Children's Care.

Been a few interesting thought provoking developments this week.

The head of the local government association carping on about how the death of baby P should not be taken as a reason to bring lots of children into care and of course strain the budgets. Now children should stay home as the evidence is that children in care fare badly, out came the stats about poor educational attainment and outcome. Interesting things in words, it was not framed in an action framework with a commitment to improve service, rather, the angle was, the service is crap so we must not use it.

Some people have accused the Sun of simplistic reductionism but that is a breath taker.

We are back to the; don't expect us to divert money from roads and leisure centres (not to mention CEO salaries) to fund front line services and make them work just because people are killing children.

And the Sun wants to blame the social workers when their boss says that...

Then we had the guy who went across Britain, fathering children by his own daughters. The technique was a recognised one - team hoping. Go and live somewhere, stay until services start to notice you exist and then jump ship to somewhere up the road. Assuming anyone works out where you went they will probably not bother to phone the team in your new area and say they were worried and if they did no one would pay much attention as social workers don't seem to trust each others judgement.

This was more common than you might think when we started out, it's harder to do today thanks to one of the recommendations of the Climbie enquiry

But there has been nothing like the noise generated by the Baby P case. Presumably killing a child over a couple of months is less serious than subjecting them to years of sexual abuse.