Tick box target world.

Perhaps it is just me becoming old and cantankerous or even developing wisdom but it has seemed to me that for these last few years we have become tick box targeted out.

In any area of public life there will be targets to be met and ticks to be placed in boxes that indicate we are doing all right or far too often that we are not.

For looked after children whole rafts of targets have been set for things to be attained.

Children will no more be removed but parents helped to parent, on the face of it not such a bad idea.

Children taken into care likewise, will not be helicoptered miles from their community but will be brought up in the places they know amongst the people who know them. This is where the wheels start to fall off the cart.

No problem with the above assertion and indeed there is evidence to support the proposal, trouble is it does not generate an easy box within which to place a tick. Enter the concept of "not placed out of county", this is an easy tick in the box but one which can severely limit the scope of good practice. In practice you could move a child a hell of a distance in Yorkshire or Powys and still be in county. Move them across the street cross the county border and you can have the same community but the different county makes the move "bad" in a blind tick box target led service.

In our case, we traditionally took children who were out of control or in danger in their own communities or who were positively a menace within it. Children who had a second chance and a fresh start away from the things that threatened to drag them down. For the vast majority of children this has been an enormous positive and most have returned over the years. Except of course where the dreaded social workers have forbidden that they do.

But it will happen no more. No more daycastle children will be placed in the west.

What is missing in all this is joined up thinking.

There is an increasing and uncritical acceptance that taking children into care is bad but framed in a discourse that is driven by negative policing rather than of positive mentoring and support which seeks to do more of what is good rather than stamp on that which is less so.

We have come full circle, no longer remove children from adversity, rather leave them there, no mentoring good behaviour but orders that control the bad. When society only notices the times that children are out of control small wonder they get more of what they look for.

This week we have seen potential re runs of the Climbie scenario, two separate cases where children have been removed from adversity, in body bags.

IN it's very sad way this is a positive. There will doubtless be panic, blame will be avoided at all costs, parents will be vilified and demonised, junior staff may be disciplined but no mention will be made of fiscal constraint.

At the end of it all the wheel may well start to turn the other way.

For us, all it will take is for the media to notice neglectful and poor service in daycastle, as soon as the press are again following a child as the council stand by and watch her move into prostitution, they trail the young boy going to visit a known paedophile, then in the depths of the West, in that farm a mile from the nearest right of way, the phone will ring.

The thinking will not be joined up, but avoidance of blame and liability seldom generate clear thought.

It might though merit a tick in the box and a target met....

R