The Sara Sharif case: what is the point of taxpayers funding these failing organisations?

I used AI to work out how many hours per week a social worker would need to complete all the tasks required for an average experienced social worker's caseload in my area currently (22 children including child protection, PLO and care proceedings) and the calculation was around 50 hours. They get paid for 37. Miracles are expected.

Social workers have no legal right to demand to see the child much less speak to them alone. Our work needs parental consent, police intervention or a legal order. We can’t rock up at someone’s door, or school, or wherever and demand to see the child.

Have you considered that these organisations are suffering from underfunding, hence these types of failings and should they therefore receive more funding? Also how many kids were saved and would be impacted if these organisations didn't exist? It's a very narrow view and broad sweeping statement, these things are never as simple as a single simple measure. Also human error will always exist, no matter how well structured and funded any organisation is. That's just humanity, we're not machines ( incidentally AI also makes mistakes...).

"Why is my tax funding these useless departments?"

What's the alternative? Maybe stop funding them? What do you expect to happen then? Privatise child protection?

The issue is that child protection is not really valued is it? Successive "efficiency drives" mean that you have under trained, over worked inexperienced staff paid very poorly expected to sacrifice their own free time and family lives while hearing in the press that gold plated pensions need scrapping ( which is basically another way of cutting pay)

It's cheaper to announce reviews of the inevitable failures than fund the system properly.

It's like the prisoner release mistakes. The cause is underfunded courts and prisons services and privatised transfer systems and apparently often incorrect and missing paperwork. What was the solution - a new detailed comprehensive "checklist". Soundbytes not fixing the underlying causes.

Then eventually a judge gets months/ years and all the time in the world and paid a lot of money to scrutinise every decision / mistake made in excruciating detail.

Ultimately you get what you pay for. The narrative is that public sector is bloated and full of freeloaders and usually the party that says we will cut it gets elected.

I was training to be a social worker. I switched degrees after one year. That was 2015, things were very bad then and they will be way worse 10 years later. From my shadowing days, it was so obvious to me that social workers are set up to fail. Separate teams have been amalgamated to save money, meaning much higher case loads but no extra workers or time. It’s a case of constant fire fighting of the most awful and urgent cases, with simply not enough hours in the day to even get through them, let alone the mountain of other cases (which could turn out to be just as bad, if left). It is quite literally an impossible task, and SWs have statutory responsibility, meaning they can personally be prosecuted if things go wrong. I don’t think anyone in my cohort is still a practicing social worker, 8 years after graduation, and I’m not surprised. Instead of asking why are we spending money on this, the question should be why are we not spending nearly enough money on this.

Fwiw - I spent my whole childhood being abused. Despite opportunities arising, no one stepped in.

I work in a role where safeguarding referrals come up often. After working in the area for over 2 decades I think the system is deeply broken. I have experienced malicious referrals, serious referrals to then be dropped, power greedy people gravitating towards the top, poor decision making skills, inadequate training, serious deficits in funding… the list goes on really.

Yes, but that's why we have social workers etc, so they can intervention and prevent a tradgedy.

Why do they return kids to their parents also.? Little Finley Boden was returned to his parents care very quickly after being taken away and was killed. So was Baby Peter.
Take their babies away forever, they can't look after them. Stop giving wrong uns chances.

If they were from home education team would they even be let in, and if not safeguarding team they probably wouldn’t think it urgent if they didn’t see the family that day.

I think some people could.
I never understand why a social worker accepts it when the parent says oh they fell or the dog knocked them over.

How about they knocked the door and the mum says oh they are asleep, next day the poor childs been found dead. They should insist on seeing a child for themselves. They often dont speak to the child alone either.

Of course we all know the parents shouldn't be so scummy and vile to want to hurt their child in the first place, but when they do and especially when neighbours complain and bruises are reported there needs to be a safety net.

The system dosent seem fit for purpose.

So many children have been failed its disgusting.
Even when neighbours report things it still happens.
You never hear whether anyone loses their jobs over it?

the home Ed team? I’ve not read the whole thread but seriously- look into the threshold where neither parent was deemed acceptable.
a court, not a social worker, gave that poor girl to a monster.

imagine making all the referrals - and being overridden by the courts. She should’ve been taken off both of them. But wasn’t. It’s awful to read the reports- but the threshold was met- as it was with Star, Arthur, Peter et al.
regardless of what you might read on social media the threshold is high - and lots of children are protected. But the others 🤷‍♀️ and that is never going to be enough. Ever. If you want to torture and kill a child there’s multiple ways due to the failings of the courts and also in some cases of social services that you can get away with it, until it’s too late.
the anti home ed stuff you reason here assumes nice, middle class woodcraft type parents. Think about that - if you are not able to physically see children you are screwed.

Competence in social work is a complex thing to build. It takes time, learning from experience, having space to train, read and reflect on your learning. It takes time to develop professional judgement and to know how to use that judgement, to know how to build sustained relationships with people who live on the absolute edge and to learn how to protect yourself from the trauma you encounter on a daily basis.

