Examination of Witnesses (Questions 29-51)
DR MAGGIE
ATKINSON, PROFESSOR
FRANK FUREDI
AND COLIN
GREEN
15 SEPTEMBER 2010
Q29 Chair: Good morning. Welcome
to our Committee deliberations this morning. We have with us Professor
Frank Furedi, Colin Green and Dr Maggie Atkinson. If you are comfortable
with it, we will use first names. We are talking about that most
serious of issues, child safeguarding. I know that you have all
heard the evidence given already this morning. Given that Directors
of Children's Services do not have powers over all the agencies
that operate for children, is their role an impossible one? Have
they been set up in a sense to fail, especially when the number
of deaths at the hands of family members has been consistent,
although variable, at around 50 children a year?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I was one,
so if you want I can start and then pass to someone who still
is. You will know that in my current role I come very largely
from the point of view of what children tell me. We talk to hundreds
of children a year who have experience of the systems right across
the piece from schools to social care to health, to mental health,
to youth justice and to others. It is, as Sharon explained, a
very complex and broad-ranging job with a strong sense of a very
wide span of control, even within the council. Children and young
people tell me that they would rather have one door to go through,
no matter which services they are then referred to if they have
a need for additional help and additional support and service.
Having a Director of Children's Services—and don't forget
the political dimension of a lead member for everything to do
with children in any local authority—is a job that is worth
continuing to press on with, whether or not there is a legal requirement
for a Children's Trust. I say that because former Councillor Mearns,
who was deputy leader of Gateshead council when I was DCS there,
will tell you that the structures which Sharon said that everybody
needed under them, with strong expertise in social care, education,
youth justice and health, within the council or able to be held
to account by the council, are a means of getting in earlier with
children who are in difficulty, answering their needs once and
for all and helping them through to safeguarding or other services
that they may need. People in a place feel that their endeavour
is about the community in that place. What Sharon also indicated
is that there are still difficulties in getting all partners—I
come back to some of the other questions—to sit at the same
table and decide together what is best for the children and young
people in an area. That is where the hard work has to come. The
role is difficult and is very big, but it is worth the candle.
Q30 Chair: Can it be done? They
don't have powers over health. They don't have powers over the
police. In a London context, in particular, there are typically
huge numbers of locum social workers. If you have somebody, like
Sharon Shoesmith, who had a background in education and becomes
the director, is it likely that they will succeed?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: Many, many
do. Cases such as those of Peter Connelly, Khyra Ishaq, the two
boys in Doncaster and others make the news not only because they
are truly horrific, but because they are exceptional. There are
11.8 million children and young people in this country aged 0
to 19. You can add another million or so to that figure if you
include those who have been in care, because they remain the responsibility
of services for children and young people until the age of 21.
In most cases, and in most lives, they are kept safe, well, properly
educated and are prepared to be the citizens that they will become.
Most of the children and young people who we meet at the Children's
Commissioner's office are rounded and truly great human beings
in the making. That is in no short measure due to the quality
of most services for children and young people—I am sure
that you, as constituency MPs, have seen great examples that you
could quote—but, none the less, it is necessary to intervene
in those exceptional cases that we have discussed. Such interventions
should be robust, but should always be made with a view to improving
those services. If you were to read the latest Ofsted reports
on Haringey, you will discover that, even in a struggling borough,
such improvements are under way.
Q31 Chair: If you read the reports
published before baby Peter's case, you might have thought that
improvements were being made then, too.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: You would,
and, as president of ADCS, I said so, because that inspection
report was the only evidence that I had to go on. Sharon has mined
deeply into what lay behind those inspection reports and the evidence
files concerned. This Committee, or its predecessor, has questioned
the inspection and regulation systems, and it has also questioned
the practitioners.
Q32 Chair: Colin, is it an impossible
job?
Colin Green: No, I would not be
doing it if it were impossible. It is an exciting job, and in
many respects it is the best job that I have had in my career
in children's services. In addition to what Maggie has said, the
job, like any large job, is a team effort. The job is made possible
by the team you build around you in the local authority and in
the partner agencies. The role's statutory basis, among other
things, gives some leverage with the other partners. That leverage
is not always easy to exercise, but it is significantly better
than what we had before. You started at the top by talking about
the small number of children who are murdered and might have been
protected, and reducing that number will require the best quality
universal services for all children. In a sense, the rationale
for having a Director of Children's Services is the connection
between providing universal services and providing additional
or quite specialist services to those children who need them.
In many ways, the job of a Director of Children's Services also
covers young people and taking the lead for families in the local
authority, which makes sense. All of those services must work
together if we are to do better for those families who have the
greatest difficulty. Prior to being a Director of Children's Services,
my career was in social services—I was also a civil servant
for a short time—and that hard end of children's social
care was too often in a little ghetto of its own, where it was
not sufficiently connected with all of the other services for
children. That meant that the needs of those children, particularly
looked-after children, were not well served, because, as they
were with children's social care or social services, other people
said, "They are being looked after," so such children
became less of a priority for education or parts of the NHS. The
rationale for the role remains as absolutely forceful as it was
in 2003-04, when the role was developed. The job can be done,
but only with a good team and political support.
