Star Hobson

Those are all one-off capital projects. You can argue the toss about any of them. If they didn't bid for the Capital of Culture people would complain about lack of vision and ambition. - "If a dump like Hull can win it, why aren't we entering" etc. When they shied away from putting millions into the the Odeon redevelopment - or failed to help Bradford City escape admin/buy the ground back/build a super stadium to share with the Bulls etc - they got lambasted and unfavourably compared with other, much wealthier councils who have backed grand schemes. They can't win either way.
Every council keeps capital projects distinct from its revenue. If you allocate capital sums to shore up revenue (eg by employing more social workers, paying better wages to get experienced staff etc) what do you do next year, when those staff and wages are still on the payroll?Keep raiding the capital until there's nothing left?

 

There is a national shortage of child protection social workers. It's a shit job that few people want to do. I did it when we were properly staffed and resourced and it burnt me out in a few years, so I escaped to mental health services - certainly no picnic, but nowhere near as stressful as child protection.

So it's a seller's market and people can therefore pick and choose where they work. You're correct that paying more might shift the problem elsewhere and that was exactly the situation when I started in social work in the mid 80s. In those days Bradford paid two increments more than Leeds, Kirklees, Calderdale and North Yorkshire and quite a few experienced SWs left those councils to work for Bradford. Leeds, in particular, struggled as a result. But, also, Bradford Social Services had an excellent reputation as a well resourced department that protected junior staff until they were ready for the heavy stuff, and had reasonable caseloads, so you had time to do things properly and had a mix of different work, not all screaming high risk child abuse cases.

Contrast that with now. Most teams are running with constant vacancies. Team Managers are sitting on long waiting lists of unallocated cases - many of them high risk. Social Workers don't decide alone to close cases - their managers make the final decision - and the longer the waiting lists the greater the pressure from managers on their staff to get cases closed in order to get the waiting lists down. Long waiting lists also eat up managers' time fielding enquires etc meaning that they often don't give their staff the levels of supervision that are professionally necessary. I seem to remember that an overworked, totally stressed out team manager who wasn't supervising staff adequately was a big part of the issue in the Victoria Climbie case two decades ago.

As well as vacancies, most of the Bradford child protection SW staff are either agency workers, who can leave at the drop of a hat if things get too tough, or inexperienced staff. Those rookie staff get pitched into heavy end stuff much quicker than they used to, because the lighter stuff no longer gets a look in. The pressures are so great that once they get a bit of experience under their belts they move elsewhere.

It's very hard to 'improve working practices' when the job is just constant firefighting, with no respite. Each decision to instigate child protection procedures brings more case conferences, more reports, more court hearings etc, meaning less time to visit other children at risk. So, when there's no slack in the system and you're already working way beyond what you can reasonably cope with, there's a built in incentive to give parents the benefit of the doubt. Mistakes are much more likely to happen when workers are overworked and under pressure to move towards closure and take on new cases.

Social work training is much better and much more fucused than it was when I was qualifying. It's not lack of training that has caused these recent deaths, it's lack of experience, lack of time, lack of supportive childcare services and, most of all, a massive overload of pressure which, once in a blue moon, leads to mistakes.
And it's not just about social work - school staff, health visitors, doctors etc are all under more pressure, leading to less collaboration and breakdowns in communication between agencies, which is a constant theme of previous child death inquiries. Note that the doctor who examined Star - ie the professional who was medically qualified to do so and who had the benefit of a full body examination, unlike the social workers - failed to diagnose non-accidental injury.

The fact is that constant calls for more investigations, more kids on the child protection register, more admissions to care etc just makes the situation worse, leaving less time to deal properly with the genuinely dangerous cases. If you design systems around the miniscule number of worse case scenarios that result in deaths then you make the system worse, not better. The only time that the media ever mentions social work is every few years when there is a tragedy. But there is no such thing as a perfect system. Mistakes will happen very occasionally, but they are outliers, not representative of the successful work that most social workers do for the vast majority of the time. The pressures in Bradford are greater than most, for reasons I've already stated several times. But child protection services are struggling in many other places because of the lack of resources and the zero tolerance of risk approach.

Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, said that “if there is any evidence, any inkling, any iota of harm to any child, that child [should be] taken away immediately”. How utterly ridiculous. Being in care can be horrific for children. There aren't enough foster carers or children's home places and the trauma of being removed from your family, even if it's far from ideal parenting, can be immense and lifelong. How many kids are we going to precipitously remove from home and often wreck their lives, in order to prevent a single child death every few years?

