5 Child protection for slow learners

The Lamming review (again) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7938826.stm further reforms http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/more-training-for-social-services-bosses-after-baby-p-tragedy-1643084.html and a later report http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/13/child-protection-laming-babyp-report

I can remember 25 years ago, when working in a neighbouring local authority, being told that one in five children on the ‘at risk’ register had no allocated social worker in Haringey. Any reports or information about those unallocated children would be dealt with by whoever was on duty in the area office at the time. In short, there has never been an adequate child protection system in place in this area of north London; demand has always been greater than the social work resources available. While being a difficult area, Haringey was not extraordinary, its problems placed it at the end of a spectrum of difficulty but these problems were common to most urban social work departments in the UK. The present government came into office pledging to address this.

As with much government reform, the emphasis has been to seek to make the work processes of child protection more efficient, so that the existing staffing and expenditure would then be adequate to the level of demand. In management terms, this led to the adoption of a simple form of Taylorism, where you had only to define the one best way to do child protection work and then put in place a management and organisational structure to ensure that that this happened and you have resolved the problem. Hence the focus on procedures and managerial/organisational structures for last 12 years.

Unfortunately, good child protection work is more craft than science. Every effective child protection social worker I have known has worked differently. People develop their own style and ways of doing things. Try to do it by standardised procedures, painting by numbers as it were, and all you achieve is to do it badly. That is what Lamming and his government friends don’t seem to grasp, child protection work is volatile; families don’t go into crisis at convenient times or in a convenient sequence. For a social worker, their case load can be undemanding one week and then manic the next. In Taylorist terms, these differences are an undesirable inefficiency; but in social work terms this isn’t inefficiency, it is how people behave in the real world and that any work load has to include contingency time for the unexpected. There is no alternative to improved resourcing and lower case loads.

On a more optimistic note, some of the discussion of the baby P case would seem to show that learning is emerging from this debate. It is being said that senior managers should have some experience of child protection before being appointed (Sharon Shoesmith had none). This is an improvement, but who thought it wasn’t necessary when Sharon and half of her colleagues were appointed? Similarly, computer systems which demand standardised modes of work and standardised inputs are now being criticised. Fine, but Lamming was their loudest advocate. It does seem to be taking a rather long time for some fairly obvious child protection pennies to drop for our leaders.