Q33 Chair: Interagency working
is important, but so is the ethos of the services provided through
children's services. The interagency working seems, in some ways,
to have been fine in the Khyra Ishaq case, and Maggie has remarked
on the generally high standard. Certainly the schools attended
by the children, who were starving to death, before some of them
were taken out, were doing everything possible to raise the issue
with social services. Social services simply batted it away. Once
the children were withdrawn from school, social services seemed
to think that it had no role in welfare, because of confusion
caused by its lack of training and understanding. That was in
Birmingham, which is one of the largest authorities in the country
and which has a record of sustained underperformance in this area.
How can we have confidence in social services?
Colin Green: I'd like to add to
that in a broader way, rather than talking about a neighbouring
local authority. Clearly, because I work in Coventry, I know a
fair amount about Birmingham. First, there are serious issues
in the work force, and the key to improvement is about improving
the work force. The work force, it is fair to say, has had decades
of neglect in terms of the key profession, which is the social
workers. Importantly, however, there are others involved in that.
The guidance and legislative framework for child protection is
sound, but it has become enormously cluttered and excessively
elaborated. The work force weaknesses and that elaboration are
connected, because work force weakness has been dealt with by
trying to prescribe the system in excruciating detail. In this
case, which obviously I have read something about, you can see
that people were following the process, but they were not thinking.
I think we have got too much process and not enough thinking.
Q34 Chair: Social services did
not follow the process, though—they did not even know the
process. They thought that if a child was home educated, they
did not have a welfare role. They thought that that welfare role
was the home educated team's job, but it wasn't and it never was.
It was quite clear in all the guidelines on home education and
on children missing school, yet they were confused about the most
basic functions of their role in protecting children. How was
that possible?
Colin Green: It was possible because
people get into a tramline mindset in following the process. They
thought, "Ah, this is home education, I have categorised
it as that." They did not think about it in a broader sense,
about understanding the meaning of what had happened to that family
and to many of these other challenging families. Social services
did not try to understand why things were going catastrophically
wrong for these children who had been reasonably well cared for,
up to a certain point. People were in their tramlines, and when
you have that mindset and a service under enormous pressure, with—as
we do currently—increased demand, increased complexity and
high expectations, that is when things can go wrong.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: One of the
things that I want to add to what Colin has said is that when
you interview children who have had contact with the system, they
are remarkably consistent with what Lord Laming had to say after
the baby Peter case. Professionals need not only to work with
each other, but to listen to what children are saying, listen
between the words of what children are saying—sometimes
there is a hidden disclosure going on—not to take the adult's
word for what is being said, to be consistent and approachable,
and ready to be accessed and to listen and to act on what a child
says. Very often, a child has screwed up their courage to say
what needs to be said about their home situation. Lord Laming
discussed maintaining professional scepticism, going in with an
eye for the child, not for what the adult is telling you and for
probing beneath apparent compliance. There were many recommendations
from that report. What children tell me as Children's Commissioner
is exactly what Lord Laming told the country in that report. Children
find it difficult to disclose and they find it difficult to put
their parents in a situation where they would feel that they were
betraying them. There is a need for the system to take the child's
interests first and to always listen and look at what is going
on. One of the things that the Birmingham report indicated was
that they took the adult's word too easily. You have to get behind
the adult and get to the child.
Q35 Chair: A whole raft of children
in that family starved to death and suffered malnutrition, with
schools which were highlighting it. You didn't need to listen
to the child; you just needed to see that they couldn't pay attention
and that their trousers were falling off them, to use one of their
teacher's phrases. Somehow nothing happened.
Professor Frank Furedi: A couple
of points from the outside. Some questions were raised about process.
One of the problems with process is that it is not straightforward
when it becomes a substitute for professional judgment. As a result,
we have a situation where leadership is measured on the basis
of how well you know the process, whereas the underlings are the
ones who need the process interpreted to them. For example, a
friend of mine who is a legal scholar called the helpline of the
Criminal Records Bureau to find out what the law was and she had
to wait an hour and a half before she was given any kind of answer,
because the person at the other end had no idea what process should
have been followed. You get conflicting interpretation. One of
the problems that we have had in Haringey, apparently, and elsewhere
is that the one-dimensional dependence on process leads to a lot
of impression management—a lot of rituals of pretending
to do things that are not actually happening. Children are let
down because of that. Another issue that the review should consider
is inter-agency co-operation. At the moment, that has become a
form of outsourcing authority and responsibility to somebody else—somebody
else will do it. We are seeing that although it is a very good
idea in the abstract to co-operate and to have all these little
committees where we sit together, it becomes a way of bypassing
responsibility for whatever is going on. That issue needs to be
confronted and it comes up time and again in almost all of these
cases.
Q36 Lisa Nandy: I want briefly
to follow up on the point that you raised, Maggie, about the voice
of the child. Sometimes it is not just about listening to children,
it is also about making sure that that voice is elevated to a
level where it is heard and put at the heart of the intervention.
