The Safer Safeguarding Group’s written
evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into the reform of
children’s social work can be found on the Committee’s website.
The group concludes that the Government
lacks a clear focus on safety in children’s services and fails to take account
of a human factors approach to making children’s social work safer. On a number
of important issues – training, recruitment and retention, learning – the Government
fails to provide a clear analysis of the problems and any clear vision of how
safer and higher quality children’s social work can be brought about.
The Safer Safeguarding Group’s
evidence stresses the need for cultural change and the importance of helping
children’s social workers talk more freely and openly about the errors they
make so that they can learn more readily from then and discover the error traps
that lurk within their organisations.
The group commends to the Committee
inexpensive and evidence-based approaches to learning that have found favour in
other safety critical industries – human factors training (mandatory in civil
aviation) and Near Miss Reporting, which has played a significant role in
exposing error traps in fields such as civil aviation and anaesthesia.
Because
the protection and safeguarding of children is a multi-agency activity,
involving the practice of many different types of professionals and agencies, the
group believes that a learning culture based on an understanding of human
factors and near-miss reporting should be incorporated into multi-agency training
and management of cross-agency work, not just social work training.
