Children's Care.

The circus rolls on.....

Very interesting developments.

No one was able to explain why OFSTED had recently given 3 stars to Haringay and then quickly found there was stuff under the carpet that they had missed.

It makes you wonder really, how will lots more oversight of necessity improve things?

What will improve things is for the social workers, foster carers, nurses and police to actually feel able to stand up and say things are not acceptable.

A service that is set up in such a way that individual social workers have caseloads in the twenties cannot because of it's structure be adequate. That's something a director should know and if they don't they should be asking.

There is a culture of tick box assessments, did a visit take place on time - tick the box. What happened during the visit is not a tick in the box....

So three knock on the door and out in ten minutes represent a "better" child care service than an hour spent assessing the family.

This is a part of a knee jerk response that followed Climbie. What is needed is a bit of joined up thinking.

We have noticed as foster carers that we are recording lots and lots more but less and less of it is the key information.

Day to day stuff we have to write down but when a child is unallocated, has no social worker for and extended period, you might not find this written down anywhere...

R