We have seen time and again with these high-profile cases that
the voice of the child has not been at the centre of the intervention
and has not been heard, despite the fact that they were saying
things that ought to have been listened to. Do you think that
there is a particular role for the Children's Commissioner in
highlighting that voice, particularly in areas where children's
voices are not routinely heard, such as in custody and in immigration
detention?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: There is a
very central role for the Children's Commissioner. We are under
review, but we will say that there continues to be a role in elevating
that voice. One of our current roles is in helping Eileen Munro
in her review by bringing children and young people into her research
environment. We have not only been getting them to answer questions
formally, but we have held several evidence sessions, where members
of her research team have come to listen to children who have
experience of the system. What those children are saying is, for
me, a blueprint model for what the profession ought to look like.
They are saying: "Make it consistent—do not chop and
change;" "Do not assume that when you have solved the
first problem, the family is healed and you can simply walk away;"
"Do not close the case just because I no longer ticks your
boxes;" "I need you to continue to be with me and to
listen;" "I have had my case opened and closed enough
times now;" "Stay with me, be consistent, make it happen
for me;" "Broker my access to other agencies;"
and "I'm a young carer, I'm looking after my mum, who has
a mental health problem. Don't just walk away when you've looked
at my mum—I need help as well." What we submit to the
Munro review, which is heavily influenced by the voices of children
who have had experience of the system, will be very much a blueprint
for the profession. That is one concrete indicator of how the
Children's Commissioner's office can influence what happens in
professional development and training. We think that children
who have experience of the system should be used in helping to
define whether somebody who is entering social work training has
the mindset to work with children and young people in the first
place. We think that children and young people's voices from the
youth justice system could and should be pushing the Youth Justice
Board and others towards only ever employing people, in lock-up
situations, who have declared themselves wishing to work with
children, and not just as a prison officer. You know that we had
influence on the situation for asylum seekers and the end of detention,
because Damian Green has said so. Those are really important roles
for the Commissioner. Children who are in difficulty, in danger,
or at risk find it very difficult to lie about their personal
circumstances, so their voices are very powerful. We quote them
extensively in everything that we publish and send to MPs, so
you are welcome to read what we do.
Q37 Lisa Nandy: Thank you. I also
want to touch on the issue about the social work profession, because
how we empower social workers to do their jobs is particularly
important. It has been established beyond doubt that the high-profile
cases, in particular the baby Peter case, have had a really demoralising
effect on the social work profession. I want to ask all of you
on the panel whether you would accept that? On the issue of media
coverage, what do you think the impact of it has been, and what
could have been done differently that might have protected the
social work profession from such effects in those cases?
Colin Green: May I start on that?
Certainly, it has had a big effect on the social work profession,
which of course is far wider than children's services—there
are thousands of social workers working with adults, people with
learning disabilities and people with disabilities. It has had
a big impact for children's services, as did the Victoria Climbie«
case and as have a number of horrific cases over the past 30,
40 or more years. The response to that, of trying to rebuild the
social work profession, and the work that Eileen Munro is doing,
which there is considerable optimism about, are important steps
in trying to put some of that right. In terms of the media, I
have spent considerable time thinking about this. In Coventry,
we have taken a number of initiatives in this area. Social workers
have, because of what has happened, shied away from explaining
what they do to the media and from allowing the media in, there
needs to be more of that. You have to see the media as essentially
like the weather—you probably can't do a lot about it, but
at least you can be prepared for the kind of weather coming your
way. So, there is something about being well prepared and understanding
that perspective. But we need to be proactive in trying to explain
what we do—there are real difficulties about that, but some
of them can be overcome—and in trying to help the media
present what we do with some balance, using those parts of the
media who are open to that approach.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I would echo
what Colin has said. I would come back to saying that the most
powerful voices you have are the children and young people themselves,
if they are properly guided and prepared, and if the media understand
that they have a responsibility to reflect back to the nation
how fantastic most of our children and young people are—how
well parented, looked after, nurtured and brought up they are,
how well schooled they are and what contributions they are already
making to society as volunteers and in other ways. It is within
that context that the media should look, when the light of heavy
criticism needs to be shone. My issue with the media is that,
in this country, it seems that good news is not news. That is
a real issue, and no doubt it is one for you in your constituencies
and in the roles you play. Good news isn't news; it's always the
bad news that makes the front page. That is a real issue for children
and young people as well, including those who are exposed to the
system that we are talking about this morning, the safeguarding
system. They get to the stage, as you know, in our work on transparency
in the family courts, where they say, "Why would I want to
tell my story if I am going to be portrayed as a broken child
in a broken society from a broken family in a broken estate? I
am not going to talk to anybody. I am not going to talk to my
lawyer or my social worker, if you let the press at me."
We have to work with the media to get them to the stage where
not everything is tarred with the same brush. Of the social workers
that I left in Gateshead at the end of February, I would say,
because we spent a lot of time with them, because elected Members
came to see them, because we supported them and because we celebrated
what they did, as winners of awards in the council—we had
some of the longest staying social workers in the country, including
some who had been in Gateshead for 27 years and who wouldn't have
wanted to go anywhere else—that they were fantastic. They
were great because we celebrated them as, every now and again,
so did the local press. The picture of a profession that is absolutely
under the cosh, or living under a stone somewhere, is not universal.
