It is hard not to feel dispirited at the sight of everybody
jumping on the we’ve-got-to-do-something-about-Rotherham band wagon, especially
when several of the key players in this new game are not exactly known for
their expertise in the area of child sexual exploitation (CSE).
Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has asked Louise Casey to lead an investigation into what went wrong in Rotherham.
Ms Casey is clearly a go-getter and undoubtedly popular with
Conservative ministers, like Pickles, who doubtless share her uncompromising views
on homeless people and troubled families. But I can see no mention in her
numerous published profiles that she has any experience at all of dealing with investigations into child sexual exploitation.
And I don’t think that understanding what went wrong in
Rotherham is going to be a matter of expressing ‘uncompromising opinions’
and banging a few heads together, which seem to be characteristic of her style
of interaction. Painstaking forensic analysis seems to me more likely to be the
only way forward; and I don’t think that’s her style.
Nor do I have much faith in Ofsted being able to draw on a
well of expertise in carrying out its proposed thematic inspections into CSE.
There are only two short ‘good practice resources’ on child
sexual exploitation on the Ofsted website (one concerning services in Blackburn and the other in Staffordshire). These are thin, superficial descriptive documents of four
or five pages each. There is nothing analytic, nothing penetrating, nothing
which seems to be based on research and nothing particularly insightful. In
short, there isn’t much.
Nor has Ofsted much of a track record when it comes to participating
in inspections across services. The inspectorate has only recently been
persuaded to join, somewhat reluctantly, in integrated inspections for children
in need of help and protection. But uncovering and understanding the kinds of
failures that happened Rotherham involves looking at how a whole range of
agencies – police, courts, health, social care – deal (or fail to deal) with
CSE. It involves systematic investigation and analysis of their interactions,
or lack of them, and of the organisational cultures contributing to the
failures.
Finding out the extent and nature of what has gone wrong in
Rotherham is vitally important. What we do not want, however, is a series of
documents that are packed with the preoccupations and ill-informed opinions of
people and institutions that are more influenced by organisational and
political agendas than by a dogged determination to unearth the unpalatable
truth.
If I read anywhere in the mounds of documentation which are
likely to amass that management was not ‘robust’ enough or that ‘case-file
auditing’ was not ‘embedded’ I will just have to scream.
