There is something refreshingly logical in the debate in the
Canadian province of British Columbia about the safety of the child protection
system there. The focus is on the question of whether there are enough people
employed to provide a safe service, with at least one influential report
concluding that there is a very significant shortfall.
It seems to me that any review of the safety of a child
protection service should begin by addressing the question of whether
sufficient people are employed to deal with the volume of work. But that is a
question that rarely seems to be addressed in any analytic detail in Ofsted
reports in England, which seldom, if ever, provide detailed analysis of how
many people are dealing with the work.
