No wonder child protection in Haringay is such a mess when this kind of gobbledigook passes for English

[mabanana]

From the Guardian:
A conference in January will focus on improving child protection.
Sharon Shoesmith will be a key speaker. Her topic: 'Breaking Down Silos: Inspiring Ownership and Sharing Responsibility For Measuring Impacts and Outcomes Across Partnerships.'

Now, wtf is that supposed to mean? It actually makes me quite angry that this kind of doublespeak is being used. It cannot help people think clearly about what must be done. It is the kind of language that makes it OK to sack and legally silence whistleblowers who want to say, in plain English, something is wrong here and we are failing children.

Nooka, all you write makes sense. My job involves getting disparate parts of a global firm to work together and not in silos. Yes, it is a huge ongoing struggle, taking many years, a culture shift (requiring consistent support from the very top), investigation of better systems and infrastructure for communication and monitoring.

But in Baby P's case, I do take issue with one statement of yours: "The point was to make sure that all services and individuals in contact with children took personal responsibility for child protection, and didn't just think "that's for the SS child protection team", refer at best and then forget about it."

I know this is based on press reports and the redone (ie NON-Sharon Shoesmith-self serving) Serious Case Review of the Baby P case is yet to come. But if it is true that the childminder, other doctors who saw bruises and the police were asking for Baby P to be taken out of his home and into care, and social services overruled them, then it is not the situation IN BABY P's CASE that other agencies were just dumping things on the SS' doorstep. In this case, SS acted contrary to what so many other agencies and individuals were recommending. I want to know why. There must be proper accountability, not just shrugging about difficulties.

blueshoes, I think a lot of it is to do with the emphasis on social worker training and culture to keep children within their birth families, the sad fact that they can be manipulated and deceived by cunning guardians and lose their sense of objectivity (not the case with doctors or police who just look at the child and see the injuries before them), budgetary pressures and huge rises in court fees for care cases and most importantly that there are simply not enough well paid, well qualified emergency foster carers out there. It should be government policy to set targets for a big rise in the numbers of foster carers. That's the kind of thing that a public inquiry could look at.

Absolutely, ladyworsley. I welcome the public inquiry. I am less interested in scapegoating in individual cases than in getting to the bottom of why Victoria Climbie or Baby P had to lose their lives despite a system that was supposed to protect them and ensuring that, as far as possible in this imperfect world, another child should not have to die again in these circumstances.

Any view any attempt to brush aside failures as being due to poor management, poor interagency communication or systemic failure with dismay. If it is a problem, sort it out! And keep hacking at it.

yes, and I don't want Lord Laming to be in charge of a new inquiry. He would not be independent and may be a bit defensive in terms of his previous reforms. A complete fresh look at the whole thing is required. I feel very cross that after 10 years of economic growth in this country, our social services are in such a state especially when my own local paper is regularly full of nonsensical public sector jobs on large salaries.

Sorry blueshoes, I was referring only to the Laming inquiry and recommendations. In that sad story it was clear that there were people who did have concerns but took them nowhere, hence the change in emphasis to say that child protection should be the responsibility of everyone who has contact with children. I wouldn't make any comment on the Baby P case because I don't know all the facts (at all). The Laming inquiry took a panel of highly experienced individuals months to investigate, this case has not had the same level of examination and most of the facts are still most probably unknown, and certainly not available to the public, so I have no intention of drawing any conclusions (apart from those one can infer from previous investigations in this and related fields).

I would doubt very much that Lord Laming, or any of the other investigators would wish to be involved. I imagine it would be fairly soul destroying.

I do agree about the urgency of sorting things out, but finding that a failure is to do with the way that agencies work together or communication methods going wrong isn't brushing things aside. Evidence from accident investigations shows that if you don't find the real reason why something went wrong, but punish the last person in the chain instead, they will go wrong again, and again and again.

The fundamental issue is that once you have found the reason for the failure you act to ensure it cannot happen again. However that often hits political barriers - for example it is clear that there isn't a good consensus on when it is reasonable to take children into care. I think this should be discussed more widely in public, so that social workers are less vilified. I think there should be more funding into social work to make it a more widely respected career choice, to increase the calibre of the intake, and the numbers that choose to go into it as a career. There should be better career progression so that supervision is provided by those who are skilled, experienced, and highly trained. All these things might reduce the very high levels of burnout and ensure staffing levels are high enough for the workload.

Of course there are then the issues about why families get into such a state that child protection is required at all as apart from the small number of cases where someone enjoys cruelty for the sake of it, a great deal of child protection is centered on families in extreme poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, mental health problems and poor parenting models. More should be done about these things too.

Unfortunately as with the very high profile mental health investigations, once the case is out of the public eye they fundamental issues go back to being invisible, and the very low funding priorities they were beforehand.

re the OP it sounds like typical public sector speak. I work in PR (private sector) with some public sector clients and this is the type of language I have to decipher every day. I try and tell my clients that newspapers and TV stations simply won't look at something written in that 'language' but it's a real battle.

At the end of the day it normally is quite simple when you unravel it. But I think people who are immersed in the public sector sometimes do 'go native'.

Have to be honest and say that sort of language isn't confined to the public sector, but my public sector clients seem more resistant to letting it go than private sector ones.

I don't think they mean to confuse, they just don't realise they do. But it's normally at the same time as trumpeting something about 'getting closer to our citizens and making the council's work more transparent'!

Did anyone hear some woman from Ofsted on Radio 4 talking about Ofsted's damning report on Haringay? Non stop jargon about 'getting underneath the data'. Even when Humphries very politely asked her what she meant, she was unable to talk in English!

Doesn't surprise me. We (private sector) have to deal with this stuff, usually printed in very expensive brochures. Love the job titles, too.