Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 179)
MONDAY 20 DECEMBER 2004
DAME GILL
MORGAN, MR
JOHN COUGHLAN,
CLLR JAMES
KEMPTON, MR
DAVID HAWKER
AND CHIEF
CONSTABLE TERRY
GRANGE
Q160 Jeff Ennis: You have just said
that schools are not involved with a statutory duty to co-operate;
and obviously GPs are in a similar situation, James. Have you
any comments to make, or have the health people any comment to
make about the GPs not having the statutory duty to co-operate?
Cllr Kempton: I would say it is
a similar issue of concern with GPs. In the area of child protection,
working with GPs is essential, and although there is very good
evidence around of good working practice, we are concerned as
to why some groups were left out and some were included, and what
that might mean in practice.
Dame Gill Morgan: This is one
of the questions we asked the primary care trusts because if they
are to make this deliver they will have to make sure that they
can engage GPs at a local level. Primary care trusts regard it
as a challenge to engage all GPs, and they are very keen to see
some proper incentives in the system to enable them to do that.
One of the issues that is not well formed enough—and this
is an issue for us not for government—is that in framing
the quality and outcome framework of the new GP contract, which
tries to deliver general practice services against a set equality
standard, is unique in the world. When we have gone back to look,
in the light of the Children's Bill at the recommendations about
what should be measured around the quality of children's services,
we think it is very like. We do not think it is good or strong
enough, and we would go back and think what we can do, in reviewing
the quality and outcome framework, to be better. On the other
hand, we know that if we look at the Royal College of GPs, they
have some very clear statements of what a framework should look
like, which seems to be very simple, very clear, and could be
put into practice within general practice very easily, to put
a set of standards that they could objectively measure themselves
against. We know that the practices that are committed to the
quality expected by the Royal College of General Practitioners
all have a named doctor and a named nurse, so they are already
well in train for the sort of principles that you would want.
The biggest challenge, however, is that if you look at the number
of individual GP practices, you have to have something that gets
into every practice. That has to happen through primary care trusts
and through training, development, and keeping people up to date.
It will also have to happen through things like re-validation
and through the quality and outcomes framework, because we know
those are things that doctors inter-relate with quite intimately,
because at the end of the day they affect pay; and something which
affects pay is more likely to be a powerful driver of conformity
than something that is enshrined in statute. We have some mechanisms
for making sure that it does not become a problem around GPs,
which are potentially easier to deal with than some of the concerns
around schools.
Q161 Jeff Ennis: James, you said
that local authorities need to take the lead in Every Child
Matters, which I do not dispute. How do the other agencies
feel about local authorities taking the lead in this matter? Should
we not just leave it to local authorities and have other agencies
taking the lead more?
Cllr Kempton: It is clear that
the leadership role is a partnership one as well. I am not envisaging
that local authorities work in isolation; and there is evidence
of strong local partnerships already around the place. What might
be new is making sure that those partnerships are focused around
the five outcomes, and I think the leadership role of putting
the outcomes at the centre. To give an example from my own authority,
the very first thing we have done is to go out and talk to children,
parents, and the professionals that support them, to agree a vision
for the kind of services we want to see. We are now taking that
vision around all the statutory and voluntary sector organisations
in the area, getting people to sign up to that. That is what I
mean by leadership. It is not a command and control relationship,
but it is about getting people to buy and to putting those outcomes
at the centre of what they do, and assessing themselves against
the outcomes. I guess we will talk a little more about this when
you ask questions on inspection; but that is the key first step
that brings people together. It is no easy thing to reconfigure
services around the child and its family. We all know that one
of the reasons why we are discussing this today is because services
have failed to do that in the past sufficiently well.
Q162 Jeff Ennis: That is a good recovery,
James, but I would still like to hear the other agencies' views
on this.
Chief Constable Grange: You will
know that local crime and disorder partnerships are partnerships
between the local chief executive and the local chief superintendent,
and anybody else who should engage in statutory partnerships.
