Aren't the council spending £25m+ to build a pointless office? Hasn't the council pumped vast amounts into the fantasy capital of culture bid? I seem to remember us spending £300k on a statue outside the Library. How much did they spend on a car park? 4m?
To name but a few things.
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Edin Nowhere Impact SubP.L.22/23 Entrant
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Better training, better processes, more efficient working practices, etc etc. Are we saying that these things can not be improved on in any way and it's simply down to paying more as per usual? -
Offcomedun Important PlayerQatar 2022 Entrant P.L.22/23 Entrant P.L.23/24 Entrant Supporter Euro2020 Winner Euro 2020 P.L. 20/21 3rd Place
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? -
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?
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Very interesting overall. Appreciated.
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.
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Offcomedun Important PlayerQatar 2022 Entrant P.L.22/23 Entrant P.L.23/24 Entrant Supporter Euro2020 Winner Euro 2020 P.L. 20/21 3rd Place
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. -
Offcomedun Important PlayerQatar 2022 Entrant P.L.22/23 Entrant P.L.23/24 Entrant Supporter Euro2020 Winner Euro 2020 P.L. 20/21 3rd Place
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. -
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.
WAnd relying on more expensive agency staff is both a poor use of resources and also a system failure!
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.
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.
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Offcomedun Important PlayerQatar 2022 Entrant P.L.22/23 Entrant P.L.23/24 Entrant Supporter Euro2020 Winner Euro 2020 P.L. 20/21 3rd Place
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.
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.
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