I strongly recommend reading the detailed account in the
Guardian of The Clockoff survey about the well-being of employees in public and voluntary
services in Britain.
It reveals that staff work long hours, take few breaks and
experience high levels of stress. More than 50% reported being stressed either
all or a lot of the time. On average, employees reported working an extra seven
hours a week. Nearly 20% don’t take any break during their working day and less
than 25% take a main break of 30 minutes or more.
The article quotes Jo Cleary, chair of the College of Social
Work, as saying that social workers “… report juggling highly complex
workloads, with little time to reflect and plan their work. She says that spending cuts have placed “unbearable” pressures on social workers who have to undertake “… complex,
delicate work with some of the most vulnerable people in our society”. This she believes to be dangerous.
You might want to put these comments and the results of the
survey into the context of Ofsted’s most recent report, which concerns
children’s services in Sandwell.
The inspectors blast the local authority for not ensuring
that “…cases of high risk or actual harm to children have a statutory
assessment of need to enable children to be kept safe”. The local authority is
said to have failed “…to apply effective thresholds or to respond appropriately
to known or potential risk, which means that vulnerable children do not always
receive services at the right time or at the appropriate level”, so leaving
some children at risk. And it is said that “… too many child protection cases
have had recent changes of social worker, causing drift and delay in
progressing work.”
It sounds to me like the people in Sandwell are experiencing
some of the pressures identified in the survey and mentioned by Jo Cleary. But
I couldn’t find in the inspectors’ report anything more than a passing mention
of resources and certainly no analysis of the impact of spending cuts on the
level of services or the morale of staff.
It seems to me that child protection services in Britain are
increasingly being caught in a pincer movement. On the one hand government
makes it more difficult to do the job by cutting resources and on the other
Ofsted waves its big stick and points to shortfalls in service quality which are laid at the door of local practitioners and managers.
I don’t think that's fair on public sector workers and I
don’t think it's an effective way to protect children.
