I liked the post on the Association of
Directors of Children’s Services website by Ian Thomas, Strategic Director of
Children and Young People’s Services at Rotherham Council.
Ian argues against the prevalent culture of
blame in society and its ramifications for children’s services and concludes
that blaming staff for service failures should only happen in a very small
number of cases of clear ‘professional negligence’. He concludes: “No one
comes to work to deliberately do a bad job.”
One aspect that Ian doesn’t mention is that
a blame culture results in unsafe
working. Where people are afraid to talk about service failures, and their
parts in them, opportunities to learn from things going wrong are significantly
reduced. And that means that members of staff and managers have fewer
opportunities to create safer and more reliable services.
The only safe services are ones in which everybody involved in service delivery and support are not only willing to explore errors, especially their own, but are actively congratulated and rewarded for doing so.
The only safe services are ones in which everybody involved in service delivery and support are not only willing to explore errors, especially their own, but are actively congratulated and rewarded for doing so.
