I have written about aspects of my work in child care and the issues which arose from time to time in several Blogs related to other matters then under discussion In order to explain my anger at the way the authorities appear to have responded to the second death of a child within a decade in the London Borough of Harringey I need to talk thought my involvement to ensure that my response has been well founded and justified in the particular circumstances. There is need to go back close on fifty years, because it is only possible to understand the unacceptability of what has just happened, or did not, by doing so.
When I was at Ruskin College 1961-1963 I wrote an article in the college annual magazine which raised the question of the role of the social worker in society. I am embarrassed by what I said overall and by the language then used but the main point was to ask if social workers were being used to cover up the problems which society in general was otherwise unwilling, and at times unable, to do anything about.
At the time in the Labour Party talked of change and radical action and the Conservative Party of stability and good order. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned that political division upside down and as I quickly found there were individuals in leadership positions at national and local level in all political parties who possessed insight, compassion and a determination to act however unpopular this made them, often within their own political party, and others who were initially hostile and ignorant, but were prepared to listen and change their positions to a degree if you could demonstrate that what was being advocated was more effective than existing situation. Later I had to argue that change for change sake often created more harm, than good, and all change had downsides and unintended consequences and this posed great problems for legislators and Ministers who are under 0constant pressure to do something and make things better. In child care there have been hundreds of inquiries, many with national as well as local recommendations which were then implemented, in varying ways and varying degrees and as with national legislation the outcome was different from what Parliament had discussed and intended.
Change is only effective if those making it work believe in it, and understand it, and those planning and ordering it then closely monitor implementation and effectiveness and then make adjustments, with some requiring further radical change, because of what has happened and new circumstances.
I do not know anything about the particularly circumstances at Harringey after the previous death and Public Inquiry, but the authorities because of the requirement of new procedures and the introduction of new people and national and local level should have been aware that children and other clients were going to be more vulnerable than before and required the closest of support and constant monitoring.
I also found that the biggest obstacles to change were not politicians but the senior professionals and managers within the social welfare services who had acquired authority over years; although of greater concern were the senior officers in other national and local authority departments, in the health services, and in the trade unions, who not only did not understand or want to understand the problems and find solutions, but were more interested in maintaining and expanding their personal power and status. In 1971 the Association of Child Care Officers published a souvenir portrait in which as the last President Elect I wrote " one must observe that the very people making these accusations appeared to be more concerned with protecting their own power and status than with the future interests of the poor and the deprived." (i) Then I referred to Medical Officers of Health who were fighting to keep their jobs and remain in Local Government but after my subsequent experience from involvements at a national level I refer particularly to those concerned with finance, with personnel and with legal issues and in general management and administration, although I can say and mean it, that it was my good fortune to work for many years with some unique and rather special individuals who were very different and who showed exceptional professionalism and great courage and conviction about what was right and what was wrong in the every day carrying out of their duties.
There have been, as I have said, hundreds of investigations and many published, concerning the treatment of individual children in care, or under the supervision of public and private professional carers and which have rightly concentrated on the role of the individual directly concerned and the general framework in which they operate, but few if any, have looked closely at the managements, especially from other parts of the local authorities and health services or at the politicians who often took key decisions but who were not directly involved in the services in question and who were not members of the Children's, then the Social Services Committees, and then the education and children's services committees and review mechanisms.
The problem which I faced when I first joined the child care service as a student in 1962 and which remains to-day is that there has been no political and public consensus of how to deal with people whose lack of basic social skills and standards placed their children at a severe disadvantage to everyone else, with the consequence that children were often harmed in a life long damaging way, creating cycles of deprivation and further harm, and in a few instances children were tortured and killed.
It was because of one case and other concerns that the Curtis Committee investigated and reported in 1946 and that local authority managed Children's Departments were created from 1948 with an emphasis on the placing of children in foster homes rather than keeping them in large residential establishments where their treatment was often worse than that of criminals in prison. At first the officers appointed to undertake the work were called Boarding out officers but then they became child care officers signalling the emphasis of their work, and provisions were then made for their training, although even by 1963 when I embarked on professional training the numbers of trained officers were few and the number of trained men was even smaller, and the quality of services varied from the exceptional to the diabolical. I had experience of both.
I went into local authority child care work by accident.