Where you have children's services and outcomes for children across
all the authorities, that kind of partnership is essential, and
there has to be leadership. If you are going to have leadership
that is locally managed, then the place where it seems to vest
itself best is in local political authority, which would be the
local authority with the other statutory agencies on board. Members
of my authority constitute three parts, one of which is local
political authority, and the chair of every local authority community
safety arena is, by right, soon to be on a police authority. We
would see it naturally vested there and would not have any difficulty
with that. We would argue that given the links between local criminal
justice boards, the local authority, the local children's safeguarding
boards, it would be natural for those things to be linked. I doubt
that there is a chief superintendent or chief police officer in
the land that would disagree with that. We would not see ourselves
leading on it. If I could briefly go back, there was discussion
of children's trusts. In the police service we see huge overlaps
between children's services and the Association of Chief Police
Officers' youth strategy. What we do not see is integration between
the two, and we think that with appropriate leadership locally
and nationally there could be. On the children's trusts nationally,
there is only one place, Braintree, where there is a police officer
full-time engaged. It is early to be stating that that is successful,
but the early indications are that it is not a bad approach and
should be pursued. We would argue that you should explore these
things far more.
Dame Gill Morgan: If you would
like me to comment from the health point of view, we are the bit
of the system that does not have democracy involved in what we
do. We are very happy with the concept that this is something
where local government should take leadership. We think that there
is responsibility at all sorts of levels. Clearly, in the Health
Service individual professionals have very key personal responsibility
to the children they look after, and that cannot be devolved or
laid off to another organisation. Organisations themselves have
individual responsibility for how they collectively provide services
for children, and that has to be the responsibility of individual
organisations. The fact that that should happen in the context
where local government provides the leadership seems to us to
be right, because children are children; children are fit and
well; whereas the Health Service largely deals with children either
to prevent them becoming unwell, but largely children have specific
problems. We are therefore quite happy with a concept that is
local government led.
Q163 Jeff Ennis: Thinking about integrated
working in practice, what do you think of the idea of co-location
of staff, and to their co-location in extended schools and children's
centres in particular?
Mr Hawker: I think it is very
important to co-locate staff wherever possible, if they are part
of multi-disciplinary teams, and the heart of integration is single
management and the professionals working together in their professional
disciplines but as a team, and it is much easier to do that if
they are co-located. Placing teams within schools is also a very
good idea, and that raises a very important issue about the management
of those teams and their relationship with the schools management.
One of the issues we will need to tackle over the next few years
is the nature of school leadership to be able to address safely
the management of integrated teams within an extended school.
That goes back to the issue of collaboration, duty to co-operate
and so on. Our experience is that the majority of schools are
keen to co-operate. There is sometimes a knowledge gap in terms
of what to co-operate on, and the particular relationships with
the other agencies that will facilitate that—and clearly
there is a development and training issue there. By and large,
schools recognise that they are concerned with more than just
educating a child that is with them from nine to three; they are
concerned for the well-being of the whole child, and that is right.
As an extension of that, they are keen to get involved in the
wider aspects of this agenda, but they need to do this safely,
and the issue of service integration raises the issue of professional
supervision of specialist functions within an integrated framework.
That means that effectively we have to look again at line management
questions, the ways in which we can safely operate inter-disciplinary
teams, and at the same time keep the professional supervision
tight and of high quality so that people being part of those teams
will continue to be professionally developed and continue to be
able to practise their skills safely.
Mr Coughlan: I support everything
that David has said. There are some critical issues that we need
to watch out for because there is a risk of "motherhood and
apple pie" mentality around some of this, and if I am able
to I would like to come back to your question about challenges
as well. The point you raise about schools is an important one,
but we have to remember as well that a significant proportion
of children, including particularly more vulnerable younger children,
are nowhere near school yet. We have to look more broadly and
more imaginatively than simply around schools, although schools
critically have a significant part. Co-location should not be
an end in itself. I have certainly worked in circumstances where
co-location has been achieved, but the different agencies did
not know where each other's door was and could not walk round
and get to each other. We have to be realistic and work on some
of the frameworks.
Q164 Jeff Ennis: What would be your
alternative then, in terms of an appropriate location, if it were
not in the extended school setting?
Mr Coughlan: Some of the early
years settings, some of the health settings, but also making sure
that we approach the position of co-location in the way we are
trying to approach the themes of Every Child Matters—that
we are looking for the outcomes, rather than some structural approach,
and do not go for co-location for the sake of it, but make sure
you have integrated systems where professionals are talking to
each other—and if there is a natural progression to co-location
which suits the environment and the locality, then pursue that.
Q165 Jeff Ennis: It is not really
the building that is important.
