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

[softstone]

This appalling case has highlighted catastrophic failures of many organisations. If I failed in my job to this extent I would be sacked and possibly jailed. Yet the upshot of this report seems to be oh dear yes it’s a terrible shame, never mind.

Why is my tax funding these useless departments? This is not part of the social contract. We’re supposed to live in a civilised society. It’s awful.

I was a teenager when the Maria Caudwell case was being reported on in the mid-1970s. This case and every case since have used the line 'Lessons will be learnt.'

The computer hadn’t been updated with the new address. I am not sure how that was their fault.

They rescheduled the appointment for September.

It was an education team, not a safeguarding visit. Most home educators don't accept home visits anyway, they prefer yearly email/written contact.

There's no reason to think they'd have been invited in anyway.

So all children should have visits from social services during the summer holidays? Six weeks is a long time without contact with other adults.

Actually saving children is extremely difficult because of a lack of will to take them away, cos this costs. There aren't enough funding for housing, fostering, therapy, many end up on the street. It's all down to funding. I don't agree we as a society should not do anything but only say oh it's the parents. I'm willing to pay more to have better safeguarding, better out omes for these poor souls . Hope you read that labour analysts.

What if you’re already working an hour late to manage your workload, so now it’s an hour and a half late. And what if that means no one will be there to pick your children up - do you let them wait outside school alone in the dark?

If these are social workers doing the best they can with the resources they have then still failing, that’s entirely forgiveable, it just their job after all. If they’re sitting in their car all day scrolling Mumsnet instead of checking on their caseload, thats negligent and different.

Are there fewer child social workers per head of population these days, or are there more children living in a vulnerable situation?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 ….

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.

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

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.

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

Nor do social workers by the way

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??

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.