This article sums it up pretty nicely:
https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2021/12/16/the-tragic-deaths-of-arthur-and-star-must-lead-to-a-more-humane-and-supportive-social-care-for-families/

 

I think you make a good point about the workload and stress of the social workers on the front line, But I just get the feeling that by reorganisation and better management then the scarce recourses could be better used, Could not Admin teams take over the removal and court work and relieve the SW to move on for instance?

 

Very interesting overall. Appreciated.

But don't you have to try? I'm not having it that it's impossible with the right leadership regardless of how difficult it may be. There has to be a solution that isn't "pay more to steal staff from over regions" thereby increasing the amount of money spent nationally on the same resources and weakening the protection in other areas which just moves the at risk kids around. It's all sounds just a little bit fatalistic.

Surely the alternative is a reliance on agency staff and firefighting forever? If you can't train and retain then you're missing out on the whole central point of improvement.

This bit is interesting to me because naturally I think I would have a very similar zero tolerance approach to child harm. This isn't me being flippant about a serious subject but what would be the "correct" bar for the likelihood, would they have to be "more likely than not to be harmed"? "certain to be harmed"? What is the correct threshold if it isn't 1%. I suppose the extension to that is how many children is it "okay" to be harmed if that criteria is set higher? (acknowledging that you don't actually think it's okay for kids to be harmed of course, couldn't find a better way to ask that general question).

 

It's a balance of risks. Stressed out parents sometimes harm their kids. In the old days parents regularly smacked, or even took belts to their kids if they were 'naughty' but those things aren't tolerated these days.

Most parents who hit their kids don't kill them. An occasional bruise given by an overwrought parent is far from ideal, but it's nowhere near as traumatising as being ripped away from an otherwise caring parent and subjected to the care system, in which bullying, physical and sexual abuse are all well known occurrences. Experienced social workers learn to judge when a lighter touch intervention is sufficient to reduce the likelihood of further harm and when heavier intervention is necessary. But you don't learn that judgement by being pitched into the deep end too early - you need sufficient time to reflect and discuss and you need backup resources to help struggling parents, which largely don't exist now.

Do you honestly think that they haven't tried to improve systems and practices? They are forever tinkering with processes and reorganising structures to try to make things better. But it's all deckchair shuffling when the main problem is too much work and too few experienced staff to do it. You can't force people to join up or prevent them from leaving and with a national shortage of child protection workers, staff will usually choose to go where they are better paid and/or the working conditions are better

You keep talking about 'throwing money at it' as though I'm advocating profligacy. I'm not. I'm simply saying that team sizes, case loads, vacancies, real wages and support resources need to be returned to the equivalent levels they were at when the the system ran well and Bradford Child Protection services had a nationally excellent reputation. The fact that that can't be done is due to a lack of money caused by cuts. There's no getting round that basic issue. Management systems, processes, training etc can doubtless be improved but they'll make marginal, if any, difference without adequate funding.

 

I know you don't mean it like this but it almost seems like you're advocating a 'reasonable risk of death' as being the cut of point? That can't be right surely.

But I agree with the last part which is why training and retaining is surely so key.

I don't know. From what I've heard in this case if they've tried to make the process efficient then they've certainly failed. The whole thing sounds like a hotchpotch of different working practices, archaic working systems and just generally an organisational mess. Surely that would also help.

I don't think you're talking about profilogacy at all but I don't think on it's own it solves the issue. Firstly because as we've said it moves the poor social workers around so the answer isn't to pay more locally to cause no greater benefit regionally/nationally. To me you have to raise the standard generally.

But secondly, and maybe this is my private sector head taking over. If you have working practices that are inefficient and disorganised and just add more money to these poorly managed areas you increase the inefficiency without solving the underlying issues. You're still disorganised, you've still got the bottom end of the barrel who choose to work in Bradford rather than Leeds in poorer conditions....you're just spending more. To me first step is to improve the process so it's the best it can be and then when you're at peak efficiency then increase the spending. That way every extra pound actually gets spent on what it is supposed to be going towards rather than still propping up the same people doing the same shoddy job.

We're going onto more general points here which isn't really fair in a thread that pinpointed on one poor kid but can we at least agree that given the facts we know about this case there is no financial excuse for failing to spot the multitude of red flags?

 

I don't know. I don't think it's that clear cut. I haven't studied the case in depth, but I wonder how many of those 'red flags' were as clear cut at the time as they appear in hindsight. Hindsight is always 20/20. Reports of CCTV footage, for example, are unlikely to have been seen by social workers at the time. Were there multiple visits by a single allocated social worker or were they mostly one-offs by whoever happened to be that day's duty social worker? It's much easier to con a duty worker than someone who's following a case through over an extended period. Social workers are being castigated for missing injuries, when they have no power to require a child be undressed to examine them, yet a qualified A&E doctor didn't spot non-accidental injuries - so maybe they weren't as clear cut as is being made out. I don't doubt that some mistakes were made, but it's very easy for the media to compile a list of 'incidents' and make them look like they all form a coherent narrative that should have been spotted when the reality at the time is is nothing like that.

