When child protection fails
The shocking findings of Glasgow's child protection review have prompted calls for greater surveillance and new powers. Common Weal’s Care Reform group, Marion Macleod and Kate Ramsden, make clear that the real lesson is a familiar one: children are being failed not by a lack of bureaucracy, but by years of underinvestment in the services meant to keep them safe.
The recent report of the Learning Review of Glasgow City Council and partner agencies’ failure to protect four children is extremely disturbing. It shows a series of failures which left four children in one family exposed (two of them for years) to extreme neglect and abuse of the most atrocious and depraved kind by the adults who should have been caring for them. Yet even without the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the indicators were there and could have been acted upon at a much earlier stage.
Arguments have been made that greater surveillance could have prevented the harm to which these children were subject, with some calling for the resurrection of the unevidenced and thankfully abandoned ‘Named Person’ procedure. The reality found by the Inquiry indicates that this is far from the truth. In this, as in tragically most of the other child protection catastrophes in recent years, it was not the absence of bureaucracy that failed children but the inability of those responsible for safeguarding children to see harm when it was staring them in the face. Yet again, a focus on the children, their voices and their needs was not prioritised, and the opportunity to protect them was consequently lost.
Perhaps the one saving grace in this case is that the children at least survived; too many have not. One is left wondering, however, what impact exposure to such harm over such a prolonged period will have on these children as they grow and develop. We can only hope that, having been removed from the danger they were in and placed by the local authority in out-of-home care, they receive the therapeutic and reparative support they need to look forward to adulthood as optimistically as any other child.
Let us be clear that we should not be looking for scapegoats here, or at least not among the hard-pressed, undervalued and poorly supported workforce. As we have highlighted for many years, there has been a fundamental failure of government to recognise that inadequacy of resourcing, insufficiency of support for front-line staff, valuing of reaction over prevention, ignoring the extensive existing knowledge base and believing that legislation, bureaucracy, inquiries, working groups, reviews, strategies and policies were more important than investment in public services. It is no coincidence that civil service staffing numbers have increased exponentially while front-line public services have been hammered. Now we face the prospect of a Scottish Government Public Service Reform Strategy that makes no bones about the fact that up to 15,000 jobs could go from public services over the next five years.
“In this, as in tragically most of the other child protection catastrophes in recent years, it was not the absence of bureaucracy that failed children but the inability of those responsible for safeguarding children to see harm when it was staring them in the face.”
Clearly, what went on in Glasgow is an indictment of the judgment of the services involved and of their capacity to intervene effectively. In some ways, though, it is surprising that this is an outlier on the graph and that there have not been more such failures. Social work caseloads are grossly disproportionate to what would be consistent with regular and frequent contact, forming meaningful relationships and enabling regular communication among services involved with families. Staff are still not receiving the level of training and support needed to accurately assess and manage risk. The outcomes for children who should be able to rely on a service that can protect them from harm and optimise their wellbeing are falling well short of what is acceptable. The outcomes for the staff trying to deliver a service are also distressing, with high rates of work-related stress, sickness absence, vacancies and turnover. Many social workers have already left the profession within five years of qualification.
Of course, social work should never be reduced to a system of scrutiny and surveillance. Families need to be given help to change and avoid risk and harm to their children. Children need to be active participants in this process, with their views sought and given weight. Social workers need to have the skills and be able to develop the experience necessary to provide this help. They need to be given the time to develop relationships with both parents and the children. Spending time with children away from their families doing “fun stuff” needs to be valued for the key part of relationship-based social work practice that it is, and not hived off to others.
Social workers also need to be able to accurately identify situations where risks to a child are such that his or her safety and wellbeing is compromised. They must have access to resources to which children can be removed when risk cannot be reduced or managed. If children have to be removed from an abusive family situation, the care system in which they are placed must have the capacity to enable them to overcome the impact of the harm they have experienced and eradicate inequality in their life chances.
A radical rethink of how we care for and protect children is needed. The Independent Care Review costing millions and the ‘Promise’ strategy costing even more have, predictably, had little impact. We have had too many time-limited projects and too little sustained investment. The myriad legislative and policy developments have added to the pressures on workers, with little evidence that they have kept children safer. We have had too much posturing and not enough attention paid to knowledge and evidence. Failures need to lead to change, not to blame.