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

I agree 100% about checking on home schooled children. IMO it’s far too easy for parents to opt out of mainstream education. Quite apart from neglect and/or abuse, someone should surely check that all such parents are competent to teach their children.

I don’t care you find my comment ‘offensive’, we are well within our rights to criticise how public servants operate (I’m one myself).

The folks who didn’t follow through with their visit two days before her death weren’t even social workers. Why didn’t they take the extra time to visit when it was their mistake (rather than a family not being at home, for example)? That’ll be for them to explain.

WRT local authorities, like you, I’ve witnessed how social workers operate. I simply take a different view to you. Some of them are fantastic and caring, but stretched. Some of them are unsatisfactory. Others are actively bad at their jobs and family don't seem to like children very much from how they interact with families.

There needs to be some responsibility taken by safeguarding and other professionals. Negligence is negligence.

There have been multiple failures in Sara’s case and it’s not just social workers who have to answer for themselves.

I think it comes back to the premise of the thread.

do people really believe that social services stop every child being killed by their abusers? Do they think that’s what should happen in reality?

social services are an agency amongst others who protect children.

the police protect the public. Do we expect the police to prevent every crime? Clearly not. What’s the difference?

this black and white A CHILD MUST NEVER DIE isn’t great for the nuanced conversation about making sure social services do the very best job they can. Which they’re not. Do we want them to do the best job or to aim for no dead children ever?

because unrealistic expectations are destined to fail. And in the meantime they’re not doing the best they can, they’re wasting time on an impossible dream.

You can absolutely say that they are incompetent, the heads of this specific councils Social Services department ARE incompetent. Not just the social workers who are doing the visiting or the home schooling team but all of them. You can’t truly fix an issue unless you admit to what the issue is. It isn’t a simple mistake, it is incompetence from the top down so treat it as such.

I think if any agency is to blame, it’s the children’s courts that gave her violent and abusive father custody.

I keep wondering that.

AR was clearly a troubled individual but we can’t lock people away indefinitely for being weird, or holding views the majority find distasteful and harmful.

I find it utterly bizarre you’ve decided the problem is your tax paying for a failed social services case.

tax, really?

The post you quoted clearly says children identified as ‘at risk’ which isn’t all children, it isn’t even close to most children. And yes, I think that’s reasonable as it happens although unlikely in current environment.

Pretty much, yes, I do, because the themes don't change: poor record-keeping, reasons that argue against intervention, inadequate cover and handover arrangements, lack of supervision, ineffective inter-agency working, inexperienced staff. But as I have said in a previous post, I'm not certain state agencies will ever be able to prevent behaviour beyond the comprehension of most of us.

ITV news just reported that her suddenly wearing a hijab and being fully covered wasn’t questioned due to worry about accusations of Islamaphobia. See how damaging this concept is?

It's easy to just say that the social workers were incompetent, but if you don't identify the actual problem, you can't fix it.
"Just hire competent people" isn't a solution when recruitment and retention in social work is such a problem.
If social workers are supposed to have 15 children and they have 30, then children will be endangered.
And if all the social workers are newly qualified supervised by social workers with a couple of years experience then of course competence is an issue. Why do you think there are so few very experienced social workers in child protection?

Agreed, that was an incomprehensible decision from the judge, given what was known about the father.

Social workers on the ground are frequently held to account. In most serious case reviews, it is found that unmanageable caseloads are a significant factor. These terrible tragedies are rarely as simple as to be fault of individual social workers, but massive institutional and organizational failure. The likely reality is that the social workers who visited probably had several other serious and urgent cases to deal with, and little time. They probably make difficult choices and carry considerable and uncertain risk every day.
I am not a social worker, but I’ve worked closely with them. I know many who are deeply caring individuals trying to do their best in an increasingly challenging and complex environment with overwhelming demand. I think that saying they can just ‘clock off’ is quite offensive. On the contrary, the ones I know well go to bed at night worrying if they’ve made the right decisions, or not.
A witch-hunt won’t help anyone. The people who should be held to account are those who fund our struggling public services.

I used to work in the insurance sector and learnt a lot about risk and disasters. One factor that has stayed with me is that disasters like Piper Alpha happen as a result of an improbable and therefore unpredictable set of circumstances. That means that lessons cannot by definition be learnt as, contrary to what we may believe, there are not patterns against which to mitigate.

In a case like this one, we could remove any one of a number of factors and predict a different outcome, but there is no guarantee Sara would have been saved. Looking at root causes, though, the factor that most mystified me is the judge agreeing she could live with her father when the extent of his violence was already established.

Lessons ARE learnt, all the time. The system is never perfect but do you really think social care and education have learnt nothing since the 70s??

Nor do social workers by the way

I'm in this system. foster carers are leaving droves due lack of support for the children we care for. Parents are prioritised over the children, social workers can be totally useless or just don't care

There is crisis and nothing is being done and no one is being held to account

We desperately need more foster carers and more people that care

It is impossible for social services to be able to save every single child from whatever it is that endangers them. That must be understood. However, I am sick to death of them trotting out the ‘mistakes were made’ excuse. A mistake is dropping a plate, or reversing into an hedge, or charging someone wrong in your shop. These were not ‘mistakes’. They were incompetencies. So, of course there will be incompetent people working for child protection services - but admit that, don’t call them ‘mistakes’, admit to be incompetent and then get better.

That is exactly the case I thought of when I started reading this thread.

Poor communication and record keeping appear to have contributed to her being in her father’s violent home, and then being kept there despite the school reporting concerns.

The bureaucracy can be very difficult to deal with. My own experience was addresses wrongly recorded but impossible to track down where or when the error originated in order to correct it.

The parents killed the poor girl not anyone else.
And if Govs make harsh anti racism laws so people daren’t speak out for fear of being sacked ….

Although mistakes were made by so many professionals in this case, I wonder if there isn't a bigger issue to be debated than mere competence. The cases that are reported, most recently this one and Axel Rudakubana, are about behaviour at the very limits of human experience. I question whether it is reasonable to expect state institutions to save people.

It should be risk based. I do think there should be checks during the holidays for children identified as high risk.

For home educated families, the frequency of any checks should be determined by the individual risk assessment. Kids who are clearly thriving and well cared for wouldn't need to be seen often at all. Where there is cause for concern, the visits would need to be more frequent.

Surely this is just basic common sense, isn't it?

The private sector ain’t gonna do it, and your neighbours won’t either. You make em better or you just sink further into squalor - burning everything down won’t help.

This. If you completely shut down "these useless organisations" ie social services, then many, many more children will die at the hands of abusive parents.

Seems worrying about being labelled 'racist' got in the way again, just like for the grooming gangs. The fear over 'racism ' is costing lives and allows children to be abused.