Mr Coughlan: I do not think so,
no. I really feel keenly about the point you made about some of
the challenges—because I do think there is a risk in our
support for this agenda, and we wholeheartedly support it—that
that gets misinterpreted as saying "there is no problem with
this then, is there?" I think there are five critical areas
that we have to watch very closely. What we have been talking
about I would characterise already as the issue of the competing
agendas. Frankly, we are talking of the question of mainstream
services for most children who do not require specialist input,
and particularly attainment within education, versus the specialist
needs of some children who require particularly intensive input.
It is very positive to go for a universal approach under Every
Child Matters but there is a potential tension in there as
to how we make sure the right services get to the right children
in the greatest need. That is the first area, which we have effectively
been discussing already. As a local government officer, I have
to raise the thorny issue of resources. We have constantly been
making the claim that part of the difficulties we have been facing
in children's services was a failure to fund the Children Act
1989, and we still think that failure is undermining much of our
effort around children's services. One of the problems around
the Climbié Inquiry was that unfortunately it pointed to
a small group of authorities which apparently were under-funding
their children's services, and I think this was used as a yardstick
to say what local authorities are or are not doing for children's
services. In fact the vast majority of local authorities are heavily
funding their children's services, well beyond the formula spending
assessment. That needs to be reflected through central government.
There is also the cost of the change programme. Thirdly, there
is a set of issues about how we develop a real consistent community
voice into children's services. This will fail unless we are engaging
children, their families and their communities; and we need to
find ways which consistently and imaginatively are going to make
people feel they are party to this agenda, and that it is not
just an agenda that is being developed by the macro organisations.
Fourthly, there is a set of issues around the fragility of safeguarding
services for child protection concerns, and our concern would
obviously be that the majority of authorities which are committed
to this arena will work gainfully to protect their children, but
there are inevitably going to be children who will slip through
the net, and we have to give this agenda time to work forward,
and support those authorities that may be struggling with their
local competing forces. Finally, this hinges around information-sharing.
We think there are still significant challenges around the information-sharing
agenda; so I wanted to make sure we did not ignore the question
about challenges, because we think they are significant and we
do not want to pretend that they are not.
Dame Gill Morgan: Coming back
to the co-location issue, in general our view around issues like
that is that they need to be identified as issues at a local level.
There is a real danger of coming up with a one-size-fits-all;
and what might be appropriate and applicable in Bradford might
be completely the wrong solution for the wilds of Cornwall. There
has to be a proper local joint needs assessment of what the issues
are and what the opportunities are; and then co-location thought
about in that context. It may or may not work out in individual
communities. What we would resist is anything that is one-size-fits-all
because the history of that is that we end up with worse services
for the majority because we design things on the worst-case scenario.
That might work in those places, but for the rest of it, it takes
us backwards not forward.
Chief Constable Grange: I am the
Chief Constable of Dyfed-Powys, which is the largest geographical
area in England and Wales for policing. Whilst co-location works
in one part of the force, it emphatically cannot work in other
parts to do with criminal justice, simply because the Crown Prosecution
Service does not have enough agents to co-locate. We have seen
successful co-location in youth offending teams across the country.
We are seeing it in public protection units where the police and
the probation services are co-located, to my knowledge, in 21
separate parts of the United Kingdom—and we are developing
ever more physical or other forms of co-located working, by the
use of buildings or IT. In child protection we have a violent
and sex offenders database, which the police services will have
in England and Wales by the end of March next year; and all the
probation services by the end of the following year; and the prison
service also. That works in that particular area; but co-location
of itself is not the answer to the problem; as others have said,
you need to think through the issues and the outcomes you intend.
If co-location gets you there, fine, but for many organisations
that will not be financially or geographically viable.
Valerie Davey: We are now taking up the
theme of professionals and their role within this.
Q166 Jonathan Shaw: There is obviously
this tension in terms of co-location. Gill Morgan, you said that
one size does not fit all. I do not think anyone is saying that,
but it is a general theme flowing from Lord Laming and the Minister
for Children. Where local partnerships and agencies determine
that co-location is appropriate, before that they have to agree
how these teams will organise themselves. There are potential
competing demands about different professionals and supervision.
Would the panel like to talk us through those potential tensions,
how they might work in practice, and what the potential hurdles
are? I am asking you to paint a picture of how things may or may
not work in practice within your areas of specialism. Gill Morgan,
perhaps you can start by not having the one-size-fits-all!
Dame Gill Morgan: Our anxiety,
which I suspect is echoed by most people sitting this side of
the panel, is that there is a very fine line from national flexibility
getting interpreted into one-size-fits-all guidance when it comes
and hits us, and that is what we would like to resist. We have
to distinguish, for people working in children's services, between
the things that they have to do and understand the same almost
core professional standards of people who work with children.
