@Cassimin it goes back to what I mentioned in previous posts and others have referred, no one cares about social workers until a child dies.
The role of childrens SWs in people's lives is unrelatable to the vast majority of the public, everyone whose been pregnant knows the value of a midwife, anyone that's been poorly knows the value of paramedics/drs/nurses/health care staff, people with children in schools see the teachers efforts, lots of people have elderly relatives needing care, people seek help from the police if victims of a crime. Genreally speaking of course. But who would IRL put their hands up to say they've had a social worker? I don't tell new acquaintances I'm a social worker through fear of their response, you never know what you might get called. It's a dark, shady corner of society where no one wants to work, yet when something like this happens everyone's got the solution.
As some PPs have commented on properly funding early intervention is key, we'll never know for sure if it could have saved the lives of these headline children but I know it would prevent a huge percentage of the referrals being made to my team if schools, HV, GPS etc etc had more services to refer to to help and try prevent things escalating before they to the level of my team.
The cuts in these services are simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.
As a Team Manager of an assessment team I be open to seeing some sort of panorama uncovered to children's services, showing the realities of my team day to day, but also something exposing the financial scandle of agency workers, what private foster care agencies charge compared to in house, etc etc. I currently have agency social workers I manage earning double my hourly rate (anyway, that's a whole other thread). Councils need to look after the permanent staff they have, then they wouldn't need to spend extortionate amounts of agency workers. The issue with recruitment would be solved if they invested in retention a bit more. We dont want fancy offices, crazy packages, just a safe workload. One extra social worker per team, or an extra team manager and splitting teams would in the long term cost far less than multiple agency workers earning £££, senior managers ae very short sighted. I have said these things until I'm blue in the face, every meeting and opportunity I can, people listen, smile and say there's no money... they aren't stupid, they just are either as powerless as me or godknows as it defies all common sense.