without open, honest frank and
widespread discussion of how things go wrong, however will they be put right?
In the meantime organisations that willfully fail to learn
from mistakes will continue to provide services that are inherently unsafe.
My own view is that the difficulties stem from longstanding
authoritarian attitudes at the top of children’s services, in which small
powerful groups wish to retain for themselves the ultimate say about how
services will develop and be structured. Openness and honesty imply distributing
power more widely, which is anathema in certain quarters. All my experience in
policy work suggests that whatever political persuasion holds sway, or whatever
ideas are fashionable, there are small groups of authoritarian individuals who
do not want widespread discussion and open learning: they want control and
compliance.
Sadly getting rid of ‘inadequacy’ forever will only be
achieved if these power structures are dismantled; and open, honest and just
cultures are put in their place.
