This morning Graham Cleaver interviewed me about care proceedings. We talked about the Baby P case which hit the headlines at the end of last year and prompted a review of children's services by Lord Laming who also carried out the review following the death of Victoria Climbie in 2000. Unfortunately as Lord Laming commented, not much has changed since his earlier report. Lord Laming recommended then as now that agencies (social services, police, education) need to work much more closely together when a child is at risk and need to be more vigilant and where appropriate intervene earlier than now. But then as now, the problem is exacerbated by lack of resources. There are simply not enough well trained social workers. I know from my own experience representing parents (I used to do a lot of this work but decided to move into different areas about 5 years ago) and from friends who are social workers how sensitive and difficult this type of work is: it is really working on the sharp edge. Social Services Departments are often 'running with vacancies' which just puts more pressure on the staff remaining. Lord Laming recommends a national strategy to address recruitment and retention problems in social work as well as increased quality of degrees, but I suspect he did the same last time...
One thing that concerns me too is that having lambasted the system for 'over emphasis on process and targets' he recommends the introduction of targets for child protection, similar to school targets (and incidentally school targets are now less than flavour of the month and some are being dismantled). What targets does he mean - x number of children at risk to be taken into care with y time? Targets are a distraction at best and at worst can actually cause professionals to get their eye of the ball. What we need is better professionalism (and training), not more targets, in my opinion.
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Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't. Is it any onder people are reluctant to become social workers
ReplyDeleteTargets are always the easy short term solution. I agree that better training will benefit everyone in the long term.
ReplyDeleteA devastating problem that is getting worse rather than better. As you say, targets are never a solution. Like highway improvements to a bottle neck on a long, bad road, the problem is just shifted somewhere else along the route.
ReplyDeleteThe problem for social services is attempting to identify the kids who are truly at risk in a disfunctional society, where case work is growing, good social workers are too few, and bad managers are too many.
Good reading especially since hearing the many stories my sister tells me since working for Social Services in Foster Caring.
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