Social services failings

[mamaxbear]

The recent stories that have come out about Sara Sharif and Isabella Wheildon have really made me feel sick to my stomach. Innocent little girls being murdered by their parents and family, what is going on? I understand the huge pressures children’s services are under, but when will there be a change? I’ve had social workers involved throughout my whole childhood, my mum used to verbally and physically assault me and my siblings. We witnessed DV almost every weekend, she drank with her partners and it would just be carnage. When social workers came to assess, they saw that our home was tidy and we had food in the cupboards and off they went. It breaks my heart to think what these little girls and probably thousands of other children have been through or are currently going through. I have a 3 year old daughter myself. My heart hurts for these children.

No law deals with murder in advance.

Social workers would be the first to cheer it if it came in - but only the police could use it.

It’s horrible, but Child Social Workers need more powers.

It seems it’s only realised how much danger these children are in when it’s too late and they’ve suffered right up until death. Sara Sharif was known to children’s social care from birth, school had made reports and voiced their concerns. She was then taken out of school. More could have been done and I just cannot fathom how these social workers can’t learn from their mistakes. It’s happening far too often.

Maybe if people sorted their own mess and stop breeding with unsuitable partners then repeating the pattern and sorted their own lives out

The people harming children are to blame social services has to pick up the pieces constantly no wonder thry are overun

And anyone knowing a child is being harmed should have equal sentencing

When social services fail then the results can be unbelievably awful, as we saw in this case. But the cases where social services achieve their goals and protect children don't hit the headlines in the same way. These cases are prominent in the media because they're relatively rare.

That's not to say that social services never makes mistakes, or is horrendously overwhelmed with cases to the point where things fall through the gaps. But it's hard to judge their success rate when we only hear about their failures.

@Edingril of course the people harming children are to blame, but we have a system in this country and social services are supposed to protect and safeguard our children and young people. That has obviously not happened. There’s no question that these people should not be reproducing, but unfortunately they do.

I work in adult safeguarding rather than childrens but I really don't think people realise how few powers social services actually have.

We do not have powers of entry into people's homes

We cannot force parents to behave in a particular way or do particular things.

We can put the evidence to court of what our concerns are but ultimately it is the courts decision not social services if a child is removed or stays.

Apparently the average case load for a child protection social worker is 38 children. That's more children than paid hours in the week for most social workers.

Would you be able to safeguard 38 Sara's in less than an hour a week per child? How do you know which one of the 38 is the one whose horrible parents will murder them at some random point in the next 3 months when all of them are equally high risk? Would you be prepared to have all that responsibility for around £30-40k a year?

Where do all these removed children go to? There's no services. There's no money.

Not sure you understand the role of a social worker and what they can and can’t do……even when a family are on child protection plan, it is voluntary , as in the parent has to consent to it…..social workers don’t have authority to enter your home of speak with your child unless with parental consent…..social workers only have corporate PR when a child is looked after in care …..and this is decided by the courts not the SW

It makes me so angry when people criticise social services when cases like this come to light.
Of course it is easy to look at these horrendous cases after the fact and say why wasn’t more done. The truth is that social services will be dealing with large numbers of children at risk and they have to make life and death judgements every day. How can they know which ones will turn out so badly.
If folk want better services then we need to be prepared to pay much higher taxes. We can’t have it both ways.

Ok so I see the comments regarding social workers not having powers, case loads being too large to handle etc. So what is the point of having them if they have so little power and leverage over children and families? I’m really open to the debate, I work very closely with social workers and community teams in the job I do, I can honestly say I am yet to meet a good social worker. That may be because they are massively overstretched, but unfortunately that is my experience of them. From being a child to present day.

I really hate it when I see the press trying to blame SW’s when it’s the lazy, lying, feckless parents fault.

There is a massive problem with retention of experienced workers, the system is massively process driven, too much time loading data, I think there's a huge difficulty about lone workers doing very stressful and potentially dangerous visits and how under those circumstances you can fully assess, pressures to keep children with family , getting no where getting management support to escalate ,lack of foster carers, and at the end of the day working with families that essentially are very good at telling lies etc. It's horrifically sad , the system is broken.

Because who else is going to do it?

Social workers also do a lot more work than just applying to court to remove children.

What is your role? Would there be room in it to pick up the tasks the social workers aren't doing?

I’m still baffled as to why social services placed Sara with her father, given that a few years earlier had tried to Strangle her mother with a belt and had tried to set her in fire.

A section 47 enquiry does not need a parents consent for the local authority to carry it out.

What is your bar for "good"?

Are you sure the social workers aren't just limited in the actions they can take based on the evidence they see.

I haven't read the posts because these threads depress the hell out of me but I'm a team manager in a child protection team. We've had manageable caseloads for the ast year following some aggressive overseas recruitment. Now the council chiefs have decided they can save money on frontline social workers so they have sacked all the locums and agreed for us to hire ONE permanent social worker to replace them. All teams are down at least one social worker. No agreement to fill maternity leave posts. I am having sleepless nights over some of the children knowing I don't have the staff to do the work needed. We need money to pay social workers, when you don't do that there are too few people doing too much work and mistakes get made and things get missed. Individuals are not to blame.

That’s awful. I can understand why you’d be losing sleep.

i didn’t say it did🤔….,merely that a CP is voluntary…..if parents refuse to engage then it may be escalated of course

He courts awarded the father custody of Sara - even though he'd previously abused Sara's mother

Ah, well sorry, that’s not how it reads.

Of course it’s down to the perpetrators who allow their children to die , we can’t just take responsibility from them and blame everyone else.

But having said that , there are times when Social services fail and completely miss the warning signs

BUT-I don’t think things will ever change. Our population is getting bigger , more unfit parents are having kids with more unfit partners.

Less people are entering in to the profession. Being a social worker is a hard job, it’s not great pay and they are under constant pressure.

Meaning people go off with stress putting more pressure on the service.

Who really wants to be a social worker nowadays when you look the expectations? People can do office jobs from home with less stress nowadays.

The country’s public service are skint, more feckless people are having kids and its never going to change.

What job do you do? I have met good social workers! I think a lot of people would be shocked at how bad a lot of parenting is. There are so many people with no control over their own mood and emotions having children and basically incapable of good parenting. I imagine there is a lot of violence in homes. But basically parents drinking, shouting, throwing things etc etc is sadly not a rarity. It must be hard to pick out which ones would go on to more serious harm.

Yes, that’s correct. On the evidence before them, which would have should have included evidence from social services given they’d been involved with the family for years.

I guess it could have just been straightforward family court with no third party professionals involved, but I doubt it.

highlights yet another case where an abusive man is awarded their child.

the system is broken.

SW here.

Reality is, there's no money! Too many cases, not enough hours in the week to do everything, little power and restraints from higher management about money/budgets.

I saw on This Morning them saying how can they let her be homeschooled. Why didn't social services say no - because we can't! We don't have parental responsibility for that child, we can't make decisions like that. The parent does! We visit for a few hours however many times a week (mostly once a week or 10 days) We can't be there or see everything that goes on behind closed doors.

Yes there will be failings that come out but if the system was different there would be less.

There are no foster placements these days. It takes weeks to place a child with little complex needs and don't get me started on those children who have high complex needs!

The system is broken. It's shit and social workers are leaving in the hundreds. This year nearly 3,000 social worker did not register meaning they have given up!

Every year we accept the little pay rise with no complaint. We never strike because we're SW's were already vilified in the press.

Thank you for doing the job you do. I couldn’t do it.