You may have different arrangements around those core sets of
skills and specialisms, where people can share responsibility,
and the things that people have to do as autonomous practitioners
which are fundamentally different.
Q167 Jonathan Shaw: Can you give
us an example?
Dame Gill Morgan: For example,
as a health visitor working in a patch, you may, through sharing
arrangements, take part with other professionals, and it would
not matter which professional did it because you would use a common
assessment framework to assess the needs of a particular child.
That would be fine because you would be guided by those common
standards and there would be a set of procedures. You need the
same supervision as anyone else because you are applying one tool
to everybody. On the other hand, if out of that comes a particular
need for a child who has some rare genetic disorder but needs
some sort of follow-up, the particular supervision you need for
that is expert and specialist, and would probably not be provided
within the team, but you would have to look for supervision elsewhere,
because that is where you are specialist; you are highly trained;
you are a nurse with extra training over and beyond it. I think
you could begin to distinguish within teams which bit is general
and would have a common supervision and support, and which bit
we need to look to the broader church and the broader family to
provide that additional expertise. That would be true for the
majority of people working in the shared environment.
Q168 Jonathan Shaw: What about when
the lines are less clear? You are talking about a physical ailment,
are you not, which is the medical profession? What about when
there are mental health issues? You could have a CPA, a mental
health social worker or a psychiatrist.
Dame Gill Morgan: Yes. The way
that has traditionally worked, and within proper team-based working
is identifying the individual with the right combination of generalist
skills, together with the additional specialist knowledge, and
at many stages of a child's or adult's progression actually it
does not matter the professional expertise is secondary to the
general bit of handling a disturbed child. Within local teams
and local professionals you would come up with agreement to guide
that. This is not new; this is not part of the Bill; this is how
many organisations and systems around children have been working
since 1948 and before. If you look at some of the best child and
adolescent mental health services, they do work in a multi-disciplinary
way with shared responsibility, with a key worker who takes responsibility,
and they take in the responsibility of pulling in those additional
specialist services that are needed. Everybody does not have to
know everything, but you have to know a man or even a woman who
does, and be humble enough to know when you need those additional
skills pulled in to the system.
Q169 Jonathan Shaw: That all sounds
very simple. John Coughlan, are you happy with that? Do you think
it is all very simple, and we do not need to worry—that
I need not ask these questions because you are going to get on
with it?
Mr Coughlan: I have said that
it is an enormously challenging agenda. I think what will happen—I
was interested listening to Gill because the models within my
own authority follow some of that pattern. We have a community
and schools clusters model, which has been developed and will
go live in April. It will be working with children who are tiers
1 and 2 of need, so they are not in extreme need, not for example
children looked after on the child protection register; but they
are showing early signs of concern. They would have a concept
of a team around the child, and the clusters team would be a multi-disciplinary
team, but it is not a team that will necessarily disband existing
core specialist teams, so we will still have a separate core cams
team, although that team will be linked in to our community model.
Where children require low levels of support, a lead professional
from the clusters team will be nominated, and they will work with
their partners in a collaborative way, identifying where particular
skills are required to suit the needs of that child. Where more
complex skills are required because the needs are extending, then
the support for the more specialist services where there are professionally
accountable lines of support will be called upon, whether calling
in a child protection investigation from a classic social services
model, or some more intensive consultant paediatric care from
the health model.
Q170 Jonathan Shaw: Cllr Kempton,
you are sitting in your local authority, and the assembled professionals
are providing you with this advice, saying of course the service
is developing very well, and it is a great policy; but do you
have any worries that whilst you are being told everything is
fine, what is happening on the ground, from what your constituents
are telling you, is quite different?
Cllr Kempton: Everyone has made
the point that it is an enormous change agenda. One thing I would
say is that the change is going to take some time. The Government
has identified that some of the structural changes need to be
in place by 2006 or 2008, and what we want to argue very strongly
for is that we need to take that time in order to get things in
place. We know that we have crisis intervention services which
are very good, but we want to improve them. We know that we have
very good universal services that we want to improve as well.
