I don’t seem to be able to raise the same
righteous indignation as Professor Ray Jones in his article on the Channel 4 Dispatches Programme in Community Care.
I didn’t think it was a very good
programme, but it didn’t surprise me. In fact, it told me what I expected to
hear: that people working in Birmingham’s children’s services department are
not well supported, are under resourced, are under too much pressure and are confronted with
organisational changes that they don’t support or understand.
And it provided me with a bit of
information that I didn’t know already; namely that more than 23% of Birmingham’s
child protection social workers are agency staff. By any standards that’s far
too high!
But the memorable moments for me were
hearing staff talk about changes imposed on them from above as follows: “…
coming with new ideas to change the world…” and “…learning a whole new process
when you’ve just learned this process and you are told to change it again.” All
that bespeaks of top-down change management which has the effect of disorientating
the workforce and leaving members of staff punch-drunk. No wonder some of them
want out.
The whole Birmingham saga seems to me
to be one of Ofsted, SCR authors, civil servants, local politicians, senior
managers, venerable experts, national politicians and anybody else on the
inside, coming up with ‘smart’ (but wrong) solutions based on a poor
understanding of the problems.
I say this: understand the
problems and why they happen; engage the workforce in coming up with workable
and credible solutions; engage with children and young people and try to gain a
‘consumer perspective’; try to understand why errors and failings occur by
identifying ‘latent conditions’; don’t try to be clever, try to be right.
And forget the silly idea of turning
the whole thing over to a trust. That’s just an abrogation of responsibility.
If you live in the UK you can watch the
programme at:
Otherwise you can read about it:
