Baby P: the tragedy that still haunts reformers

Plans to overhaul social work and cut red tape in the highly regulated service are being drawn up by the Conservatives. The party believes that reforms introduced after the Baby P tragedy fall well short of what is needed to keep children safe from abuse and neglect.

They have appointed Eileen Munro, Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and one of Britain’s leading experts in the field, to work out how to change the system.

With research showing that frontline social workers spend 80 per cent of their time at their computers, she has been asked to see, in particular, how unnecessary bureaucracy can be stripped out.

Professor Munro, who has an academic background in philosophy, reasoning and scientific methodology, but is also a former social worker, finds much to criticise in the current system, which is based on a series of standard assessment forms that must be completed within deadlines.

She believes it works against the complex and intricate decisionmaking that lies at the heart of good child protection. “The current management framework does not help social workers build an accurate picture of what is going on in a family, nor does it take account of how fallible judgments are. Social work is about building a relationship with a family, but once you do that it can become difficult to be objective. Social workers need the help of a supervisor or colleague to ask ‘is this right?’”

The Baby P tragedy graphically illustrated the system’s shortcomings. Peter Connelly died of his injuries despite being seen on 60 separate occasions by child protection social workers and other professionals.

“In the case of Baby P, the question that should have been asked was ‘now that there is a new man around, should we change our opinion?’. Instead, a judgment was made early and stuck to. There was a lack of critical oversight. There was, of course, good oversight of whether they were meeting the performance indicators, but that’s the wrong sort of oversight,” Professor Munro said.

In the Baby Peter case, she noted that the family first came into contact with social workers when Tracey Connelly, Baby Peter’s mother, presented herself as a separated mother struggling to bring up four children, with evidence of some accidental injuries to her son.

“If at the time of that referral social workers had met the family as single mother with four children and a new bloke on the scene and the first set of injuries, they would have come to a different conclusion,” she said.

“When I was a social worker in the 1970s there was hardly any oversight and hardly any guidance. You do need it. But the system has to be designed to help us make better decisions about children. At the moment it is designed to keep Ofsted happy. The Government has provided forms for each stage of process … very long documents putting everything into boxes. I don’t think it is contributing a great amount to what people are thinking about the case. And research on its use suggests that it is treated like a parallel process.”

However, she rejects calls for a national system. “I don’t think we should have a uniform system when we don’t know what is a good system. We should be allowing places to experiment and evolve. If one of them produces something fantastic, others will want to copy it. I don’t think it is up to the Government, with its level of knowledge, to impose one mediocre system rather than another.”

Not everything that the Government did in the wake of Baby P was wrong. Professor Munro welcomes some of the new measures, in particular plans to raise the intellectual calibre of social work students. That is crucial, she said.

“Social workers in child protection come across some of the most complex circumstances. There is very imperfect knowledge, huge ethical dilemmas and it all takes place in an incredibly emotional atmosphere. Look at the public outcry over Baby P and then imagine visiting a child like him in his home. You would have a reaction, and that affects your judgment. So you need an organisation that knows how people think and designs its systems accordingly.”

Ofsted, which was only recently put in charge of inspecting children’s social services, has been criticised for failing to help drive up standards, some Conservatives even questioning whether it is up to the job. Professor Munro agrees with the critics to a point. “Ofsted needs to switch and have a heavier bias towards how judgments are made. What we have at the moment is compliance inspection with a model that has no guaranteed benefit for the child. There is no evidence finishing an initial assessment in seven days rather than eight is good for a child, so we don’t want an inspection regime that just asks you to comply with what’s there. You want to have a regime that helps organisations develop and learn.”

But she is uncommitted on which organisation should run inspections. “I think we need to change the nature of the job, and whichever organisation does it will have to learn it. It doesn’t really matter if it’s Ofsted or another organisation. It is the way they inspect that has to change radically.”