To expect a report into the death of a child to at least be literate

[friday16]

Apparently no-one in Bradford Local Safeguarding Children board can be bothered to proof-read an SCR. This is just lazy jargon reflective of lazy thinking, and that it's misspelt (and I assume an SCR is seen by quite a few people before it's published, so it's not just a problem of one person) just compounds the lazy thinking. Even if you fix the spelling, it's still the sort of prose written by nine year olds.

"Professionals are effected by the physical and emotional demands of their work that can be exacerbated by other temporary crises or difficulties that effect their performance such as the bereavement for one of the professionals in this case"

The prose/spelling does not concern me as much as the findings

DO not concern me as much as the findings I am literate, honest

Or they are so tired and overworked and burnt out that they simply can't spot mistakes, or maybe they were never taught the difference between affect and effect.

Or they don't have the support available to get someone to proof-read before publication

You would hope that someone writing an SCR would be educated to a level in the first place that would preclude having to pay for proof reading *ohfourfaxache". Its not only the poor spelling, its the poor grammar and lack of sentence construction too. Added to the fact that the content is so general as to be virtually meaningless. It gives the impression that its a box ticking exercise and that the writer was disinterested in their subject so as to take little care in writing it. Really not acceptable.

both the c

both the content and the presentation are important.

The prose/spelling does not concern me as much as the findings

I think they're hard to separate. Lazy writing and lazy thinking go hand in hand. I've read quite a few SCRs, and this one jumps out as being much more jargon-filled than others. It reads like a middling first-year essay, which probably means it's full of middling first-year thinking.

For example:

"Reliance on hindsight can wrongly infer that wrong personal or professional judgments were made rather than looking at what was known at the time and analyse how and why information was being processed by all of the relevant people (family and professional) and the reasons for it. "

It's not just that they don't know what infer means. It's that it's not at all clear what they're trying to say. On this occasion imply doesn't work either: it's probably something like "can wrongly encourage one to think that the wrong", but it's difficult to tell. I think they're trying to say "With hindsight, one might think people bad decisions, but in fact they made sensible decisions about information that turned out to be wrong", but who knows?

And if the people who are writing the report aren't clear what they mean, how can the promise to "learn lessons" mean anything?

Agree - its dreadful writing, but it's everywhere. If I employed people, I would give them all a literacy test before employing them.

A few spelling or punctuation mistakes wouldn't bother me if the content was clear and well thought out but I can't even tell what their findings are!

Poor child deserved better than this.

The link seems to be to the executive summary. Would need to read the whole document to critique the analysis fairly. Although I accept that the ES will be indicative of the approach

Clive James tore apart Martin Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (standard reading in an A Level History course near you now), in what is to my mind one of the finest book reviews ever written. The original publication, at some length in The New Yorker (is there any other sort of New Yorker article?), omitted James' skewering of Goldhagen's lazy writing, as Tina Brown thought that attacking a book that had been otherwise so well received was going to be difficult enough, without also spending a page on how the bloke couldn't write.

"My animadversions on Goldhagen’s prose style were held to be a potentially embarrassing irrelevance: to dispute his interpretation of factual events was going to be contentious enough, without getting into the subjective area of how he wrote his interpretation down. I didn’t think that it was a subjective area; I thought the callow over-confidence of his jargon-ridden style was a clear index of how he had been simply bound to get his pretended overview of the subject out of shape from the start"

James is right. If you can't write it down clearly, you probably can't think about it clearly either; even if you do in fact have some clear understanding, your audience certainly won't. And slipping easily into a jargon-laden writing style implies you've slipped into a similarly cliche-laden thinking style: your language is shaping your thought, rather than vice versa.

Gobbolino, my second quote is from the overview report rather than the executive summary. It's just as bad.

For example:

"21. Although there were efforts to check information when for example a health visitor had become concerned in 2010 about the lack of contact with health services and subsequently both the enquiries by health, education and CSC as well as a referral that was made in early 2011 relied primarily on what the family said rather than getting to a point where Hamzah or the siblings who were subject of the inquiries had been seen."

