Should we accept greater state monitoring of families in order to safeguard children?

[AllYearsAround]

This point has been raised on a few threads in reference to Sara Sharif - that the state should do more monitoring of home educated children if there's a possibility of uncovering abuse and saving a life.

But looking into it, most children killed by a parent or step parent are actually under 1
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/statistics-briefings/child-deaths-abuse-neglect

There have been a few awful cases recently of babies and toddlers being murdered, particularly by mums' boyfriends.

Would it not be more sensible then to put the time and money into monitoring families with young babies? We already have the system in place with health visitors.

Maybe health visitors should be a mandatory service, with regular (weekly? Monthly?) home visits and babies stripped and weighed/examined.

This would surely save many more lives than any additional monitoring of home education.

Monitoring and referrals are not the issue! There are NO resources to do a single thing.

Have had SS and SAFE involvement for a lot of this year. So far I have yet to have a single issue that I've asked to help with addressed. Not one. Fucking millions of meetings and calls and texts. Checking we are "ok" but that's it.

Didn't want to homeschool. Destroyed our mental health and financial security. Had no choice. No school for both kids. Ended up begging for a place in another LA. Moving again. It's a fucking travesty. Everyone passing the blame.

Those fuckers deserve never to see the light of day, but the government should hang their heads in shame how many families are suffering and neglected - and therefore real safeguarding issues - go unaddressed. I feel sorry for anyone doing that job. Unless you're dead or dying no one cares.

I'm home-educate my child & I am a child safeguarding social worker.

I'm massively in favour of greater scrutiny of home educated children.
Nobody WANTS more state intervention in their life, but the benefits of doing so means that fewer vulnerable children will fall through the net.

The issue currently is that if a child is in a mainstream school & there are serious safeguarding concerns, there is no legal way of preventing a parent removing a child from school & home educating, short of removing the child from the parents.
Courts are extremely reluctant to do this without overwhelming evidence.

The new proposed legislation means that social workers / courts will be able to insist a child attends a school & a parent that is physically or sexually abusing their child can't withdraw their child from school to hide them from professionals. This is particularly relevant where there children are on child protection or PLO.

There is a much wider issue with the state of statutory social work in the UK, which has been chronically underfunded for the twenty years I have been qualified.
Social worker morale is often low with a high turnover of staff. Caseloads are high & resources are increasingly scarce.
Social workers are disrespected by other professionals (sometimes justifiably so) & we deal with constant hostility from parents, families & other agencies.

Serious case reviews & inquiries over decades have tried to address the same issues, but there has never been the level of funding needed to transform children's services.

Sara Sharif death is a truly awful tragedy. But if children are going to be adequately protected, more social workers with lower caseloads are needed. Better paid & trained foster carers are needed. Comprehensive support agencies that work long-term with families are required instead of short-term interventions.
It all costs money but the public are not minded to pay more taxes to actually safeguard the children that need it.

I feel so sad for Sara who was so terribly failed. A beautiful child who deserved so much more 😢 Children should be permanently removed much sooner in my opinion.

I think most under1s have regular interaction with outside agencies. HV, GP, vaccines etc it is expected that any suspicions will Be picked. Which they usually are, wether this changes outcomes is another thing.

until there are more foster places none of the interventions matter. As they will stay with their families

Poverty will not be the only factor in the neglect though. Will usually include something else which means the child is unsafe and has been for a long time.

i'm well aware of that, I worked as a social worker. But lets be realistic - very few middle class kids are being taken into care because of neglect.

I also work for a government department and priorities and contracts chop and change depending on media controversy.

Thats part of the problem though services like education, health and social work have been chronically under funded for decades. Every now and then there’s a crisis and the government pop up with a bit of extra money but then the media circus moves on, and so does the money.

They’ll spend inordinate amounts of money on public enquiries and lessons will be learned, but those lessons learned never come with a budget to actually properly finance services to implement that learning. And social services is never top of the list for additional funding, social workers don’t have the professional profile that teaching and nursing do, don’t have a dedicated union that has any teeth so the public are often unaware of the pressures. Until a child dies and then people ask what the hell social work was doing.

Where I am (Scotland) social workers are well paid particularly when newly qualified - salary isn’t so much of an issue. Workloads are horrific though and I’d argue can’t be managed safely, so social workers leave the profession through burnout, or because they’re scared they’ll miss something and a child will die, or more likely they’ll know a child is at risk and they have literally nowhere to put them if they’re removed.

Poverty will not be the only factor in the neglect though. Will usually include something else which means the child is unsafe and has been for a long time.

Actually research shows that poverty in and of itself is a huge contribution to child neglect and abuse. It’s very difficult to parent children when you can’t provide basics like housing, heating, food and clothing. The financial pressures undermine parenting capacity, impact mental and physical health, wear away at your resilience as a parent. Whatever else is happening in your life, it’s much easier to cope if you’re not worrying about your leccy bill.

Of course not all parents who live in poverty neglect their children, but poverty creates a landscape that makes parenting much, much more difficult. Tackling child poverty is the one measure guaranteed to reduce the numbers of children at risk of harm.

I'd love to know where in the country people are getting regular HV checks. Where I live you get one, which can happen at any time between baby being born and turning 1, and then nothing. At all. No 1 year checks any more, nothing. When I found out I immediately thought of all the children who will slip under the radar because no one is checking on them, it broke my heart.

This. Back in the day when I was a community midwife (70s/80s) we visited every day until at least 10 days. We could continue for up to 6 weeks if necessary. HVs would take over and a proper handover was done. A friend of mine had a baby who was in SCBU for weeks and needed cardiac surgery. She said her HV (who had been a paediatric nurse) was a fantastic support right up until the child was 5. I did my training in a small maternity hospital. You had to be a state registered nurse (3 years) with one year's post reg experience before doing midwifery training. Everybody looking after patients had a professional qualification.
I have been appalled at the decline of obstetric care over the last 2 or 3 decades. In some areas there are no community midwives at all. My nieces have had really dreadful standards of care right the way through their pregnancies and post natal periods. Absolutely shameful. Postnatal wards are absolute hell holes and it is a matter of surviving, not recovering.

Yes. I was recently speaking to a Ukrainian refugee who is now living in Britain and is pregnant. She is horrified by maternity care here (she has older children born in Ukraine). She is seriously thinking of returning to Ukraine for antenatal care as she already has for dentistry!