Give us more understanding, social work chief pleads

Scotland’s most senior social workers have called for greater understanding from politicians, the public and parents in controversial instances where children are removed from the family home.

In the wake of several high-profile cases, involving parental issues with obesity, anorexia and learning difficulties, Fred McBride, from the Association of Directors of Social Work, told The Times that there was a need for a mature debate with politicians about what level of risk professionals could reasonably be expected to deal with.

Mr McBride said that a conversation was needed “in broad terms” about where the threshold for removing a child should be, so that everyone understood that when social workers intervened, they did so with good reason. “This is about more clearly defining it so that families, the public, the professionals, the politicians and the newspapers are clearer about what can be expected. That’s what our conversation should be about — a framework for supporting decision- making,” he said.

“We need to define the circumstances in which the State should intervene in private life and remove children. We can’t keep skirting around this. We have to get to grips with it.”

Mr McBride, who is the convenor of the association’s standing committee on children and families, said that very seldom did his profession’s work involve single issues. “So it’s extremely unlikely that social workers would intervene to the extent of removing children from home, for instance, on the basis of obesity.

“What’s much more common is that we intervene to that extent on the basis that the health, welfare and safety of the children are at stake.”

Everyone, he said, passed judgment on the issues which his profession had to deal with — from sterilisation of parents, closed-circuit television in households, to a belief that drug- abusing people whose habit was under control could care for their children perfectly well.

“There are all kinds of public and political views on these things. We can’t be expected to operate, it seems to me, in that kind of very polarised sense of what’s acceptable.” In the absence of any consensus, social workers were blamed for under-intervention as fast as they were blamed for over-intervention.

Mr McBride, who was head of social work in Dundee at the time of the death of Brandon Muir — the toddler killed by his mother’s drug-abusing boyfriend — said that official reports had shown clearly that the danger to Brandon could not have been foreseen. He said he regretted the “irresponsible” reporting in the press of these issues. “It is not just about being harmful to professionals and agencies, but is also harmful to the children. If it feeds a degree of professional anxiety and causes under-reaction in future by professionals, then that is as dangerous to children as over-reaction.”

In addition, it led to child protection services being swamped with referrals, the vast majority of which did not require action, and when that happened “there is a real danger that we miss stuff”.

“Newspapers in particular seem to want life to be black and white, right and wrong. They don’t like us if we operate in the grey areas. But we do, we operate on the horns of dilemmas all the time. What they need to know is they are damaging efforts to protect children.”

Mr McBride made a plea for the work his frontline staff must do. “It’s the most incredible balancing act. It requires a huge degree of professional skill and knowledge, and a huge degree of courage and confidence.

“Some of the cases that frontline practitioners are having to deal with now are significantly more complex than I had to deal with 25 years ago. They are more complex because society is more complex. Things are getting worse. In terms of chaotic substance abuse, all the evidence suggests it is much more prevalent.

“In Scotland we are removing more children into public care than ever before. These children at risk are getting much, much younger. We are seeing many more children under the age of 12 and a significant number under the age of 5. Previously the optimal age of children coming into care was 14 or 15.

“If we continue we will reach a point where we run out of foster carers, and see a return to group care for the very young children that we saw 40 years ago — an orphanage situation. God forbid we return to that.”

Mr McBride’s views were supported by David Crawford, head of social work at Glasgow city council, who said: “We are forever between a rock and a hard place. The public expect us never to fail to get it wrong, never to fail to intervene, and on the other hand, equally never to interfere when that’s disproportionate and unfair to families.”

Mr Crawford said that the checks and balances in the system were not appreciated by the public. To remove a child, social workers first had to convince a sheriff that failure to intervene would leave the child seriously at risk. “This is not to deny that social workers are influential players, but we don’t make the decision. Sheriffs, children’s panels, sometimes they take our recommendations, sometimes they don’t. Parents have rights and access to solicitors. “I know my social workers are subject to a far greater level of scrutiny than I would have got 20 years ago. It is a far safer system.”

Mr Crawford said it was essential that people understood that social workers operated in a very complicated world. “What people also struggle to understand is the speed at which circumstances can change. One of the things that you will never get is a set of rules, because of this. Our workers are working on the finest of judgments.”

Mr Crawford pointed out that being bound by confidentiality meant that his profession could appear defensive. “Because we can’t comment on individual cases, there’s a huge amount of information which isn’t and can’t be in the public domain. The public need to understand that if this was their child, they would not want to me to authorise a statement saying, let me tell you what’s really going on.”