Will lessons really be learnt after this tragic child abuse case?

[Tolkienista]

The horrific case of baby Preston Davey sickeningly abused by his adoptive parents (a teacher and his partner) concluded in a guilty verdict in court yesterday.
The details are too traumatic to contemplate the awful end of this child's life.
Once again the age old phrase "lessons will be learnt" has been quoted and I have to say, will they?

I know life is extremely complicated & I'm in no doubt that the killer of Preston was manipulative, cold hearted and extremely secretive in covering up his abuse of this defenceless little child.
I guess that because abuse generally takes place behind closed doors, child abuse will sadly always be a part of our society.

Utterly utterly tragic.

Two separate questions
One - will lessons be learnt? Yes, they always are. Whenever a child is killed there is always a lot of work done to integrate lessons into practice including often changes in policy and legislation.
Two - can this prevent people killing children? No. It's impossible to eliminate risk altogether and it's impossible to eliminate human error in practice.

I would imagine a big help would be more social work staff. Just as it would be in maternity, where inquiry after inquiry has mentioned the lack of staff and poor staffing especially for the acuity.

So, no. Not if it requires the super rich to pay taxes instead of super yachts (which pollute the world). Not in a time when the “Labour” party resent the idea of public finance for anything and want to be seen as more Tory than the tories.

Every year 53 children are killed in their own home (NSPCC statistic) by those who are charged with their care.
A horrifying statistic.

Not until people see the value of paying for good protective services. All the lessons in the world won’t address systemic issues of under funding social work services, case loads are impossibly high with many local authorities now struggling to meet their statutory duties. Social workers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate, 25% are out within 6 years of qualification, which is a huge concern because good child protection work relies on practice wisdom gained over time.

So yes, there will be changes that can be made but without workers who have the capacity, time and space to do the work… I’d also say that there are people absolutely determined to harm children, and who go to huge lengths to hide that intention - stopping them is a whole other question.

I was reading about it this morning it is horrific that poor baby. I agree with others that yes there will be a review and changes to practice made but staffing is still a a major issue. In my role I often have to refer to child protection and the threshold has got so high and it is mainly due to staffing and volume of cases. In many instances a case that would have been accepted 10 years ago now does not even reach their threshold for consideration. It is scary. The trouble is those that do go into child protection don't last long because they are expected to try and work within staffing levels that make their job impossible and unsafe for the families they are working with. There needs to be a huge overhaul if they are going to attract the needed staff and retain them.

My god, that is a bleak and shameful statistic. Some of those children will be entirely under the radar, others will be very much known about and still not stopped. I think the threshold for removing children from the home should be much lower, but I'm also very aware that the Care System hardly offers a safer environment or better outcomes.

I think the question really needs to be will this actually change anything, lessons are always learnt after cases like this, but as seen so often, the lessons learnt are invariably the same ones, missed opportunities, lack of communication between agencies, often just unacceptable errors, concerned others not listened to , the list seems endless and sadly, nothing ever seems to change or we wouldn’t have endless enquires where “lessons are learnt”

On paper they look like great prospective adopters . A teacher with additional responsibility for safeguarding. With all the lessons learnt in the world, these 2 were very good at masking , probably psychopathic and that is very difficult to detect. It makes us feel better to hear 'further training' etc but from what I've seen , the checking for adopters is very thorough and still didn't reveal these 2.

It’s not just staffing levels, which are a huge issue, but wider resourcing of services and supports when risk is identified. Also a complete lack of placements for children who need to be removed. I’ve recently heard independent accounts of social workers literally taking children home with them because the kid needed to be removed and there was nowhere to place them in foster care, kinship care or residential placement.

We’ve let services become eroded to such a point that the most basic of functioning isn’t possible in child protection.

Will lessons be learnt? Yes.
Will this happen again? Yes.

This case has sickened me to my core.

I have friends in Social Services Family Support, a Social Worker and in the Police covering CSE. Every single one of them is frustrated by the constrained resources and support to do their job properly.

Well exactly.
We remove children from parents only when the harm of removing them is lesser than the harm of leaving them there. It's not about how safe the care system is - it's very safe in the main - it's about the outcomes for children. As a professional in the field I disagree that the threshold for removal should be lower.

Social workers never take children home with them. Don't make claims like that - that would be a career ending thing to do if a social worker did that!

You’d think so, but in both cases emergency approval was given, because there was nowhere else. I don’t mean they took the kids home without process or supervision, of course.

People don't ever see the work that goes on behind the scenes. No child should suffer what Preston did, it makes me sick and angry. But at the same time, no one see's all the children who have been protected from abuse. You only ever hear about what goes wrong.

I used to work in a similar field, where we were also chronically understaffed. At some point you have to end your work day. No one can work 24/7. Every case is difficult, every case is urgent. So what do you do?

I am a bit tired of the phrase "lessons will be learned" but the public in general can't accept that sometimes bad things happen and, for numerous reasons, we sadly can't save everyone.

It isn't even just about money. People don't want to do these jobs. This means high workloads and burnout for the ones that do. Which leads to less people wanting to do the job and so it goes on. I don't know what the answer is.

Sadly you can’t prevent all child abuse. That isn’t the outcome of “lessons are learned”

lessons are learned. Children are safer now than they’ve ever been. It’s never doing to be zero harm though.

No, just don't believe that. It's unlawful. It would not be approved. There are emergency care agencies who will take a child to a hotel and stay with them in a dire emergency which can be used, a social worker taking them home? Absolutely not. Ofsted would report this to the regulator if they found out about it. Everyone involved would be investigated.

I believe that one person involved in the placing of the child with these two men declined to place him, but their higher ups overruled it.

Lessons had already been learnt. One needs to ask why this was overruled and why.

How do you know that? Is there an investigative report that has been published yet?

I doubt this is true

I suppose the question here is ‘why were so many red flags missed’?

Multiple trips to a+e in a short period of time with a young child should be a big alarm bell.

I wonder if his being a teacher made people
think he was trustworthy?

Another question I have on safeguarding is - I doubt Varley just suddenly developed an interest in children at that point, I wonder if there had been more advanced digital checks, the adoption would never have taken place?

Im aware of a child going home with a social worker as a emergency placement for a couple of days. Its definitely a thing

It's a highly illegal thing. What about insurance and liability? Safety and suitability of the environment? Conflict of interest between caring and professional role? Local authority statutory duties to regulate placements? It's a major breach of professional standards and IF it happened it was a MAJOR breach of regulations and a sign of an inadequate/failing/dysfunctional local authority. If reported, everyone involved would be up in front of the regulator facing fitness to practice enquiries. I just don't believe it.

What will be learnt? I know the nhs trust said they were going to review some things.

In a lot of these cases we see lots of people raising concerns, family, schools, lots of people making reports, but nothing being done. This one seems to have evolved really quickly with not much time for any pattern of abuse to actually be established and not many concerns raised?. He was noted with unusual bruises twice, but one time was explained by him pulling a toy box on himself and it presumably wasn't until the investigation into his death it was found the video of him pulling the toy box over was 12 days old (iirc). Previous foster mum raised concerns over a gut feeling which isn't concrete enough for anyone to do anything with.

it's a horrendous case but I'm not sure much could have been done prevention wise in this particular one? (I read about the case yesterday but there may be things I'm unaware of?)

Oh I've just remembered he had the fractured elbow too didn't he?. That should definitely have raised some red flags.