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.
so glad to see that someone is finally looking at the ridiculous performance markers, which are mostly bureacratic indicators of paperwork done in a timely manner, to determine child safety. If workers had more time to spend with families and less demands in the way of meaningless recordkeeping, safety would improve dramatically, in my opinion. Now, if the US would just get on board with this concept.
ReplyDeleteActually if agencies would properly prioritize their cases, they wouldn't have many of the problems they have but the number one priority of most agencies is to investigate every report. Also because it's easier and safer to service the easier cases, they often choose to do the easy cases to improve their "score". Instead agencies need to prioritize the investigations at the initial report. Florida is starting to do this now and the NCCPR is o
ReplyDeleteften citing their improvement. Also reduce the mandatory reporting requirement to only serious (i.e. abuse that requires overnight hospitalization or is otherwise a felony) and is current abuse. Make it so that if they report anything else they could be subject to lawsuits. This will end a great number of the medical social workers abusing the system in conjunction with CPS. (See Beltran v Santa Clara, for example). Also it will lessen the multiple reporting of minor abuse that wastes CPS time and money. I've seen example of CPS investigating anew 10 yr old cases where the parental rights were terminated because the child reported a memory of abuse.