Fair point. I personally feel that this has been a fuck-up from start to finish. Yes the grammar/spelling/jargon is utter crap, but the importance of this pales into insignificance when you look at what actually happened

Re being a box ticking exercise - absolutely! Sadly that is all reports like these are - it's a way of using lots of jargon, that no one understands, to make it sound like they're doing something. What they have identified is that there are problems, but it gives no indication as to what the hell they are going to do about them.

The standard of the report and the findings of the report are two seperate issues. However, the standard of the report illuminates the findings. The extracts quoted by the OP are awful. The writer(s) need to practice punctuation and reading back as a matter of urgency.
It's truly terrifying that, in all probability, everybody who contributed is educated at least to first degree level.

It is lazy, disrespectful, uneducated shite.

but the importance of this pales into insignificance when you look at what actually happened

Oh, I agree. But I think that the bad writing is of a piece with the bad thinking, and allows us an extra insight into what went wrong. Even the statement from the chair of the LSCB is symptomatic. "My independent view of services in Bradford has been they are good and sometimes excellent. This personal assessment was re-enforced by the Ofsted inspection of 2012 which is available on the Ofsted website." I think it's interesting that someone can get to be a professor without being able to spell reinforced (or, perhaps more damning, understand the distinction).

Unfortunately, just because someone has a piece of paper saying that they have achieved a certain standard of education, it doesn't guarantee that they in fact have a fully functioning, thinking, reasoning brain.

I think the report also highlights the fact that, even when something goes horrifically wrong and the shit hits the fan, there still isn't the joined up thinking between agencies to get to the bottom of existing problems, never mind trying to tackle issues prospectively. There is reluctance, stupidity and a general "passing of the buck" that is ingrained in the current system. As a result, no one wants to work in the field which perpetuates the pressure staff are put under.

The sensible thing to do would be to communicate effectively between agencies, work together and do what they are supposed to do. Instead everything is always the responsibility of someone else. This is what I mean about the spelling etc being the least of the troubles - they go far, far deeper than that.

OMG Friday - that statement is shocking

Based on the sentence and paragraph construction, my guess is that the document has been checked through and altered by several different people. Then no-one took responsibility for making sure all the track changes added up to a coherent document. They probably pressed the 'accept all' button.

I think there will rightly be a furore about this SCR, the spelling and grammar are the least of it.

"Edward Timpson, the children’s minister, said there were a series of “glaring absences” in the review.

He singled out the “failure” of the serious case review to fully explain the actions “taken, or not taken” by authorities to intervene.

The review, published by the Bradford Safeguarding Children’s Board, found that Hamzah Khan’s death “could not have been predicted”, but said he was “let down” by systems."

I think this case illustrates a tragic failure by the authorities from beginning to end.

"Following the death of Hutton's mother on Christmas Eve 2005 she turned to drink, and repeatedly asked the police, doctors and social workers for help.

In the year after Hamzah's birth, she asked police for help in getting away from her abusive husband, asked her GP for help with depression and asked the local social services child protection unit for advice."

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10446221/Hamzah-Khan-deep-concerns-over-social-services-failure-to-explain-death.html

The report is actually so patronising it's offensive. It's as if they just got anybody to write a non summary, but instructed them to fill it with jargon rather than facts and truthful conclusions.
It reminds me of a very old saying;
'If you can't astound with your knowledge, (or actions) then baffle them with bullshit.'
Unfortunately whoever threw this together wasn't even bright enough to bullshit with any credibility and thinks the general public are even more stupid. This is indicative of the arrogance of the attitude of children's services Bradford.

olgaga

The full letter from the DfE (Timpson is, presumably, just the signatory, and the letter will have been written by one of his senior civil servants) is here. The difference in the quality of the writing highlights the difference in the quality of the thinking.

Yes I think more thought went into how to gloss over these missed opportunities than the requirements of the brief, or the presentation.