It seems to me that it is the area of prevention and getting the
preventive services as good as the others, where I would want
to ask some questions in my authority. It is the area of making
sure that support is being provided to families where children
are identified, or the family is identified as vulnerable in some
way. Those are the sorts of areas where I would want to ask questions
and would want to build up the services. That is an agenda not
just for the statutory services but the voluntary and community
sector as well, and that is one of the key leadership challenges
that I have. No-one really wants to de-professionalise any of
the people, and it is very important that we identify that we
are bringing together groups of professionals from different disciplines
because they add value by being together, and we do not want to
create a structure that dissipates the expertise when it comes
together. What we want to do is share some of the training—teachers
that are training, and social workers might go on, identifying
children in need and providing the sort of support they need.
For example, we have seen through the Surestart programmes different
professionals coming together and not losing their own identities
but adding something by sharing their knowledge and approaches.
Q171 Jonathan Shaw: David Hawker,
it is not good everywhere, is it; otherwise we would not be having
this inquiry, and Lord Laming would not have had to undergo his
work? There are problems, and integration is the key word that
has come from Lord Laming's inquiry. In the Green Paper there
is a long list of members of multi-disciplinary teams, but it
does not include teachers. You are services, and you are education:
should it include teachers?
Mr Hawker: Yes, it should include
teachers and health professionals as well; and in many cases it
does, depending on their particular area of work. If they are
responsible for special educational needs or if they are the designated
teacher for looked after children, they will be part of a multi-disciplinary
team which their school is linked with. The sort of service model
that John has described is very similar to the service model that
we are developing in our locality as well; and it is probably
similar up and down the country. It is not one-size-fits-all,
but there are some very clear service design principles that people
are now working to up and down the land. In terms of making it
work, we clearly need to have professionals who know when to stop,
who know when they have reached the limit of their own expertise,
and are therefore able to hand it over to somebody with the expertise
that is needed. That is one of the important principles of multi-disciplinary
working. In terms of teachers, clearly we need to look at how
the school workforce reforms will be able to create enough time
for teachers to engage in these important activities without distracting
them from teaching, their core task. That is a challenge to us
all, in terms of making the thing work in and around schools.
In terms of other aspects of the requirements, we have clearly
got to make progress on implementing a common assessment framework;
we have to have good data information sharing protocols. We need
good referral systems and formal protocols for that. We would
like to see some progress on pooling of budgets, but only when
it is clear what the budgets are that we are pooling, what we
are pooling them for and what the service specification is for
pooling them. There have been some examples of pooled budgets
before their time, which have not resulted in any service improvements.
We would argue that the service specification, the review of the
services—what James was saying in terms of looking at the
middle part of that triangle, targeted services for children in
need, needs to be got right; then you look at how you will pool
the budgets to get the service into the shape you really want
in order to serve the children better. This is a massive programme
of change. It is clear that local authorities and their partners
up and down the country are at very different stages in that process.
Some are fairly well ahead, and others are only just starting
to think about it. The head of steam that there is behind it now
is such that it is pretty well on the way. We do have to watch
out as we implement it that we do not fall into some of the elephant
traps that are there, and it is very important that we move forward.
Q172 Jonathan Shaw: What are the
elephant traps?
Mr Hawker: That people would move
too fast and be too enthusiastic about doing change, and then
fall over themselves. We could be putting children at risk if
we are not careful, if we do not have the right kinds of safety
mechanisms. It is important that as we manage change we are also
improving services at the front line, or at least concentrating
on not having services deteriorate and thus putting children at
risk. It is important that we have a good view of the overall
resource package that we need to work with. John raised the issue
of concern, which many of us share, about the shortage of resources
for managing this, which could jeopardise the whole exercise if
we are not careful.
Q173 Jonathan Shaw: What do you think
it is going to cost? The figure of 20 million has been given so
far.
Mr Hawker: I think it will cost
more than that. Our conservative estimate is that setting up the
children's trust would probably cost around half a million pounds
in back office costs, and that is leaving aside the workforce
development issues and the management of change at the front line.
Clearly, we are not going to be talking about adding all of that
to existing budgets.
Q174 Jonathan Shaw: Any more money
for training?
Mr Hawker: Yes, we do need to
put more money into training, workforce development, joint training
of professionals. We need to do a lot around information sharing
and child protection training. In our submission we have suggested
we should be looking at an entitlement for every professional
working in the field to have three days of training, which would
enable them to take full part in the programme.
Q175 Jonathan Shaw: Terry Grange,
can you give your organisation's views of the information-sharing
database that is being set up? Is that something that you have
considered, or have you not been consulted on it?
