A Good Read

Whilst sailing somewhere above 71 degrees north earlier this month, I needed a good book to while away the endless hours of daylight. I found it in Harry Ferguson's Child Protection Practice (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

The great thing about this book is that it is primarily concerned, not with the macro world of child protection, but with the minutiae of everyday practice. Ferguson looks at such seemingly mundane events as performing a home visit or taking a child somewhere in a car and explores their significance and their potential as opportunities for effective child protection practice. There is an excellent chapter on the importance of touch in protecting children, which is a welcome counterblast to what he calls "deeply troubling cultural norms" surrounding touch.

This is just the kind of book we need: one that bases it's conclusions in an accurate understanding of what child protection practice involves and what can be achieved.

It is very readable too.

Bureaucracy - It’s not just the UK

The Irish Examiner reports that Irish social workers are at loggerheads with the Health Service Executive (HSE) over a new standardisation process for dealing with child protection cases.

http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/social-workers-criticise-hse-child-protection-process-159523.html

Echoing concerns in England about the ICS system, it is said that research indicates that the proposed system in Ireland (The National Child Care Information System Business Process Standardisation Project) would result in “… social workers spending 60%-80% of their time at their desks”.

The system’s purpose is said to be “… to increase the amount of data the HSE has available on children interacting with care services”.

It is sad to hear that the Irish Government seems set to emulate the same mistakes as the British.

Unmanageable Caseloads

Children and Young People Now report on research by the Children's Workforce Development Council that found that social workers in 57 English local authorities are dealing with between 20 and 30 cases at a time. In six authorities average caseloads exceed 30. The report also found significant levels of vacancy and agency working.

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Management/article/1077800/social-workers-50-councils-high-caseloads/?DCMP=EMC-CONCYPNow%20Daily

We need to remember that when we say "20 cases" this will always involve more than 20 children, since most families have more than one child. So many social workers are dealing with say between 30 and 40 children at any one time. That’s a lot of children to be concerned about and to keep track of.

Just consider home visiting, an absolutely essential part of working with children who are at risk. Most workers will be lucky to be able to conduct three home visits in a day and I expect that the average is about two. If you allow for a two hour meeting and one hour’s travelling time, that leaves just 30 minutes to write up the visit – and then half a day has been used up. So with a caseload of 30 it would take 15 working days to visit all the families – one home visit every three weeks.

But that does not allow for the fact that the social worker will be involved in other time consuming things as well. There will be meetings, child protection conferences and court hearings. Not to mention training. And then there is the administration! Some estimates say that more than 60% of a child protection social worker's time is absorbed in administration.

So it is not surprising that quite a lot of vulnerable children are not receiving frequent visiting from their social workers: monthly or even worse. And it is not surprising that social workers are often overtaken by events and fail to spot significant changes in children’s circumstances. In fact their workloads make it very likely, if not inevitable.

More Appeals

I read in yesterday's Evening Standard that other Haringey staff, sacked after the Baby Peter tragedy, have followed Sharon Shoesmith in winning the right to appeal against their dismissals. The summary sacking of children's social care workers involved in the case sent out a most unhelpful and damaging message. I hope that they are successful in their appeals.

Ofsted should be split

I was very sorry to hear that the Government has apparently decided not to split Ofsted.  

Children and Young People Now identifies two reasons being put forward in support of this decision:

1. Structural change is less important than the quality of inspectors and inspection methods
2. A single inspectorate is necessary to mirror the structure of local council services.

(“Ofsted survives calls for it to be split”, 28 June 2011

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Education/article/1077311/ofsted-survives-calls-split/?DCMP=EMC-CONCYPNow%20Daily

The first reason is better than the second. Every-one would agree that in the final analysis it is the quality and competence of personnel that matters. But the question is whether the right people will be recruited and retained if they have to work in a small corner of a large organisation which is culturally distinct and which operates according to a different knowledge base. Understanding schools is quite different to understanding child protection.

The second reason is really quite silly. There is no reason at all why the structure of inspectorates must reflect the structure of local council services. Apart from anything else it is not the case that all local authorities have similar structures. And we certainly wouldn't expect that the structure of (say) the Nuclear Inspectorate would have to change because some of the companies it inspects had diversified into other activities, like retailing or financial services!!


Furthermore this reason contradicts the first, which insists that structures are really not very important. And it seems to miss an important point completely: effective inspection comes about because inspectors are knowledgeable about what they are inspecting, not because what they are inspecting has a particular organisational structure.

The problem with Ofsted inspecting child protection services, as I see it, is that they have inappropriately attempted to subsume child protection inspection under inspection methodologies which are designed for school inspection, and they have failed to develop any kind of knowledge centre about child protection best practice. These are singular failures which are reflected in inspection reports which are often uninformative and formulaic.
 
I think the government will rue the day it decided on this course of action. What is required is an inspectorate for child protection which is not limply configured to arbitrary organisational boundaries, but an inspectorate which can develop and focus its expertise on the issue of child protection across a range of organisational and professional boundaries. That would truly support multi-agency "working together".

Leave it alone ...

Sad to hear that the Government has decided to appeal the Sharon Shoesmith judgement in the Supreme Court. I think that will be a waste of public money and generally very unhelpful.

NO POSTS FROM THIS BLOG IN JUNE. Going to the Arctic for a dose of midnight sun. Back in July.

The Recruitment Crisis and a Just Culture

In an article entitled "Child protection work facing recruitment crisis after Baby P tragedy" the Guardian's Patrick Butler reports that many child protection social workers have resigned because of media attacks on the profession in the wake of Baby Peter's death. 

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/27/child-protection-recruitment-crisis

Butler talks of "a long shadow" having been cast over children's social care and speaks of 

the results of workforce shortfalls being "catastrophic" for many councils. Sadly he does not provide us with the detailed figures, but there is every reason to believe that this report is accurate. Information from a variety of sources endorses what he says.

In this context, I was struck by John Humphrys' interview with Sharon Shoesmith on the BBC's Today programme this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9499000/9499424.stm.  

Humphrys said that the nation wanted to know that someone was accepting the blame for Baby Peter's death, because, he said, "... if they do not accept the blame, how can we stop it happening again"?

But the opposite may be true. We may only be able to stop it happening again if we do not pursue blame against individuals too far. Not only does the pursuit of individuals give rise to a defensive culture, in which nobody will admit to even an honest mistake, but it creates a climate in which many people simply do not want to do the job, waking up each morning wondering just how long it will be before they become another Sharon Shoesmith.

Sidney Dekker is a Swedish academic, who also is an airline pilot. In his role as Professor of Human Factors and Flight Safety at the University of Lund, he investigates safety failures in aviation, medicine and other sectors. In his book Just Culture (Ashgate, Farnham 2007) he argues that not having a just culture in organisations damages safety by obstructing investigations, creating fear and fostering bureaucracy. His book should be read by everyone who works in a safety critical industry, like child protection.

If we want people to work safely in child protection - indeed if we want people to work in the profession at all - we need a just culture; and that is precisely what we have NOT got.