There are some real heroes, doing fantastic work every day, and
we need to find a way of getting the media to say so.
Q38 Lisa Nandy: Do you think that
we could do more to promote that as well?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: Absolutely.
Go and see the teams. Get yourself out on a day with a preventive
worker, a youth offending worker or a social worker who is attached
to a children's centre. Go and spend some time with such teams,
who will value you, including just for having the name—"Such
and such an MP is coming to see us." They will feel really
supported.
Professor Frank Furedi: There
is a danger of missing the big picture by pointing a finger at
the media. Of course, the media do horrific things as they did
in the Haringey case and they are responsible for promoting all
kinds of panic. But when you talk to social workers, especially
the more creative, dynamic sort of social workers, you will find
that what demoralises them is not the occasional media representation
that they are uncomfortable with, but the very fact that they
spend a phenomenal amount of their time not doing social work.
So when Sharon Shoesmith was talking earlier about her being surprised
by seeing all these people hanging around the offices, that is
not unusual. You often find that, if you look at the amount of
time a social worker spends out with real people, it tends to
be less and less compared with the amount of paperwork you are
doing, and the extent to which you are forced to cover your rear
end rather than think creatively about the job you are engaged
in. That is what is demoralising. I talk to my ex-students who
went into social work, but who have subsequently left social work
precisely for the reason that they got fed up with not being social
workers, but being petty little pen-pushers.
Q39 Tessa Munt: I am quite interested
in your analogy of the weather and, if you can see the storm coming,
how much of an impact that storm has on people's behaviour, and
since 2008 and the Baby Peter case, looking at the reaction of
the general public and of the services to the possibility of a
storm coming? Have people changed their reactions, their reporting
and their actions as a result? Do you get that sort of effect
where stories happen? How do you balance out people's responsibility
to report and react to circumstances they may be aware of, particularly
the general public, but also the services concerned?
Colin Green: It is quite hard
to separate out some of the components, but certainly one of the
responses is a very defensive response, a response that is about
compliance. In a sense, it is hard to separate out some of the
response that is about the media. It is also about the response
of the Government and the regulators. The response of the regulator,
Ofsted, is often about compliance and too much talk, in a sense,
of "How did we get the process right" not "Did
we get the result right?" The two are linked in the way they
operate. While the media are more of a storm, the regulator is
more a kind of thing that is with you all the time. It is about
changing both, and the regulator, the impact of the regulator,
and the wider comment in society are more of a constant feature.
So it is important that both get adjusted or we make some change.
We will have to have a more positive discussion about what it
is we want from our safeguarding child protection system. What
do we think should happen in families with the most serious difficulties
and are really struggling to care for their children? How do we
want to intervene? What risks are we willing to take around intervention,
and so on?
Q40 Tessa Munt: I was going to
ask you about risk, in particular, and whether attitudes have
changed to risk and whether they just change as a result of storm
or whether it is consistent. Has there been a change of attitude
to risk since 2008?
Colin Green: I think it is quite
hard to unpack it because there is some evidence that the rise
in work load started actually before November 2008 and therefore
other things were going on, some of which are about improved recognition
of things that are harmful to children, in particular a much better
appreciation of the impact of domestic violence. There has been
a lot of attention on the long-term impact of neglect, still an
issue we don't tackle as well as we might. Those are part of the
picture, alongside possible impacts of the recession, possible
impacts of our society becoming much more complex—certainly
I would feel that in a major urban area in terms of how diverse
the population is, how volatile it is in terms of people moving
around. All those things are making a difference. I am not sure
there is real evidence that we are necessarily notably more risk
averse in that sense, but we are identifying more need and responding
to that, perhaps more assertively.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I am on record
in public as regretting some of the "cotton-woolling"
that goes on of some of our children and young people. I am in
my mid-50s and as a child, I used to disappear for a day at a
time, climb trees, fall in water and all sorts of things with
kids my parents did not know, and I was very pleased that they
didn't know them. Twenty years ago, that was at the end of the
street, and only with children you knew. Ten years ago, it was—maybe—a
play area that your parents had sight of, and then only with a
select group of children and young people. For some of our children
these days, there are the twin pressures of having something to
fill every minute—dance, horses, music and goodness only
knows what else—and only being allowed to play in the garden
if somebody can see you. We have to get to the stage where we
as a society understand that childhood is childhood and needs
to be allowed to be so. That's so whether you are vulnerable,
poor, affluent, disabled, or terribly able-bodied and very bright—every
child needs the right to be a child. You have to work out between
you, as a family, what the length of the leash is on which children
are allowed to play. In families that are dysfunctional and chaotic,
or where children and parents are not bonded or attached, the
leash can sometimes be far too long. That is the point at which
children become out of sight, out of mind and not properly parented.
It is also the point at which parents either abdicate their responsibilities
or claim not to have them, and that happens not only in difficult,
inner-urban estates but elsewhere as well. It seems to me we need
a national conversation about what childhood is for. Who are the
adults in this situation, and how do we keep our children safe
without so locking them behind closed doors that nobody actually
knows how safe they are and they are not taught risk as opposed
to foolhardiness? We need an ongoing national conversation about
those things, because it is about rearing, educating, health and
everything in between.
