The Work of Ofsted - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-314)

CHRISTINE GILBERT CBE, MICHAEL HART AND MIRIAM ROSEN

10 DECEMBER 2008

  Q300 Mr Stuart: Thank you for that clarification. If 210 children were killed during those 15 or 16 months, that means that more than three children in this country are killed by abuse every week. That is an horrific statistic. Can you explain the discrepancy between that and the Government's assertion that the figures are more like one a week? Whether it is three a week or one a week, those children are not statistics; they are human beings who have been killed.

  Michael Hart: Those are the figures that we established. The calculations show that there were around 12 a month over 17 months. Those are certainly the figures that we have established since we have had responsibility for them.

  Q301  Mr Stuart: Thank you.

  Are social workers hindered in their jobs by the excessive bureaucracy and paperwork involved, and could a reduction in that bureaucracy and paperwork help to ensure a more effective system that is less interested in ticking boxes—you referred to that, Chief Inspector—and better able to identify and support children such as Baby P?

  Christine Gilbert: We have not investigated that issue as such, but we have identified it for possible survey work in the year to come. As I said, people are dismissing the paperwork without looking at the detail of what it tells you. It is like going to the doctor and the doctor not having your notes and giving you the wrong treatment. The paperwork is really important, and the issue for me is that if it is managed properly, and looked at and discussed as it should be, you would pick up the bits of information that someone might have missed during a busy day and so on. There are two issues. We have not focused just on social workers, so I do not have the evidence to answer your question, but I would not dismiss the importance of paperwork.

  Q302  Mr Stuart: I think that in Haringey there are one and half social workers for every child on the child protection register, yet despite the focus on paperwork no one seems to have been properly responsible for Baby P. Has the heavy bureaucratic load come at the expense of accountability?

  Christine Gilbert: Some of what is being asked is simple stuff, but it is not being done well, and it needs to be done well. Managerial supervision in social care is intended to focus very much on practice, to pick up and talk about individual cases, to explain why you have not seen the child alone, and so on, since the previous visit, and to consider what support could be provided.

  Q303  Mr Stuart: Is it your finding that those on the front line believe that the paperwork required is proportionate and reasonable?

  Christine Gilbert: We have not asked that question, and I have seen no evidence to enable me to answer it honestly.

  Q304  Mr Stuart: Given the nature of what you are dealing with, is that not important? I think you said that you would try to take more cognisance of information from those on the front line. Will that be an urgent priority for you?

  Christine Gilbert: It is an urgent priority. The survey is a longer-term issue, but it will be part of the safeguarding no-notice inspection visits. It is likely that we will do the questionnaire before we go in. We will have to do it in such a way that they do not know that we will be coming next month. The questionnaire will accompany the assessment of whether we need to inspect a certain authority now, next month or whether it is safe to leave it until next year.

  Q305  Mr Stuart: I am trying to square what you are telling us as Chief Inspector. You are effectively saying that paperwork is important, and obviously everybody would accept that; broadly speaking, you are suggesting that the paperwork is proportionate and reasonable. That is not what social workers tell me. You have not surveyed them yet, but are you stating to us today as the Chief Inspector responsible for this area that you are broadly confident about the amount of paperwork that front-line social workers have to put up with?

  Christine Gilbert: I feel confident about the safeguarding requirements put in place after the Laming inquiry. I have seen those working well and not so well. I do not know whether you are referring to additional paperwork over and above that. We do not have the evidence for that additional work. I am confident that social workers up and down the country are not being asked to do too much because of the requirements placed on them as a result of the Laming inquiry. One thing that we will ask about in the questionnaire will relate to that and to the work load issue in the Haringey case that has been described. People were allocated families, so it would not have been picked up that four children were part of their work load. That would be picked up in a questionnaire.

  Q306  Mr Stuart: You said that you planned to do more on the issue of whistleblowers, with a whistleblowers hotline. In a sense, that answers my first question of whether you think enough is being done to allow whistleblowers to warn us of these tragic cases. In the Baby P case, the whistleblower's warnings were repeatedly ignored and she ended up being bullied and ostracised at work instead. Is there something inherent in the culture of children's services that needs to be looked at?