The potential financial excuse is that if the workers were so stressed out because of inexperience, staff shortages, extreme caseloads and consequent burn out, that they weren't operating at their normal level of competence then that could account for some errors. You must surely accept that people can't go on forever working in intolerable conditions without their performance suffering. It's hard enough running an efficient child protection team when you have a full complement of appropriately experienced, motivated staff; it must be a nightmare trying to do it with multiple vacancies, rookies and short term agency staff.

You can make 'efficiency' improvements to some degree, but if there simply aren't enough bodies and/or the necessary levels of experience to cover the work demands then you are going to get failures, however efficient the systems. You can't get an overrun system to 'peak efficiency' if there simply aren't enough people with the requisite experience to run it.

There aren't enough Child Protection social workers to go round. So, like it or not, there is competition amongst authorities for those staff. The higher than average demand on services, caused by poverty, in Bradford isn't going away. Tweaking the system might help at the margins, but it's not going to make a massive difference. What's needed is more bodies, with appropriate experience, to do the work. Given that the pressures on child protection social workers are always going to be high, however efficient the systems, because of the nature of the place, the only way you're going to attract and retain such staff is to pay better wages.

Of course I'm not advocating 'reasonable risk of death' as a threshold. That would be ridiculous. The legal test for statutory action is 'have suffered or are likely to suffer significant harm'. You then get into a debate about what constitutes 'significant harm'. Which is worse, the significant harm' of an occasional bruise, or the significant harm' of a childhood in care, being shipped from pillar to post, traumatised by separation from your family and quite often abused in care? There's a big grey area between the occasional slap or punch and killing a child. Persistent physical or emotional abuse obviously has to be stopped, and sometimes that unfortunately means removing kids from their families. But I've worked with plenty of kids in care and many of them would have chosen to go back to their birth families because the abuse or neglect they suffered at home was preferable to the separation trauma and their experiences in the care system. There are no easy answers, despite the simplistic way the media presents things.
And let's not forget, the number of avoidable child death tragedies over the decades is a vanishingly small percentage of the total cases dealt with. And there is no such thing as a system where mistakes never happen, in any walk of life, public or private.

 

I really don't understand how you can discuss a case like this is such depth without actually looking into it.

Videos and photos from the parents phone were shown to social services including HUGH facial bruises. No need for any undressing! I'd spelled out what I saw as the red flags all the way back on page 2 and forgetting hindsight I don't know how any layman could look at them and go "yeah that's fine" let alone someone whose job it is. If you genuinely think those red flags were impossible to spot I don't know what to say.

And if it NEEDS for the same social worker to go each time and that doesn't happen....then that's a system failure. Not a cost issue.

Fine. But it's not a coverall. It's not an automatic assumption that you can be inept just because you're busy. The whole societal system would fall down if that was the case. You still have to do the sodding job you're paid for.


WAnd relying on more expensive agency staff is both a poor use of resources and also a system failure!

Both those bits in bold are completely true but if you're not going to recruit and effective train staff to fix the second point the then you're in a never ending cycle around the first one.

When there aren't enough staff to do a particular job you have to be able to 'make' them. The same is true in ever industry.

But you have to minimise the inefficiencies first before adding money to it otherwise you're adding to the waste not removing it. Jeez, in some of the companies I've worked at if you'd gone to the MD and said "My departments a mess, we're unorganised, work is slipping through the net, nobody knows what's going on.....can I have some more money" You'd have created an almost immediate efficiency saving which was directly equal to your salary.

To me it's relatively simple and it's shocking for me to hear the flippancy. Maybe I'm just from a different era? I would want any child who is suffering from an "occasional slap" that isn't a one off mistake to be within the system. Especially if those occasional slaps are causing referrals from friends and family, marks, hospital visits, etc, etc.

The difficulty of the foster system is a can of worms but I'm not sure that keeping them with a caregiver who is definitely abusive because they may end up staying with someone who might be abusive makes that much sense to me.

 

It will only improve with privatisation of all the council's services including social services, Where we are the customer and can insist on a level of service. The trouble with in house operations is that when it fails it has a built in tendency to defend itself rather than sort the problem out, It will use all possible means to defend the status quo and the organisation and of course cannot be replaced, Privatisation gives you the tools to ensure targets are met or the contractor removed or penalised.