Chair: Can we bring Frank in on this?
Professor Frank Furedi: There
is no doubt about the fact that we have become steadily more risk
averse. When I wrote my study, "Paranoid Parenting",
in 2001, there were many things that children could do that are
now no-go areas. Every week, I get four or five e-mails from parents
telling me that they have been reported to the headmaster, the
police, or to somebody in local government, simply for trying
to give their children independence—getting their kids to
walk to school. The other day, I got an e-mail from somebody in
Kent. She had been planning for months to get her daughter, a
13-year-old girl, to come up to London for the first time, with
another 13-year-old girl. It was a big day for them, but they
got into trouble because of that. It seems that we have an intensification
of risk aversion, which hides something more profound, which is
responsibility aversion. When we deny children the opportunity
to engage with risk, we are saying "No, you cannot do it.
Don't go outside. It's impossible to do it". It is much easier
to say that and not take responsibility for our kids than to work
out ways in which children can manage that risk for themselves,
so that they live in a community where it is expected of all adults
to be responsible for their welfare. Instead, we have created
the situation where adults have become entirely estranged—physically
estranged—from children. They are no longer allowed to go
anywhere near kids. You literally need a licence to be near a
child. As a result, perversely, children are far less secure.
We have to remember that even if you have 1 or 2 million social
workers, in the end, the safety and security of children depends
on the quality of communities, and the responsibility that communities
take for them. Risk aversion, which really means responsibility
aversion, has the paradoxical consequence of compromising our
children's existential life.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I think we
are generalising from the specific very much in what has just
been said. We cannot, as a society say at one minute, "They
are locked away and never allowed to take risks", and the
next minute, ask, "What are they doing outside my house playing
football?" Are these the same children or are they not the
same children? We need a balanced conversation about how to keep
children safe without absolutely locking them down, and we need
a balanced inter-generational conversation about how best to approach
youngsters who are simply being children in our communities, not
out to cause trouble because there's more than three of them.
It is more subtle and complex than is being portrayed to my right.
Professor Frank Furedi: I don't
know about subtlety and complexity, but all I know is that if
you now have mums who want to go into the playgrounds of their
schools, and they are told that they cannot enter unless they
are CRB checked, there is no subtle balance. If you talk to the
headmaster about it and say, "Why are you not allowing this
woman to go into the playground?" and he talks about process
and everything else, and instead of being embarrassed, says, "I'm
just being sensible about it" that is not subtle or complex.
When you have a situation where children, who used to be able
to bicycle or walk to school, are now regarded as eccentric if
they do so, and their parents are regarded as irresponsible, that
is not a subtle or complex situation. What we are doing is creating
a world where children are forced into their digital bedroom more
and more. At the same time, we have a small minority of children
who are tremendously at risk, and who are also suffering from
the fact that adults in their communities no longer keep an eye
on them, because they think it's not their business any more.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: The generalisation
I would point out is that there are 11.8 million of them. I got
on the tube this morning, and it was full of children going to
school on their own. I walk the streets around Southwark, where
my office is, and there are children walking from school to home
and from home to school all the time on their own. If there are
11.8 million of them, not all of them can be as has just been
characterised—that is my issue.
Q41 Damian Hinds: We would all
recognise some aspects of the obsession with "credentialisation",
process and so on. As a candidate, I remember visiting schools
and being asked whether I was CRB checked, which I thought was
absolutely ludicrous. I was more interested in what Maggie was
saying about the need for a national conversation, and that we
as a society need to talk about these things. In my experience,
people are talking about them, and there is a national conversation
going on. All sorts of sensible and normal people say that some
of these things have got completely out of hand. As Children's
Commissioner, what do you think should be done about that?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: Many of the
changes that Roger Singleton steered through before he stepped
down, particularly the vetting and barring scheme, were good developments.
It is sensible to stand back from the vetting and barring scheme,
as is happening now—as we speak—to look at what we
actually need. But I would remind the Committee why the vetting
and barring scheme was introduced in the first place. It was introduced
after the murders of two little girls by their school caretaker.
As a nation, we need to work out where between the two extremes
of "lock them down" and "don't lock them down"
we are actually going to sit. That is why the conversation that
you have just characterised, which is ongoing, is important.
Q42 Damian Hinds: I meant in terms
of risk aversion in general. Even people who complain about children
being outside their house are the same people who say, "We
want the children to have a childhood." You are the voice
of youth, so what can the public, government and local communities
do to turn that conversation, which has a large consensus, into
something that makes a difference for children?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: One of the
great moments of opportunity is with us at the moment. If localities
are having to make stringent cuts to things like how many public
buildings they run, one of the things that is incumbent on them,
and is entirely in line with what all three parties were talking
about in terms of community development, is to bring the generations
together in a properly structured way to talk about their communities
and what is needed, which is what children and young people are
asking me. How do we make it possible for youngsters to play football
after dark without them being reported to the police 15 times
by people who would rather have "No ball games" signs
than "Children welcome here" signs? What children are
asking for, particularly the teenagers, is to be helped to talk
to the older generations in ways that frighten neither of them,
in proper community settings, usually with a project in mind—"Can
we turn this stretch of empty green space into a community allotment?"
or, "Is there a way of us, as young people, helping you,
as older people, to keep the war memorial up to date and clean
and tidy?" or, "Can we work together on community programmes
that are about learning about each other and learning together?"