After I completed the six months in prison for refusing to enter into recognisance following a non violent protest against the possession and potential use of weapons of mass destruction in 1960 I became a member of the Labour Party, served on a local executive committee and had an interview with the senior officer of the Labour Party about my future and was advised of the Adult Labour and Trade Union college located at Oxford, Ruskin College. Sponsored by my local Labour Party and with a further education grant from my local authority, I gained a place in 1961 to read Politics and Economics for a university Diploma and which then could lead to take a college based university politics, philosophy and economics Honour degree, spread over three years for the second public examination and bypassing the first.
The attraction of going to Magdalene or Balliol was strong and although I gained good marks and comments in economic theory I could not grasp the basics of how the theory was translated into practice, so towards the end of the first year I went to see the Principal and said that I wanted to study criminology and psychology. The Principal responded in a way which enabled me to do this and to retain my local authority further education grant. He recommended me for a place on the combined University Post Graduate Diploma in Public and Social Administration and professional social work course to become a Probation Officer, Child Care Officer or Psychiatric Social Worker under Olive Stevenson, who subsequently became a Professor. Apart from two other Ruskin students already on the course the other students were first or second class honours graduates and I shared Criminology tutorials with a brilliant 1st Class honours man who subsequently became secretary of the Association of Child Care Officers and a senior manager in a Social Services Department.
These academically bright students were taking the two qualifications over a seventeenth months period whereas Ruskin students took only the Diploma over two years. Switching courses midway between the two years meant I was required to take four academic subjects over three terms, Criminology, Psychology, Public and Social Administration, and to cram social casework teaching from two years into one and to participate in three hastily arranged practical fieldwork placements. In order to get on the course I had to indicate a social work preference and choose probation because of my prison experience a couple of years before. This was an on the spot required decision.
However I quickly changed my mind during three months with the Manchester Family Services Unit, working mainly in Salford where by coincidence I had met the Member of Parliament, sitting next to him on a private bus to Aldermaston for the CND March. We kept in touch for a number of years after that.
The Family Services Units was a remarkable organisation originally established in Liverpool and which provided intense practical help and support to the poorest families. Later when undertaking professional child care training I was also attached to a residential unit for families with multiple problems for four weeks over Easter and when one of my functions was to call daily to check that some of the mothers were taking their contraceptive pills. One of my first visits after joining the Family Services Unit for three months in the summer of 1962 was to visit a family who had become so well known that they appeared in a television programme because addition to their own problems all their children had problems and were supported in different ways when they grew up and had families of their own. For two hours I did not get a word in, which those who know me will know was an amazing feat, because the mother went through all the workers from all the agencies and all the students telling me what she had learnt about their lives and if they had helped or she had helped them. I got the message loud and clear, regardless of their behaviour, the lack of basic education and poverty, they possessed remarkably developed understanding and intuition about the welfare services and its workers: look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you.
During this placement I was invited to join three of the existing staff taking a mini bus of young people for a weekend in the countryside and I discovered I was able to communicate with the young people and together with what I learnt over the three months, and my experience in prison, I asked if I could switch to child care and a placement was arranged for me with the Manchester Children's Department over the following Easter.
I also attempted to gain acceptance on a professional child care course but without success which was not surprising as I had no full time experience and a politically active background as well as having an odd upbringing by three aunts one of whom I only discovered was my mother where I went to school, and where the two aunts and other sisters were required to leave their homeland Gibraltar by the British Government because of the World War Two. My mother's grandfather had been a sergeant in the British Army who married a Spanish girl and then settled in the peninsular after retiring on health grounds as a Royal Chelsea Hospital pensioner out payments and where one of his sons then worked for the Navy and the Army in Gibraltar as a civilian marrying a Gibraltarian with Italian and Spanish backgrounds.
The sisters were the among the first refugees in a then Surrey London suburb speaking only Gibraltarian at home although my mother worked an unqualified teacher, with first year primary school children, having become a pupil teacher at the age of fourteen in a convent run school. Being a single parent teacher in the 1940's was the reason which justified being brought up in secret, until I learnt the truth shortly before my sixtieth birthday. Recently I examined my Medical records and those if my mother. after her death at the age of 100, and there are no records until my age of ten on either file. For those years I shared one double bed with the three aunts and it was only the intervention of the Constituency Member of Parliament which led to the allocation of a wartime requisitioned flat, and the sisters voted Conservative thereafter, until their 90's when they switched to Liberal Democrat.
Before this happened application was made for me to be received into care and I retain a vivid memory of being interviewed and saying that my father had been killed in the war, of being taken to what may have been a small child care home by the aunt who provide mothering and who may well have presented herself as my mother and of persuading her to take back home within a day or two.