 

Just like the privatisation of Bradford LEA - that went well, didn't it?
And where exactly are these private companies, stuffed full of qualified social workers, queuing up to take on the job? Or are you proposing that we go back to an unqualified workforce? We've seen what a god awful mess the privatisation of care homes has created; now you want to do the same to child protection services?

 

Yes, I saw all those red flags on page 2 and, on the face of it, they look damning. But I know, from 32 years social services experience and perusal of numerous enquiry reports in child protection and mental health, that how these things are presented in the media - for maximum sensationalism and 'name & shame' effect - is often very different from the realities of what actually happened. Eg, what relatives say to the papers after the event is not always what they actually said to the services at the time. So, as I said on page 2, it does appear that mistakes were made and if there has been rank incompetence then, of course, some heads must roll. But until there's a proper enquiry into what exactly happened and why things went wrong I'm not going to assume that everything in that 'red flag' list is accurate.

No, of course it's not. If most of those staff were 'inept' and not doing the job they're paid for there would be a constant stream of these tragedies, but that isn't the case. How many non-accidental child deaths in cases known to Bradford social services have there been? I can think of one other since I came to Bradford in 1980 and that was the fault of the NHS for failing to tell child protection services that a dangerous hospital patient had been given home leave. I hope you understand that there's a huge difference between being 'busy' and being totally overwhelmed by the constant pressure of a seemingly unmanageable workload. Yet, despite the totally unacceptable pressures that staff are working under, Star's case is an isolated exception, not the norm.

Of course it's a cost issue! If there is more work coming into the team than there are bodies to do it then cases get left unallocated. Even stressed-out team managers sitting on huge waiting lists know that there is a limit to how many cases they can keep piling onto each of their workers' caseloads. That limit is far higher than it should be, but it's still a limit. So that means that alerts on unallocated cases often get seen as one-offs by whoever happens to be on duty that day. That is a clear consequence of under-funding leading to insufficient means to meet demand. If that's not a cost issue then I don't know what is.

Of course it is - it's a terrible use of resources. Every local authority prefers to have teams full of in-house permanent staff. But if you are unable to attract or retain permanent staff you have no choice but to use agency staff because the alternative is to leave posts unfilled, which is even worse than having to use agency staff.

I think I now partly understand some of your exasperation and constant talk of systems failures and training needs. You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that local authorities can train their own staff to do child protection work. This is emphatically not the case. Only qualified social workers can carry child protection caseloads and carry out investigations. To become a qualified social worker you have to do a three year training course at university. It's illegal to act as a social worker without the qualification. So all local authorities are totally dependent on the supply of qualified staff from university courses - they can't just 'make' their own, as you suggest.

Social Work is an extremely responsible job, yet it is undervalued by society in comparison with doctors, teachers, lawyers etc and is poorly paid by comparison with most other graduate jobs. So, unsurprisingly, there is a shortfall of people wanting to do the training. And of those that do become qualified social workers, most don't want to work in child protection - whilst undertaking their work placements during training they see first hand what a shitty, thankless, stressful job it is and most choose to go into other areas of social work instead. This is why I keep saying that system improvements will only make a marginal difference - there is a finite pool of newly qualified social workers each year and most of them don't want to work in child protection, and especially not in child protection in Bradford. Those that do come to Bradford rarely stay long enough to get the necessary experience to handle heavy end child protection cases like Star's, so you have a merry go round of inexperienced kids joining and leaving before they get good enough to do the serious end work. And if you can't keep permanent staff then you have to resort to agency workers, at greater cost, or leave posts vacant.

If you think I'm being flippant I can tell you that I most certainly am not. You appear to be massively underestimating the traumatic impact that being in care has on many, if not most, children that are unfortunate to be subject to it. It's not just about abusive caregivers - although there are enough around to make that a significant issue - it's the trauma of being separated from your family that can be so damaging even when the care being given is good. The average life outcomes for people who've come through the care system are dreadful. We have to think very carefully indeed before inflicting a 'solution' that is worse than the harm we are trying to prevent. I'm totally opposed to any form of corporal punishment of children but, having worked with kids and seen them devastated by the experience of being in care, I know that there has to be a balance of risks. All social workers know that the care system is terrible and should be avoided if at all possible. Of course it's not always possible to avoid it, and there are times when it's definitely the correct thing to do to remove kids from their parents, but it's not a neutral act - it often has long-lasting negative consequences. Part of the problem is that the services which helped struggling parents to improve their parenting and thereby reduce abusive incidents have mostly been axed due to government funding cuts.
The fact that you think this issue is 'relatively simple' speaks volumes about how little you know of the realities - it is light years away from being simple.