  Christine Gilbert: I hope not. I said earlier that we are scrutinising the proposals we made in September to ensure that they are rigorous. We are ensuring that any piece of evidence that would have been key in that tragic case will in future be picked up. Such things will be built into any system that we establish. The consultation closed last week so I have not read through it. We will go through the responses from wherever they come in great detail. I do not think that we have had that many. We had far more on schools. We have had fewer than 50 responses. We will look at those and build any that we think sensible into our proposals.

  Q307  Mr Stuart: Of course, the context for the Baby P case is the Climbié inquiry, which took place after that case traumatised the whole country. That case could not have had greater national attention and political focus, and yet in the very authority in which it took place you have found that the findings were not implemented. How can we give confidence to our constituents that the lessons learned from this new terrible case will be implemented?

  Christine Gilbert: I have spoken to a number of chief executives and directors of children's services over the last few weeks. There can hardly be a place in the country that is not looking at its procedures and asking itself those questions. We can give further guidance to councils on how they can scrutinise such work more effectively.

  Q308  Mr Stuart: If I may, I will move to a more general issue. It is unlikely that these councils have been indifferent to the welfare of children. What are the systemic reasons for their failures? Is it a lack of funds? Is it because social services do not rate high enough on the political priority list? Are you in any position to make any comment on that? Social services departments and social care workers are basically being hung out to dry as the great villains of the piece. Perhaps it has happened once or twice too often for us to want to blame the individuals concerned, and we should be looking further up the political system to find responsibility.

  Christine Gilbert: The safeguarding review that we published in July stated that there had been some improvements locally and that most partners were round the table on the local safeguarding children boards, although not all of them were. A number of agencies were still not attending, and we recommended that they should. Those boards are meeting and talking, but in too many instances the serious case reviews show that they are working in parallel rather than focusing sufficiently on the needs of the child or young person.

  Q309  Mr Stuart: To come back to their practice, do they have the resources and support to do the job? Is there something systemic that means that they are destined to keep failing, and that we can berate them for their failure when in fact it is not their fault? The quality of social care and perhaps of social workers is a real issue to consider.

  Christine Gilbert: More resources are always helpful, but that point has not emerged in our work as a major issue. The major issues are such things as the use of different language to describe things, the use of different systems and so on. Agencies focus on getting things right in their own organisation rather than on the child herself or himself. It is very much about the different organisations. There are really good examples up and down the country of very good practice involving multi-disciplinary, multi-agency work that is absolutely focused on the child and support for the child. We are doing some work, although maybe we could do more, to share best practice in those areas and give examples of what really good practice looks like.

  Q310  Mr Stuart: But yet again, you have failed to answer my question, which is really about the bigger picture. There are pockets of better practice, but are they properly supported? You are the Chief Inspector; do we have an adequate system within which we can expect most social care cases—or 99% of them, given the seriousness of the matter—to deliver proper care to some of the most vulnerable people in this country?

  Christine Gilbert: I said last week that Haringey was exceptional, and I do believe that. Even in other places where there have been serious case reviews that we considered inadequate, the safeguarding arrangements are often as good as they could be made but there has been a problem in a particular case or a human error. That does not mean that the whole set of arrangements for safeguarding vulnerable children is poor. I hope that you do not feel that I am not answering your question, but money has not emerged as an issue. It is the practice of applying some policies that seems the key issue, and I do not feel that most authorities in the country are in the same state as Haringey.

  Q311  Mr Stuart: But you said earlier that 50% of staff being agency workers was quite normal across London—so normal, in fact, that it was not even worthy of comment, regardless of its contribution to the poor service levels. As the Chairman mentioned, if those service levels were in a school, we would assume that it had serious problems. Yet because that is so common, it was not worth commenting on in your report to give us an idea of what was going on in social care. Surely if that is happening commonly across London, there must be something going wrong with what is being done to attract, motivate and retain really good social workers.

  Christine Gilbert: I did not mean to say that we do not mention the stability of social workers. That is very important, and we mention it in both the APA and the JARs. London authorities have certainly done a number of things to try to attract social workers, but in some ways it is a thankless profession. What has happened in this tragic case will not encourage more social workers into the profession. We need to give some attention to recruiting, supporting and training social workers, and to make that a high priority.

