Children and YoungPeople Now reports that staff shortages continue to haunt Birmingham City
Council’s children’s services department, which continues to be rated
‘inadequate’ by Ofsted.
Apparently about one third of children’s social worker posts
are vacant and have to be covered by agency staff.
Birmingham seems to me to be a good example of how an
authority can enter a spiral of decline. A string of Serious Case Reviews and
negative Ofsted inspection reports is hardly a good basis for attracting new
people to come to work in an authority or for retaining reliable employees.
Continued reliance on agency staff is costly and threatens the continuity of
service.
What Birmingham, like many other authorities, needs more
than anything else is to change culture. History cannot be re-written but the
ghosts of the past can be laid to rest. Changes need to be put in place that
demonstrate to all concerned that social workers who go there to work will be
supported, treated fairly and motivated to do good work. Caseloads and
workloads have to be more than reasonable – they have to be among the lowest.
Management support has to be first class, with regular high quality supervision
and frequent support. Bureaucracy must be rigorously slashed to ensure that
social workers spend their time working with children and families, not with
computers.
Most importantly the right attitude to human error needs to
be adopted and promulgated. Members of staff must be encouraged to be open
about errors and mistakes and to discuss them openly and to learn from them.
Those who do so should be rewarded. The goal should not be one of pretending that
error doesn’t happen or trying to coerce people into compliance with arbitrary rules
and regulations. The goal should be creating a safer organisation by
understanding how and why things go wrong and coming up with ideas for change
and improvement. Creating a learning environment based on a just reporting culture is what they need
in Birmingham; and elsewhere as well.
