This week’s interviewee works in the child protection unit of a city council, and has nine years’ experience as a social worker
"Just under a third of children in this city live in poverty, but – contrary to popular belief – they are not the only children we deal with. Reports come to us from various people – friends, relatives, teachers – telling us they think a child is in some kind of danger, and it is then our job to follow it up.
The recession has put more strain on families, which has led to an increased demand on child-protection services. I usually have around 16 cases to deal with at a time, and that’s too many – but I know of people who have more than 20 in their caseload.
There has also been increased demand on our services following the case of Baby P; and Lord Laming’s review of child protection, which followed that case, has certainly given us a lot to think about. In particular, his report recommends that every referral to us from another professional – say, the police or a health worker – should require us to do a formal initial assessment.
In my opinion, saying we have to do a compulsory initial assessment with every case is madness. We already spend too much time on paperwork, and this would only make it worse. I went into this job because I wanted to protect children – and to do that I need to be able to spend time with them, yet more and more I feel like I am in an admin job. Paperwork is necessary of course, but I would like to see us decide for ourselves when a formal initial assessment is needed. Each case is different, and it’s certainly not necessary every time. We should be trusted to use our own discretion and to take the most appropriate action for each child.
What I am pleased about, though, is that the published summaries of serious case reviews are going to be fuller and clearer. Thankfully I haven’t had any experience of this yet, but if a child dies or is seriously injured because of abuse or neglect, we need to look at what went wrong. Why not publish the reports in full? I’d like to see the government making it mandatory to publish the full report.
For one thing, that would go some way to restoring people’s trust in social workers, and in child-protection teams in particular – and we desperately need to restore that trust. Of course, we have to protect the child’s identity, but there are ways of doing that and still publishing reports pretty much in full.
I get a lot of abuse from people because of cases in the news, such as Baby P and Victoria Climbié, and very often that’s because people are unsure exactly what my job involves. People only hear about us when things go wrong; they rarely hear good things. So it is important to me that people know what I do to try and protect children, and in order to raise awareness in this way we need to be more open and much more transparent.
That’s why I’m happy there has been a public information campaign to improve the public’s understanding of what we do; I would like to see similar campaigns continue. It worries me that it will be a one-off, and public perceptions won’t improve. We need to build confidence back up in the profession and encourage people to join.
The last government said it would put millions of pounds into social work and improved IT systems, and that was obviously welcome – but that investment looks doubtful now. What we need most of all is back-up: more people to help with administration so that we can spend more time with children and less time at our desks. Most of my time is spent at my desk and that’s not how it should be, yet so far I’ve seen little action to tackle this.
Social workers also need more – and more regular – training, particularly within child protection. There is a lack of training and development here, which doesn’t help when things are constantly changing and when some people qualified many years ago. Often we don’t have the time or money to send people on courses, but we should do: it would improve knowledge, boost confidence levels and, perhaps, ease the pressure we are under.
In the short term, we use agency workers to try and help relieve that pressure. They are invaluable in lightening our load but tend not to stay for long, which weakens the team and means they don’t have time to build strong relationships with children. I think the government needs to ask itself why there are so many agency workers, and yet not enough people willing to take on a permanent position. For child protection teams to be successful, we need not only to encourage people to join, but to support them to stay."