In 1962 after being turned down by my local authority for a second further education grant, I had successfully applied to the Home Office for one of their special grants but did not return the paperwork when I failed to be invited for interview. I was contacted by the Home Office with a reminder and after explaining situation I was offered three interviews, accepted by the third. I had several previous dealings with the Home Office and security services for as a full time temporary organiser for the Direct Action Committee I had meetings in London and Scotland with the authorities to detail our plans for a sea and land protest following the deployment of a Nuclear Weapon carrying submarine at the Holy Loch on the Clyde estuary. I had also attended a meeting with a Home Office Minister having chaired a group of CND ex prisoners in making 100 constructive suggestions to improve the effectiveness of prisons, called Inside Story, for the Prison Reform Council, arranged by our president Lord Stonham who subsequently became a Minister of State. I felt I had become a prison after care protégé of the Home Office and this continued through to when I was placed on the list of suitable candidates for the position of Director of Social Services in 1970 for recommendation to the Secretary of State.
However my career was nearly cut short by my own making. I found the Birmingham University course even more of a challenge than the academic Oxford Diploma course because throughout the academic terms it was necessary to combine days of lectures and seminars with days attached to Birmingham Children's Department, one day, two days and then three days a week, as well as working throughout the Christmas, Easter and subsequent the summer holiday. Towards the end of the first term I had cause to visit a family in a multiple occupied dwelling where the conditions shocked.
As mentioned I had kept in contact with the Member of Parliament for Salford and he had taken a party from Ruskin around the Houses of Parliament at my request. The contact led to my having correspondence with High Gaitskell about the CND and Harold Wilson about prison reform. I wrote to Frank Allaun, subsequent chairman of the Labour party about my concerns on the housing conditions I had encountered, unaware that a short time afterwards he was speaking in a housing debate and read out extracts of the letter which then were reported in the national media, I think the term twilight zone was used. Without warning I was told late one evening that the Home Office were on the phone, only to find it was a local reporter who had been given my telephone number by the MP and I made the mistake of confirming that I had written the letter and that I was training in child care. There was a brief note in the paper which was spotted by the wife of the Deputy Children's Officer who told her husband, who told the Children's Officer, who told the politicians and the head of the child care course. I was read the riot act and told to apologise to the Children's Officer and the family in question but had not been identified in my letter or subsequently and told that if my placement with Birmingham was ended I would leave the course. The Children's officer was a kind man and offered me a job although by then I had applied to Oxfordshire and the Deputy Children's Officer had come to Birmingham to interview me and I was put in the books for a vacancy when one arose upon completion of the course. For the second time in three years my heart had ruled my head but I had survived.
I completed the course obtaining the Birmingham University Diploma and the Home Office certificate of Professional Qualification and I went to work for Oxfordshire County Council. I learnt several years later after I had progressed within the child care service that a seminar was held each subsequent year on the role of the social worker and political action, what could be done and what could not, and my situation was used to get the discussion off the ground. A feature of the Birmingham Course is that once a week we attended a seminar on child care law and provided detailed notes which were used throughout my service and were kept to this day. The aspects of the law were discussed using real case situations provided by the Lecturer who was a children's officer and wrote a text book on Law in child care. I was quite clear that despite the shift towards preventive work and preventing children from entering and remaining in care that our first duty was to protect children and if necessary this meant bringing them before a court in need of a fit person order, and that in an emergency with the assistance of the police and the approval of a magistrate a Place of Safety Order should be taken.
In 1980 I was recommended by the Department of Health to sit as the social services professional on a judicial led panel of Inquiry into the accidental death of a child in East London where the mother had been sent to prison for neglect, and the inquiry had been caused by an awarded senior police officer hero of the Balcombe Street Siege who had in my view justifiably provided information to the media that the Social Services Department in question was proposing to discharge other children to the mother on her release from prison. During this hearing which went on throughout a summer, one of the barristers argued, (there were some fifty lawyers and their staff, involved defending the position of the workers and their agencies, but none representing the interests of the dead child or the foster parents and neighbours who had repeatedly complained to the responsible social workers), that the workers had a duty to do all they could to prevent the children entering and remaining in care. I intervened and asked if the barrister was seriously asking the inquiry to accept that this duty was equal or greater than the duty in law to protect the child. She explained that she was making a proposition. Had I not contested it may well have been accepted by the rest of the panel and indeed the chairman took the view that this was a difficult situation and the workers had done their best given their lack of training and experience, and the loss of the background file at the same time as the lead worker had left the department to commence as a trainer of social workers at a university.
