Events | 2010.03.29
Khyra, Baby P. But Labour's response will cause more children to suffer | Madeleine Bunting
We have to manage the expectations of child protection, and not turn social workers into figures of public contempt
When the balance sheet is drawn up of Labour\'s attempts to reform public services – its massive increases in health and education, children\'s centres and Sure Starts – there is one sorry tale that needs to be added to the deficit column. It is an unedifying story of idealistic ambition\'s unintended consequences, an obsession with accountability, a deluded faith in technology, alternate penny-pinching and enormous flamboyant unfunded commitments, and always a preoccupation with playing to the Murdoch media. This has been the poisonous recipe that Labour has applied to child protection and by the time the full extent of this chaotic legacy becomes clear, the party will probably have long since left office.
To be fair to many of the well-intentioned Labour politicians who have held the brief over the last 13 years, this is one of the most fraught and difficult areas of public administration. Nothing grabs the public imagination as vividly as the image of a young child whose innocence has been betrayed. Last week it was Khyra Ishaq , who starved to death in Birmingham, dominating headlines. Brutality to children is unbearable; it outrages every instinct. In the past it was ignored by use of taboo; now it prompts modern day witch-hunts because searching for scapegoats is the age-old way to relieve guilt.
No one is allowed to say what is inescapable: child abuse is a terrible thing that has always happened and always will. A quarter of a million children are at risk of abuse at any one time, 50 children die of abuse every year. But preventing deaths is like hunting for needles in a haystack; it is impossible to entirely prevent. Abusers can be astonishingly devious; without a huge erosion of freedoms we value, some children will slip through the net. But instead, every case prompts piety from politicians: "This must never happen again"; "One death is one too many". Anything less is regarded as inexcusable complacency. No one has been brave enough to manage public expectations of child protection as difficult, expensive, and something that will periodically fall short. Instead, beleaguered social workers are set up to fail.
Labour has responded to this maelstrom of expectation and complex welfare service in two ways. The first, the audit culture, is a familiar aspect of Labour\'s reform across all public services: improve accountability through micro-management of procedures, impose targets and performance indicators. All of these involve a heavy reliance on computers. The guidelines have poured out of the departments responsible, probably prompting that haggard look evident on the face of directors of children\'s services. Last week there was another huge batch of new guidelines. At the same time, Sir Roger Singleton \'s first report as child protection adviser to parliament offered a quiet howl of anguish, pleading with government to stop generating guidelines and prescriptions.
Social services is perhaps where the audit culture has been most disastrous; in other services, such as the NHS, the absurdities of targets were exposed. But as Professor Harry Ferguson of Nottingham University points out, while the government and successive inquiries have focused on flows of information and how agencies – police, health, social workers – communicate, the crucial central issue is ignored: the complexity of emotional relationships.
What happens when a social worker sits in a room with a child and carer – as they did with Baby Peter – two days before his death and fails to notice anything amiss? What crucial skills does the social worker lack, or not use, to make difficult judgments? These are questions of personal development, experience, confidence: they do not fit neatly into public management tick boxes.
As acknowledged by Moira Gibb, chair of the recent Social Work Taskforce , the training has been distorted so that more attention is given to "doing a section 48 inquiry than in understanding people and relationships. We met people who thought social work was filling in assessment forms. Welfare bureaucrats."
The family Q case involved no less than 16 case conferences; the review of the case acknowledged that all the staff were competent and motivated but were "stuck": the system is so preoccupied with following procedures that it simply gridlocks. It fatally undermines professional autonomy: the serious case review of Baby Peter commented that the social workers were timid when they needed to be "authoritative". Ferguson believes in part this is because "social work has capitulated to a service user/rights agenda and there has been a lot of emphasis in social work education about empowering clients".
But the lack of authority is also about the wider context in which social workers are operating: do they feel they have the backing to use their judgment? And the answer is obviously no: management culture distrusts them, wider public culture has turned them into figures of contempt.
Labour\'s other innovation, energetically and proudly pursued, was full of good intentions. Labelled progressive universalism, it was the Every Child Matters agenda in which children\'s services and education would be merged as part of joined-up government. It promised more investment in better services for all children: Sure Starts, children\'s centres – it was stuffed full of wonderful ideas. But wise heads were immediately worried that the historically under-resourced social services would be lost in the educational agenda. The most vulnerable wouldn\'t get the targeted intensive help needed to prevent terrible tragedy. Some of these fears are already evident: 80% of local authority directors of children\'s services now come from an education background. Frontline social workers are left stranded, handling complex caseloads without a boss who understands their work.
Professor of social work Ray Jones argues that the policy – in the wake of the Victoria Climbié case – destabilised one of the best child protection systems in the world. Instead of seeing Climbié as a tragic exception, Labour resolved to eliminate all such cases – a noble ambition but one that it never funded properly. And worse looms. Progressive universalism is expensive: with local authorities already discussing spending cuts, the danger is of a stripped-down social services struggling to meet inflated expectations.
This constant revolution has been compounded by intermittent bouts of intense media hostility to social workers. Ed Balls\' collusion with the witch-hunt of Sharon Shoesmith , director of children\'s services in Haringey in 2008, is the most egregious example.
The result is a social work profession in turmoil: there is a national recruitment and retention crisis – some local authorities have been struggling with vacancy rates of 30 to 40%. The reliance on agency staff is chronic, and the churn rate in many areas makes continuity of case supervision impossible. Meanwhile the longer term legacy of Baby Peter has been a sharp increase (20%) in the number of children taken into care, yet no increased funding is on the table.
Every child only matters if you put in the money and the people who can make that meaningful, otherwise it\'s the equivalent of putting an "I care for the planet" sticker on your 4x4. Social workers have been given an impossible job; you have to be mad, desperate or heroic to want to be one. But it is abused children who will end up paying the steepest price.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]2/khyra-babyp-labours-response