That is what they are asking for. We are in a moment of opportunity.
If you cannot afford both a community centre and a youth club
and a this and a that and the other, and you can only have one
of those, you're all going to have to use it together, so how
about we run some properly structured programmes? There are organisations
that can help you do it—from the voluntary sector, from
academia and from the schools in our communities—and who
will help to bring those generations together. It is happening
already in many parts of the country, and it does bear fruit.
It is very important, because the two ends of the age scale characterise
each other as not understanding each other. Actually, it is about
bringing them into spaces where they learn to speak each other's
language, and that is what children are consistently asking for.
Professor Frank Furedi: Unfortunately,
the generations will not come together as long as we believe that
child protection is based upon the vetting, monitoring and surveying
of adults. As long as adults feel that they are being viewed as
potential criminals they will feel estranged, and in many cases
will feel very awkward about physically coming near children.
It is a very big problem, particularly for the older generation.
When you talk to them they often feel very uncomfortable about
being with children not because they do not want to be, but because
they are worried about how their behaviour will be interpreted
by other people. This is where politicians and people like ourselves
have a very important role to play in encouraging some kind of
cultural change so that the default position is that we think
adults are responsible, decent people, rather than potential paedophiles.
I think we need to establish that, and we need to act on that
basis.
Q43 Chair: The culture change
that has taken us in that direction, about which there may or
may not be a consensus that it is the wrong one, was based on
a series of legislative and administrative process-based actions,
which tipped things that way. I think Damian is trying to ask—rather
than wishing a culture change, which I don't think we will effect
from this room, however persuasively we talk—what actions
need to be taken. It is like anything to do with health and safety,
where people say, "Tell us the specific ones you want to
withdraw, where you will accept the increased risk by removing
them," when it sounds as if it is there to protect small
children, for instance. You have to remove that and take it away,
and accept it in order to change the culture. Is that true, and
if so what should we do?
Professor Frank Furedi: We should
take away the vetting and barring scheme straight away, because
it creates more problems than it solves. We need a sensible system
for monitoring people who either work full-time with children—teachers,
social workers and people of that sort—or who are consistently
exposed to them in specific areas of volunteering. The inappropriate
extension of the scheme into other areas, which has happened in
recent years, is really where the problem is. We need very specific
forms of monitoring where this is really explained. We also need
to have somebody, either in social services or elsewhere, whose
job it is to police the bureaucratic mechanisms that have been
established and keep them from getting out of hand in the way
that they have. Yesterday, for example, one local government wrote
a letter to parents because they allowed their kids to walk to
school. In that instance, it would be their job to reprimand that
local authority for causing harm and creating difficulties for
the individuals concerned. We need to bend the stick in the opposite
direction.
Colin Green: I am afraid—
Chair: Colin, your body language is showing
that you fiercely disagree with that. We must move on or we will
not deal with other issues. I hate to cut you off, especially
when you have so obviously been severely provoked.
Q44 Nic Dakin: I was provoked
as well, but I will move on. Is the publication of Serious Case
Reviews the right thing to do? Does it in itself bring about the
accountability that is desired, and how do we make sure in those
cases that surviving children are not harmed by that publication?
Colin Green: First of all, it
is important that there is accountability, but I do not think
that full publication of Serious Case Reviews will achieve accountability.
The primary problem with this is that—I am just trying to
make sure I state this clearly—what we have had, and the
move towards publication means that the focus of the Serious Case
Review will become on preparing a document for publication, or
preparing a document that will get full marks from Ofsted. It
will not be on learning, it will not be on organisational change
and it will not be about what we really need to do differently
in those cases. I feel that publication is a costly exercise that
will not contribute either towards better accountability or towards
keeping children safer.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I would add
to that, and again I am on public record as having already said
this. If it becomes an extremely process-driven and document-driven
and get-the-ticks-in-the-boxes-driven exercise, how is it supposed
to continue to help to keep children safe, whether they are surviving
siblings or not? For me as Commissioner, the big issue—because
we see all of them—is the quality, honesty, robustness and
detail in the executive summaries of Serious Case Reviews. To
come back to an issue raised earlier in this conversation, there
are partner agencies whose members would, I think, stand back
from even allowing their documentation to be used as part of a
Serious Case Review if the Damocles sword of potential publication
and pillory in the press was held over their heads. It is not
an aid to co-operation between agencies. The biggest insult as
far as children and young people who are surviving siblings and
have talked to us as an agency are concerned is, "You are
about to publish this, but you have not talked to me about it.
When were you going to ask my opinion as a 13-year-old surviving
sibling in a desperately awful case? If you're not going to ask
for my opinion, how do I respect you as professionals in the system?
