That strange expression dates from a cartoon in the satirical magazine Punch at the end of the 19th century. The nervous junior clergyman is too scared of his bishop to admit that breakfast egg he has been served is bad.
Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr
Jones".
Mr Jones (the Curate): "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you
that parts of it are excellent!"
[Not copyright material – see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:True_humility.png]
A curate’s egg is what I thought of the research report on
decision making by the Behavioural Insights Team for the Department for
Education [1]; it was good in parts.
Incidentally there is a useful summary of the report in
Children and Young People Now.
The good bits are:
- The report recognises that time and workload pressures increase the reliance upon social workers’ intuition in making decisions.
- The authors draw attention to the kinds of biases that affect social workers’ ability to make objective judgements. Such as ‘availability heuristic’ (making judgments about the probability of events based on how easy it is to think of examples), confirmation bias (only looking for evidence that confirms pre-existing views) and the tendency to judge cases on their relative rather than objective merits.
- They recognise the complexity of social workers’ decision-making
- They note that many sequential decisions have to be made everyday, which can result in ‘decision fatigue’
- And they note that the information provided to social workers is often of relatively low quality. Resulting in the need to spend time and energy making sense of a complex jigsaw.
These findings lead to some sensible recommendations:
- Introducing feedback loops to help social workers learn from past decisions
- Developing simpler systems for filtering out irrelevant information
- Developing checklists to guide decision-making that are much less complex than current ‘actuarial tools’, such as the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need
The bit of the report where I began to find the smell of
hydrogen sulphide a bit overpowering surrounded what was said about evidence
and what works. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the view that the evidence base
for child protection social work is weak, but I thought that the discussion of
this tended to be mechanical and naïve.
The authors of the report talk as if “… an almost total lack
of robust evidence available or given to social workers on what works…” is just
some sort of unfortunate oversight which can be quickly corrected by
introducing “… quantitative, predictive modelling to identify effective
practices” which they say will result in social workers making “… faster, more
evidence-based decisions in the future”.
However, I believe that it is not simply a matter of some
group of clever people building a database – the report speaks of unlocking and
connecting the data. It is much more a cultural issue of creating the
conditions in which practitioners can become learners from their own practice.
Child protection in Britain – and I expect elsewhere – has
suffered for far too long from quick fixes being imposed from the outside. Yes,
we do want to make better use of data and yes we do want to learn what works
and what does not. But just as professions such as medicine have had to climb
their own learning curves, so too must child protection social work embark on a
long, hard journey towards building a more robust evidence base. That will not
come from data mining existing corporate systems; it will come from creating in
the people who do the work a scientific spirit of discovery and a commitment to
never-ending improvement. It needs the creation of organizations that value and
encourage learning, not which insist on toeing the corporate line and keeping
your mouth shut.
[1] Elspeth
Kirkman and Karen Melrose. Clinical Judgement and Decision-Making in Children’s
Social Work: An analysis of the ‘front door’ system. Research report. April
2014 - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clinical-judgement-and-decision-making-in-childrens-social-work