  Q312  Mr Carswell: Chief Inspector, I should like your perspective on a slightly broader area. Yesterday, I spoke to a social worker with 20 years of experience, who told me that there is a slight danger that we have created social workers and children's services who are almost encouraged to look on the bright side when they should not, and encouraged to see progress and positive things where there are none. Similarly, we have created a so-called multi-agency approach in which everyone is responsible, but no one is actually in charge. Do we need a separation between those who make the assessment of the vulnerable child at risk and those who can take a hard-nosed, tough decision about whether something needs to be done? If that had happened, surely someone within Haringey would have had the wherewithal to say, "Enough: this child is going into care. If we need to take it to court we will, but this child is going to be removed from this situation." Do we need to ask whether we are doing something fundamentally wrong by placing an onus on social workers to see something positive where there is nothing?

  Christine Gilbert: Our July safeguarding report, and the serious case reviews, point to the optimism of social workers about what parents are saying, or promising, as a real issue, so that certainly is not encouraged. We have highlighted that as a significant problem, because the focus is very much on the parent rather than being sufficiently on the child. That links to my earlier point about focusing on the child and listening to them, where possible, if they are old enough to engage in debate. The optimism of some social workers is an issue that needs to be discussed and countered in debates about practice at local and national level. On your other point, our reports also pointed to difficulties with accountability, which is not always clear and needs to be clearer in some organisations. In the safeguarding work that we looked at, and in work on the serious case reviews, it is not always clear, in the police, exactly who is accountable for what in particular cases and with safeguarding issues more generally. I know that they are looking at that.

  Q313  Chairman: Chief Inspector, a member of the public who had been horrified by recent events and who was listening to us questioning you this morning might have heard some very plausible explanations from you for where we are. You have acquitted yourself very well this morning. However, you have just said that Haringey is an exception, and many of us might believe that, but many of us know social workers who cannot sleep at night because they worry about their cases. They work hard and are not well paid, and they do a fantastic job that many other people in this room and on this Committee would not want to do, so they should be given the support that they need in the job. To a person outside this Committee, looking in, you have revealed a higher percentage of child deaths than I have been given by the NSPCC or any other charity, let alone the official figures. You have presented figures that are quite astonishing and unacceptable. If we are to try to bring down the number of child deaths, something more radical has to be done, but in your responses to the Committee you seem to be floating over the surface of that. You have given the most horrific figures that I have ever seen in the public domain, but you are also saying, "More or less, we are doing the job alright." Many social workers might say, "If only Ofsted had been there, trumpeting from the highest of heights that something is deeply wrong in our society if we have this number of child deaths a year and a child protection system that does not save those children." I do not want to say that you are complacent, but is not there an air of complacency around this, from either the Government or yourselves?

  Christine Gilbert: I am really concerned if I have come across as complacent, because I hope that we are not complacent and are examining every part of our practice. We have done that in the past year and again because of recent events. I think that social workers are absolutely key, and we need to think harder about the support, training and status of social workers. With regard to the number of deaths we reported, of the 50 children we looked at in detail in the serious case review, for instance, not all were seen by social workers, particularly the babies, and only two out of 21 were on any form of child protection, so this is everybody's responsibility. All those babies were known to health services, for instance, because they would have been born and been in a hospital and perhaps been seen by a health visitor, so it is everyone's responsibility and we have made those recommendations about increasing awareness.

  Q314  Chairman: But does that not refer back to Douglas's point and the criticism of Laming—I do not know whether you share those criticisms—for making it more complex, rather than focusing on real accountability across Departments? There is a lack of accountability, which Douglas Carswell asked you about in his question, so do you recognise the criticisms of Laming and are they justified?

  Christine Gilbert: I feel that the criticisms are not justified, actually. Applying and doing some of the very simple, straightforward things that he has suggested would allow us to pick up and make the connections across. At the same time, I want to stress the work that we have done. Yes, specialist services are sometimes involved, particularly as children get older, but of the babies that died, only two were known to social services. We make the point in the recommendations about the responsibility of what we describe as universal services, such as health and education, for recognising the signs.

  Chairman: Chief Inspector, we started this as a scrutiny of your annual review, but I did not want to stop anyone asking questions about this very important aspect. You will know that the Committee is about to start a major inquiry into the inspection process, so I will now call a halt to the questioning. We have not asked many of the questions that we would normally have asked you, but earlier in the new year we hope to have you back to finish today's job and start our inquiry into inspection. Thank you very much for your attendance.





 
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