Chief Constable Grange: We know
that there are attempts across the country to find out how information-sharing
could be done. I do not believe that there is an information-sharing
database being set up. I think we are in the throes of piloting
in 10 areas to find out what can be done. Information-sharing
is absolutely essential, but you are back to the elephant factor;
and there are cultural issues and professional issues about information
sharing. The Soham Inquiry demonstrated only too clearly that
people's professional cultures stopped them sharing information
with others.
Q176 Jonathan Shaw: What do we do
about that, then?
Chief Constable Grange: Training,
cultural understanding—putting people in the same room tends
to break down the cultural barriers which stop information-sharing.
We have evidence in working with the probation service. As one
of the two inquiries into the Soham incident showed—I think
Sir Christopher Kelly's inquiry—there were police officers
that would not share information with social services on principle,
and vice versa. That will take a long time to break down.
The idea that you can share information with 43 police forces—I
do not know how many local authorities there are or how many primary
care trusts in the country, but the idea that you are just going
to create an IT package that will share information across them
in short order is mythical. The first thing we would need to do
as a police service, I would argue, is have one single child protection
database nationally. Currently, we are working at trying to get
the Home Office to fund that. If you said £20 million had
been set aside, we could create a single child protection database
for the English and Welsh police forces in about 24 months at
round about £10 million, because we have evidence from doing
it with the violent and sex offenders database. On top of that,
you are talking about health and education circles, and you are
talking about a very complicated thing that needs a great deal
of thinking through. The same applies to the whole thing of working
together in practice. The police view is that in terms of the
role of professionals, our role in this has not yet been worked
through properly at all. We would see that we have a major remit
in such things as domestic violence, truancy or exclusion from
schools, missing from home, criminal family members, where our
role and that of children's services should be inextricably linked;
but it has not yet been worked through. If things are to work,
that has to be done.
Q177 Jonathan Shaw: Mr Coughlan,
from the social services point of view, what have you to say about
databases? We have some pilots, and obviously we will wait for
the outcome of those. The child protection end is one thing, but
we will obviously be flagging up areas of concern or possible
concern so that a picture emerges before a child protection conference
is called. Is that right?
Mr Coughlan: I think the picture
is complex and mixed. I am not as pessimistic as some of the conclusions
from the Soham inquiries would lead us to believe because most
of us see on a very regular basis very high-quality joint working,
on a day-to-day basis on the ground. One of the challenges of
this process is to bottle that and get it consistently across
the piece. I am not saying that there are not problems but I think
front-line practitioners have developed great skills in identifying
when they can and cannot share information. They do work within
professional cultures where, for example, many of them have been
trained about the sanctity of the information that they are holding;
and then to work into a new environment where they are being told
to break that sanctity is challenging for them. I think it can
be achieved. The challenge is enormous, partly because of the
systems issues that have just been described but also because
of the professional cultural issues, and because we have to recognise
that some of the families at the more extreme end of need are
also extremely mobile. Some of them live beyond standard services.
That is why keeping a track—and that is why it was called
Identification, Referral and Tracking, originally—is critically
important. We have been one of the authorities acting as an IRT
trailblazer. We have made substantial progress. It has been very
positive, encouraging work, but we still feel that we have a long
way to go to be confident about an information-sharing database
that is absolutely consistent.
Q178 Jonathan Shaw: Can you tell
us how it has been working, for example how would a teacher with
a concern flag it? How would the GP know about that or how would
Terry Grange, as a police officer, know about that?
Mr Coughlan: The systems we are
working with have recognised that the notion that you can effectively
disband all the internal professional systems and create an all-singing,
all-dancing children's database which covers all professional
need is cloud-cuckoo land, and that will not happen, as far as
we can see, in the future. We have developed a system that will
talk, on a routine basis, to the existing professional systems
within health, social services and the police. Finding the technical
as well as professional solutions to achieve that have been complex.
In an internal system, for example where there is a child database,
if there is a way in which a school's concern can be noted on
their database in a way that then gets swept up by the co-ordinating
database or the integrated database, that becomes a simple model
which does the very basics of what has been described in the consultation
document so far. It expresses who the child is; the family; the
address; where mainstream services are involved; and obviously
the most complex issue is what specialist services have been involved,
the parental permission for recording those specialist services
or the case for recording that specialist involvement without
parental permission.
Q179 Jonathan Shaw: At the moment,
in most local authority areas, if there were a referral to social
services, whether from a school or neighbour, they would do that
manually, would they not?
Mr Coughlan: Yes.
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