Why would I want to? All right then, I won't tell my story."
How safe are they if they are not going to tell their story because
of their fear of publication? If you are child B and child A was
the subject of a Serious Case Review and you live in a tiny village
in the back end of a dale in north Yorkshire, everybody at your
school is going to know that you are child B even if your material
is redacted. It's not a means of keeping children safe and it
won't be a means of entirely assuring the system that it will
learn. If you want to make them trials, then call them trials;
Serious Case Reviews are supposed to be learning exercises.
Colin Green: I would just add
that in terms of the issue of learning, the biennial reviews,
where research teams looked at all this, have been a very powerful
learning tool. That is the way to get the learning out to a wider
community in a systematic way that has been synthesised and can
give people a focus on what they need to understand has gone wrong
and what we need to do differently.
Q45 Nic Dakin: Moving on from
Serious Case Reviews, has the abolition of the National Safeguarding
Delivery Unit, which Laming asked for, been a loss to the promotion
of good practice? You might want to take that first, Colin.
Colin Green: I would say yes,
because all the National Safeguarding Delivery Unit did was bring
together the civil servants from across government who had leads
on safeguarding. I worked as a civil servant on safeguarding for
three years in the then DfES, and one of the perennial issues
was ensuring that government departments worked together on safeguarding,
particularly the Home Office and the Department of Health, but
not just them. The Safeguarding Delivery Unit brought those people
together and co-located them with some clarity of common leadership.
I thought that was potentially really beneficial. It didn't add
anything to cost and it wasn't a quango—it was simply about
bringing people together so they could do their policy work more
effectively.
Q46 Nic Dakin: What should replace
ContactPoint?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: In my last
job in Gateshead, we were a pilot area for ContactPoint and we
saw that it made a difference. Let's just be clear what ContactPoint
is not: it is not a database full of case records, case conference
minutes or whatever. For most children in this country, what ContactPoint
did was tell you who they were, when they were born, where they
lived, their GP reference number and where they went to school.
For most children, it was simply one simple, central national
record of where they were. For those children who needed additional
services, it enabled me as, for example, an Educational Welfare
Officer, to get into the system with three or four passwords to
work out who else had contact with that child. Children and young
people tell me, "I'm sick of telling my story five times
over. I need all these extra services, and I need to tell my story
once. Whoever's doing it then needs to work out who else needs
to work in the team around me." If we are going to have a
database only for the vulnerable, I would like somebody somewhere
to sit me down and define "the vulnerable." Do you mean
all four million in poverty? Do you mean all 1 million with a
disability? Do you mean all however many with a special need?
Do you mean anybody who comes home from work and suddenly their
dad's not got a job and they're about to be thrown out of their
house? Do you mean somebody whose family has suddenly broken up?
Define me "the vulnerable" and where one is not and
one is vulnerable and I'll tell you that we can only have a database
for the vulnerable. It is really important that we have something
simple, clear and fast.
Q47 Nic Dakin: Are you essentially
saying that ContactPoint was that something, or were people right
to be critical of it and do we need something else?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: For us in
Gateshead, it was that something and I could show you concrete
proof of finding a child who had gone missing in another borough,
because they came in to us and we knew what their national health
number was and we found them within 48 hours. And they were in
danger.
Colin Green: I was more sceptical
about whether ContactPoint would ever work quite in the way that
Maggie has described. I am more sceptical about whether we can
construct something else that is somewhere between the list of
children who have a child protection plan and all children, for
the reasons Maggie has very briefly outlined. It is also for me,
in what are going to be hard times, about the opportunity cost
of trying to create yet another technical system. My concern with
ContactPoint is and always was that it was yet another technical
fix for what I see as essentially a human problem, which is about
people recognising they have information that needs to be shared
and that they need to go and talk to other people to whom that
might be useful, and vice versa. That really is my concern. The
effort needs to go into the training and development of the work
force, so that they understand who they need to talk to and do
that in a proactive way.
Professor Frank Furedi: In addition,
from a sociological point of view, there are a number of other
reasons why it is a really horrible idea. One is that it tends
to fossilise identity and leads to a situation where what is on
the screen is the child, rather than the living creature that
is out there. That often tells us that random databases are a
very illusory way of dealing with child protection, or for any
social problem for that matter. It is a lazy way of going about
the whole process.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: Chair, I have
to come back.
Professor Frank Furedi: Secondly,
there is a tendency, when you have databases, to invite more information
and other people's suspicions, and notes also get on it. So databases
very rarely stay still. They tend to expand with the passing of
time until you get to the point where, especially when you come
to more subtle nuance issues, they become a little bit unreliable.
That seems to me to be a danger. From a non-sociological point
of view, it is a civil liberty issue. A society that has to put
all the children on a database is basically saying that we are
a sick society—that this is the only way we can proceed.
That is a form of self-condemnation that I am really surprised
that enlightened practitioners are comfortable living with.