And to do the job well takes time too - time to think through and understand the risks you’re concerned about and time to plan effective support and intervention.

In my first social work job my team leader had 10+ years experience in child protection, I had a case load of 10 children. I had time to think and I had lots of experienced colleagues who had time to help me develop.

Now a team leader might have 3/4 years in practice - and they’ll be considered an experienced staff member. The rest of the team will have a few years under their belt, maybe. I know of teams where the most experienced practitioner has 2 years. Case loads are crazy, 20/25 children - so taking a 35 hour week you have less than 90 minutes per week per child. In that time you need to do home visits, make complex assessments of risk and need, deal with families in crisis, talk to schools, health, third sector organisations, keep clear records of everything, prepare reports for multi agency meetings and hearings, attend those meetings and hearings, attend to your own training and development, team meetings and supervision.

I’d argue it’s basically impossible for a social worker to practice competently in that environment for any amount of time without burning out.

The fact that over 25% of social workers leave the profession within 6 years of qualifying suggests I’m right.

This, it was insane when you read about the case. My heart hurts for Sara. There were a litany of failures, no-one questioned why she was suddenly in a hijab and the withdrawn from school. The neighbours were worried about intervening. We need to be more robust as a society and stop skirting around sensitivities. When children disappear from view we need to be aggressive about having sight of them.

Thank you for continuing to turn up every day in the face of all this. If half of the social media commenters I’ve seen today could spend a day in your shoes...💐

Thank you for what you do

I’m a social worker, and have been for 20 years. I’ve just finished work for the day - I stopped being paid at 5pm. Last night I had to ‘stop’ working at 6pm so I could take my own child to football training. I logged back on for work at 9pm once my children were in bed and I logged off at 3:40am after writing 2 court reports. Again, I stopped being paid at 5pm yesterday. I work over my hours week in, week out. I don’t get paid over time, I can never claim my hours back. I’m contracted for 37.5hours a week. I work minimum 55hrs a week. And I keep doing this. To protect the children I’m employed to protect. But it comes at a personal cost - I forget things for my own kids, I’m often late to pick ups, I can’t ever arrange an after school play date, I’m tired, I’m grumpy, I have a constant headache and pain in my back. I see things, I hear things that nobody wants to see or hear. I’m traumatised by my job. But tomorrow - I’ll get up, go back to work, and if I’m lucky will finish early enough to collect my own child from after school club and not have to log back on. Whilst trying to compartmentalise the risk I assess everyday, the children I worry about, the conditions I’ve seen - with needing to be a mum to my own kids who need me just as much. It’s very easy to blame the social worker - why didn’t they just work an extra half an hour, why didn’t they visit more frequently, why didn’t they ask more questions, do the case recording more promptly… but the blame needs redirecting. Firstly to the people who directly caused this beautiful girls death - the father and step mother. But secondly, and looking at the holistic picture - to those in power that know these services are badly underfunded, understaffed and over worked.

They can't take all the at risk children into care - there are so many of them. Social workers often recommend interventions only to be overruled by managers.

I adopted children from the care system. Most of the children who are adopted or in care are on at risk plans but at home until a catastrophic incident pushes them over into managers having to take action. But just standard neglect will be tolerated for a long time sadly.

Nobody is saying that home educated kids are more likely to be abused, but that's not the point. The point is that home educated kids don't automatically have regular contact with known adults outside their own family, so there would be fewer opportunities to spot abuse if it did happen.

How many cases would there have to be before you would think the risk to home educated kids was "significant"? Surely we should be putting preventative measures in place instead of waiting for further examples of things having gone wrong?

Schools aren't perfect and can't prevent all abuse, but actually, teachers do regular identify safeguarding concerns and this often helps kids to get the right interventions put in place. There is no equivalent mechanism for safeguarding home educated children. I honestly don't understand why some HE parents are affronted by the idea that there should be some kind of independent checks in place. It seems an absolute no brainer to me.

It wasn’t social workers that went to the wrong address, it was workers from the home education team. There is no statutory duty to visit home educated children

It’s step parenting. A child in a home with another adult as a parent of either sex who is not their biological parent is at greater risk of abuse and death.

Step fathers, not step mothers. This was a step mother.

Well in all the cases here, with the exception of Victoria Climbe, they all involved a person who was in a position of step parenting. They did not protect these children.

The reality is that a step parenting arrangement allows for an abuser to ensure that the primary care of a child is downgraded to their need, be it sexual or otherwise. The child stops being the focus of family life and is a source of resentment. To say this is toxic to a child’s wellbeing is an understatement. It’s a sign of something with the potential to go badly wrong.

People on here won’t like that. They already believe Mumsnet shit anti step even when most of who are, are step children.

They forget that like adults children even pick up on smaller details when step parents kid themselves that yes they dislike their SS but they hide it. The SS knows and that’s bad enough without the cases of psychical abuse.