Quality | 2009.10.23
Balls clashes with social work leaders
Children\'s secretary challenged over time spent by social workers on record-keeping
The children\'s secretary, Ed Balls, clashed with social work leaders today as he was accused of stopping professionals getting out to see vulnerable families and wasting their time on paperwork to prop up an "ineffective" inspection regime.
In tense exchanges following his speech to the National Children and Adult Services conference in Harrogate, Balls rejected a plea to reduce the "heavy-handed" bureaucracy that kept social workers away from the frontline.
He said the failures in Haringey highlighted by the death of Baby Peter had nothing to do with record-keeping and were down to poorly coordinated interventions by different agencies.
But Hilton Dawson, a former Labour MP and chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, told him: "That response simply won\'t do."
To applause from the conference hall, he continued: "This is not an issue about good case work recording. This is not about good communication.
"What social workers are having to do 80% of their time is serve a bureaucratic machine which actually has nothing to do with good social work, and has everything to do with keeping a really ineffective inspection regime operating in a way that does not support really effective work with children and families."
Balls had first come under fire from Jim Couchman, Oxfordshire county council\'s cabinet member for adult services, and a former Conservative MP.
"The response of your department to Victoria Climbié and more latterly Baby Peter has been to impose a very heavy-handed bureaucratic system of records," Couchman said.
"Will you stand back now because that has led to our social workers having to spend far too much time in front of the screen and far too little time out there with the families that need your help."
Balls replied: "The answer to that is no … the idea that social workers who are dealing with complex cases of potential child abuse or neglect … wouldn\'t be making records or keeping track of what they do doesn\'t seem to make much sense."
He added: "The idea that you would use making records as an explanation for not getting out there and working locally with other professionals … I don\'t accept the idea that if we somehow went back to a day in which we didn\'t keep records somehow we\'d improve child protection, I think that is really barking up the wrong tree."
Dawson said the government had to trust social workers, to enable them to "take back their own profession".
Balls acknowledged that more more flexibility was needed in the way information was recorded, and was being introduced.
But he added: "The fact is that quality of social work training isn\'t good enough."
Newly qualified social workers in their first year are put in situations that teachers or police officers at a similar level would never face, he said.
"There isn\'t sufficient support for social workers in the early years of their career."
"There\'s still too often a standoff between social workers at the frontline and management. I think we need social work management to have much more of an understanding of the reality of work at the frontline."
Blaming problems on central direction and targets was "missing the point," he said.
In his speech to the conference Balls said social workers needed to be "less passive, more engaged, more part of a team".
He added that the government faced a "difficult balancing act" when responding to public anger about child protection failures, between showing action was being taken and not undermining the confidence and morale of frontline workers.
He admitted there were "big challenges" ahead in terms of funding. "After 2011 it\'s going to be tough," he said.
In a later conference session the chair of the social work taskforce set up to reform the profession, Moira Gibb, told delegates it was imperative they changed their attitude to dealing with the media.
"We find it very easy to hide behind confidentiality, but we live in an age where people do want to tell their stories," she said. "We have to be much better prepared when things go wrong, to explain and not conceal."
Gibb said some social workers had told trade unions they face threats of disciplinary action after suggesting they wanted to talk directly to the press. "Being on the taskforce has taken me to a new level of understanding of just how bad we are at telling our story," she said. "We do have a duty to explain ourselves."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/o[...]alls-clash-social-work-leaders