Q48 Nic Dakin: May I move on to
one last area, which is the Munro review? There has been review
upon review upon review in this area. Do we need another review
and, if we do, has this got the right remit?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: We do need
another review and this builds on what Moira Gibb's Social Work
Taskforce did in such sterling fashion, but what Moira and her
team were looking at was the structure of the profession. The
really positive thing that Eileen has been asked to look at is
the nature of front-line practice. What that then enables you
to do is to listen to the voice of the client of that front-line
practice. That enables you to then re-shape the front-line practice
to tackle exactly what Frank raised, which is too much time away
from the client transforming into better time with the client—staff
who do not know what the profile of a social worker should look
like being told from the horse's mouth of the client's experience
what a social worker should look like. Eileen has been asked to
do it in a very short period of time. She has been asked to give
concrete recommendations on how the profession ought to move into
the 21st century. This is the finishing point of the work that
Moira Gibb did leading up to this.
Colin Green: I would agree with
all of that. It is a very wide remit, so there are some concerns
about whether there is the time to cover such an enormous scope.
I feel that it is more practice-focused. Also, given the direction
she comes from with her academic research and interest, we know
it will be focused on practice and be a systematic and human look
at what actually happens and why things go wrong. We will not
get 100 recommendations about process and procedure.
Professor Frank Furedi: She is
unusually sensible for an academic, so I completely agree with
the two comments.
Q49 Chair: Are the current levels
of safeguarding activity—as we know, it has gone up a great
deal since 2008, for whatever reason—sustainable, given
what we know about local authority budgets? Is it reasonable for
us to expect that funding for preventive and early intervention
services might suffer as a result of the expected reductions?
Colin Green: To put it another
way round, the activity is there; the question is, can local government
and the partners sustainably respond to that level of activity?
The answer at the moment is that it is proving very challenging
to respond to that level of activity and do it to a reasonable
standard. That is really the crux, because a lot of the issue
is that where things get into serious difficulties, there are
often problems about the sheer capacity of the system and of people
to do the work, and to do the work well. If you're looking at
social worker case loads, health visitor work loads or work loads
in police public protection units, all those are up, and that
leads to compromises on quality. One of the quality issues, of
course, is about the quality of recording. Although I agree that
people spend too much time at their desks, this is an area that
requires very careful recording. These are children's lives. There
may be critical decisions made, on the basis of records, on whether
children may be separated from parents, and so on. It's a real
concern. I think it is quite possible we will be in a scenario
where preventive services will go, because of the need to maintain
the child protection services and services to look after the children
who are already in our care. Once you have a child in your care,
you have got to provide a service. That is a very costly service,
and it may well squeeze out other services for children and young
people.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: My warning
to the system has been consistent since I took up office: be careful
what you wish for when you start to cut preventive and early intervention
services. The very services Colin has just carefully and eloquently
described will then be even more swamped than they are now, because
there is no diversion or dilution of behaviours and no early intervention
in families who, if you got in early enough, would recover. I
recognise that every public service, my own organisation included,
is having to face some very tough decisions about what we spend
and how we spend it. If you simply take the easy way of cutting
the discretionary and the universal, you will live to regret the
day you did it.
Q50 Ian Mearns: I have often been
made aware of the tension between the levels of need driving the
service and the resources available. We've been through some very
difficult times recently in children's services—Sharon's
still sitting there listening to all this. We have heard about
the recent history of demands on services and the breadth of the
role of Director of Children's Services within a local authority—I
think it was John Bangs from the NUT who described it as "undoable"
in evidence to this Committee in its previous life. Given all
these tensions between resources and needs and the times that
we're in, is it going to become more difficult to recruit people
who are capable of fulfilling the duty of a Director of Children's
Services into the future? Are you finding any sort of wastage
in the system where people are bailing out because of the demands
on them as individuals?
Colin Green: There has certainly
been, I would say in the last year, a change in about 40 local
authorities in Directors of Children's Services. That was a full
mix of retirements, people moving between authorities and so on,
so it is quite a high rate of churn. To be frank, I don't know
how hard it is to recruit. I certainly know a number of authorities
have had to look pretty hard, and maybe go out a couple of times,
so I think the demands of the job are reflected in that way, but
the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children's
Services, or whatever it's now called, is doing a lot of work
to try to ensure that there are people coming through who have
been prepared for the role.
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I'd add to
that that there is certainly a breadth and depth of talent in
the system. It is about the current generation of directors not
portraying the sense of hero leadership. I come back to what Colin
said earlier: this is a team effort. You can't keep the whole
of the job in your head. Somebody else has to step up in very
senior roles and have exposure to elected members, partners and
other things, so that they are ready to take it on and can see
it as a possible next step. There is a vast array of talent out
there, and I come back to what I said earlier. That's why most
children's services departments are extremely good.
Q51 Ian Mearns: Given the collegiate
approach that is necessary, and the requirement to fulfil the
role and provide the services adequately, you would need different
agencies to work together. Given all of that, do you think it's
therefore reasonable that a Director of Children's Services is
ultimately accountable for everything that happens on their patch?
Dr Maggie Atkinson: I'd say an
unequivocal yes. I always saw myself as being absolutely where
the buck stopped.
Chair: I think we will bring this session
to a close. Thank you all very much for giving evidence to us
this morning.
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