The
Annual Social Services Conference took place this year in Brighton.
The weather was gorgeous, and as delegates left the conference hotel
each evening, there were superb sunsets over the sea, silhouetting
the twisted burnt-out ruin of the old pier, around which starlings
swirled in their thousands before roosting. The visual impact suggested
that there ought to be a metaphor there of decay and the creation
of something useful out of disaster, but in reality, it was just an
impressive scene.
Inside
the hall, the speeches were all well-crafted and the speakers said
the right things - John Reid, Charles Clarke, Denise Platt and the
new President of the Association of Directors of Social Services,
Andrew Cozens among others. They were business-like, but without much
spark.
Hanging
over the Conference there was the uncertainty about the implications
of the Government’s plans to split social services into adults’
and children’s services. Although this was not explicit, there
was a clear expectation that it would happen, and while consultation
on the Green Paper Every Child Matters was proceeding, so too was
the Government’s thinking on legislation, and there was the
fear that it might have made its mind up.
Anyway,
here are a few of the contributions concerning children and young
people.
*******
James
Strachan, Chairman of the Audit Commission, mentioned a case where
a disabled child had asked to be able to invite another disabled child
to his home for tea. The transport was arranged, and all went well
until tea-time, when the host’s carers refused to feed the visitor
as they were not insured to do so. If we have reached a situation
where the commercial insurance industry cannot provide a suitable
service to the social care industry but serves as a block to good
practice, maybe it is time to replace it with some other system.
*******
Tim
Loughton, Conservative Spokesman on Health, pointed out that the amount
of targets and checks under the current Government did not help. “The
pig does not get any fatter the more you weigh it”, he said.
He noted that :
-
30% of children had not been immunised,
- 2-year-olds waited 2.5 years for speech therapy,
- there were three times as many children in hospital now compared
with 30 years ago, and
- Afro-Caribbean children were five times as likely to be excluded
from school as white children, although their truancy rates were the
same.
*******
Paul
Burstow, Liberal Spokesman on social services, said that the Government
was stigmatising children and young people and being too intolerant.
Under the Antisocial Behaviour Bill, the presence of only two young
people meeting together could be deemed offensive. He argued for building
the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into British
law and for reasonable chastisement to be scrapped as a defence when
parents thumped children. Amen to both proposals!
*******
Lord
Laming said that protecting most of the children most of the time
was not good enough. When Victoria Climbie died, there was evidence
of 128 separate injuries on her body. She had not been protected,
despite the involvement of four Social Services Departments, three
Health Authorities, two Special Child Protection Police Teams, two
Hospitals and an NSPCC Family Centre. Her case was closed the day
she died.
“Failure
to meet children’s needs”, he said, “is costly to
the child, the parents and the community. Corrective work is expensive
and not always effective". The moral is that abuse should be
prevented in the first place, but in Victoria's case there had been
failures in management, administration and practice.
Good
practice entailed imagination, determination and courage. No assumptions
should be made - for example about racial or cultural differences
- and everything needed to be checked out for each individual.
*******
Yvonne
Roberts, journalist, made the most lively contribution to the conference.
She had a good swipe at the Green Paper, saying there was a danger
of being sold a pup. Lazy assumptions might be made and parental rights
might be put before children’s, for example on the issue of
smacking. The Government tended to sentimentalise young children and
criminalise teenagers. Children were invisible politically, she said.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was ignored.
And what sort of consultation was it, when the Queen’s speech
on 26th November was due to outline the legislation before consultation
had ended?
*******
Professor
Brian Sheldon, talking of evidence-based social work, got our medal
for the most entertaining session, with a sequence of bon mots in
the course of his argument.
He
questioned the capability of the social care workforce to read research
findings, as there was a culture of action, not contemplation, and
it was deemed improper to be caught reading a book. In a survey, 85%
of social workers claimed to read research, but only 5.6% could identify
anything they had read, though this figure is now up to 50%. “It
takes 8 years to get something into a medical textbook,” he
quoted, “and 12 years to get it out”. The same applied
in the social professions.
Arguing
for evidence-based projects, he described delinquency prevention as
“the Russian front for the social professions”, as nothing
worked. All that short sharp shocks had done was produce leaner fitter
burglars. Yet politicians still advocated this type of treatment.
Similarly, family therapy was popular, but there were no research
grounds to suggest it was efficacious. We needed to apply what was
successful, and be prepared to change our minds.
He
pointed out that research had shown that social workers spent 13 -
16% of their time in face-to-face contact with clients, the rest being
“virtual social work” in meetings and on the phone.
In
one project he had come across large numbers of child protection cases
which were unallocated, and so he suggested, tongue in cheek, that
they might be used as a control group. The idea fell through when
the senior manager involved suggested that this might be “unethical”.
Brian
Sheldon pointed out that the social services were still dominated
by outsiders. The Griffiths Report, for example, had been based on
supermarkets, and we had the market model forced onto the services.
We needed to take the lead ourselves. “If you don’t have
plans for yourself, you will quickly become part of someone else’s.”
All
in all, the social professions were “too close to Floyd on food,
and not enough like Delia Smith”.
*******
So
much for Brighton; the Conference is in Newcastle next year. Now,
the last time it was held in Newcastle was the year when David Mellor
was rude to Directors….
