Other than the dire warnings about a shortfall in finance, which are clearly important, I
found little in Norman Warner’s second report on Birmingham City Council’s
Children’s Social Care Services that grabbed me. Much of it was a dreary disappointment. Although to be fair the only copy of the report I could find on-line lacked the
appendices that might have contained something more upbeat.
The document speaks of an ‘improvement plan’ and an itemised
budget to support it, but it seemed to me to be more like a list of things that
Warner and the Government and key people in Birmingham had agreed should be
done. What I missed entirely was any sense of sustainable improvement based on continuous learning. Looking at some of the items on the list will
illustrate what I mean.
On the positive side the document calls for “…a credible
recruitment and retention strategy that minimises use of agency staff….” On the
negative side it doesn’t provide one – perhaps it is in an appendix! Sadly
Warner doesn’t seem to give much attention to retention which to my mind is much more important than recruitment.
Cynically I can’t help thinking that is because retention is much more
difficult. To recruit people all you need is a credible spiel and an
advertising budget. To retain people you have to treat them well, help them
develop and grow, make them feel safe and encourage their loyalty and
commitment.
I also warmed a little to the call to “…review, integrate and upgrade the
various dysfunctional IT systems used for social work case management.” Sadly
the document does not say how this will be done. To my mind the trick is to
realise that the IT system should support practice and not vice versa. IT that helps people retain important information and
to retrieve it easily and which reduces, not increases, the bureaucratic burden
is what is required.
Less welcome to me was the call for “… a more credible and
useful performance scorecard/dashboard that measures safety and performance.”
That sounds rather like crude management
by objectives, which has been the bugbear of ‘managerialist’ approaches to
children’s social care over the last 25 years. I would have preferred Warner to
have recommended hands-on management. Rather than looking at screens and
reading reports I think effective senior managers need to get involved at the
coalface. They should talk to workers and to children and young people and
their families, hear their opinions and note and learn from their concerns and their
ideas; and then go away to think about them and to act on them.
Warner also discusses “… assessing the capability of
existing social work staff and team mangers and assisting them to improve their
skills with a more effective system of supervision and appraisal.” There is
something horribly top-down in the way that is expressed. Although he talks of
devising something ‘less bureaucratic’ than the existing appraisal system, what
he seems to be thinking about still seems to resemble the end of term school
report with lots of ‘could do better’ entries. I would have preferred to have
heard something about how staff could be motivated
to learn and develop: more of that anon.
Warner goes on to mention “… the development of an effective
quality assurance framework within which good social work practice and
corporate parenting is likely to flourish with a professional head with assured
access to top management.” Again this sounds very top-down to me and seems to
gloss over all the well-canvassed difficulties in devising quality management approaches
suitable for complex services. Quality management has to be much more than a few
bright young managers being paid large salaries to say what other people should
do. And it has to be about much more than just reading the files and looking at
a few statistics.
But it is
what is NOT in the report that I find most worrying. Bizarrely, given
Birmingham’s long list of Serious Case Reviews concerning child deaths there little in in Warner’s report about safety.
I would have liked to have seen a lot of space devoted to specific proposals to
increase safety. I believe that there are some obvious quick wins: manageable caseloads,
reduced and simplified bureaucracy, better support from line managers, senior
practitioners and other experts. Then there are some wider objectives that
are about reducing blame, encouraging discussion of error and equipping practitioners
to learn from error, rather than simply fearing it.
Which
neatly brings me to my next point. There was nothing in the report about learning. Creating the conditions in
which people can learn is vital to the success of complex services; and there
is a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there is a long-established
problem of not learning in Birmingham. But Warner doesn’t focus on how people
can be helped to learn.
There is
also nothing in the report about culture.
Having myself worked in one or two places that are not wholly unlike
Birmingham, I expect that at the very least there are some toxic aspects to the
culture. I expect that a culture of blame still exists and that many people
feel they have to watch their backs. In my view tackling the culture is key.
And there
is nothing in the report about morale.
Helping people to learn, tackling the blame culture and giving people a safe
environment in which to operate should result in improved morale. But feeling
unsafe, fearing blame, having to keep one’s head down and blindly obeying the rules are
a surefire recipe for low morale.