At one point I asked the Deputy Director of Social Services if following the loss of the file, or since the death and in preparation for the inquiry the local authority had checked the statutory requirement to maintain a register of all children boarded out. He had to admit that this had not been done and the following day the local authority advised that two more foster parents had been discovered and had been surprised they had not be contacted to give evidence, especially as they had complained to department about the care provided by the mother and indicated their belief that the children should have remained in care.
I was shocked and saddened by the report prepared by the chairman in consultation with Counsel for the Inquiry because it amounted to a whitewash of the officers and their managements. I wrote saying that I was resigning from the panel and would not sign the report. I was then persuaded by two other colleagues, a recognised Paediatrician and a Health Authority Nursing officer to draft a report explain why I thought individuals had failed to act in response to clear evidence and that the local authority was corporately negligent, although I never used the term as such. This took some time because I had returned to my duties as a Director and there were some twenty lever arch files of documents. I was able to identify dozens of instances when workers should and could have intervened and this list was used by several national newspapers and TV stations when in due course the two reports were published
,
I had presented the final report to the Chairman Inquiry before its publication and the Chairman amended his report in such a way as to cast doubt on the basis of the judgements which had been made collectively by all the three professional and experience members of the inquiry panel. One example is worth highlighting. It referred to a handwritten entry in the reports of a Health Visitor and the Chairman's stated that the health visitor had made two visits on day and not one as I had stated. One national newspaper highlighted what may appear to be a trivial point after such time. What the chairman had not done was to examine the handwriting and initials in which instance he would have realised that there were two visits but by two officers. This point if worth underlining in an era when the use is being made more and more of word processing, a position where records can change and deleted according to changing needs and circumstances. It is a feature of the present case at Harringey that it is said that some 60 instances or opportunities were missed when the child could have been removed to a place of safety It would be interesting to know how well these situations were recorded and shared between the workers and their supervising managers and how often the files were read and brought up to date.
Twenty five years ago there was justification for the attitude of social workers and their managements in arguing that without the main case file, with generic social workers who possessed only a few hours of study on child care law and the lack of effective leadership within the local authority and national government on the priority to be given to the care and protection of the children, and to rights and bests interests that there were excuses for what subsequently happened, but with one possible major, exception, which I will cover later, there is now no acceptable excuse or mitigation for what happened in relation to the baby tortured to death in Harringey. The second part of my concerns will follow tomorrow.
There was an interesting contrast between the reaction of the Question Time panel to this case and the late night Politics show which I will mention tomorrow or Saturday. It has been a wet and dark day with the evenings closing in rapidly to late afternoon. I am still working out the loss of date from the desktop but discovered why I was not printing from the internet with the computer asking me to save the item. While for other programmes the computer had recognised that the printer was the default this was not so for the internet but after taking a further look I worked out that it was the problem of the printer not registering as the default.
(i) Child Care 1949 1970 ACCO A souvenir Portrait. Published by the former Association of Child Care Officers.
When I was at Ruskin College 1961-1963 I wrote an article in the college annual magazine which raised the question of the role of the social worker in society. I am embarrassed by what I said overall and by the language then used but the main point was to ask if social workers were being used to cover up the problems which society in general was otherwise unwilling, and at times unable, to do anything about.
At the time in the Labour Party talked of change and radical action and the Conservative Party of stability and good order. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned that political division upside down and as I quickly found there were individuals in leadership positions at national and local level in all political parties who possessed insight, compassion and a determination to act however unpopular this made them, often within their own political party, and others who were initially hostile and ignorant, but were prepared to listen and change their positions to a degree if you could demonstrate that what was being advocated was more effective than existing situation. Later I had to argue that change for change sake often created more harm, than good, and all change had downsides and unintended consequences and this posed great problems for legislators and Ministers who are under 0constant pressure to do something and make things better. In child care there have been hundreds of inquiries, many with national as well as local recommendations which were then implemented, in varying ways and varying degrees and as with national legislation the outcome was different from what Parliament had discussed and intended.
Change is only effective if those making it work believe in it, and understand it, and those planning and ordering it then closely monitor implementation and effectiveness and then make adjustments, with some requiring further radical change, because of what has happened and new circumstances.
I do not know anything about the particularly circumstances at Harringey after the previous death and Public Inquiry, but the authorities because of the requirement of new procedures and the introduction of new people and national and local level should have been aware that children and other clients were going to be more vulnerable than before and required the closest of support and constant monitoring.
I also found that the biggest obstacles to change were not politicians but the senior professionals and managers within the social welfare services who had acquired authority over years; although of greater concern were the senior officers in other national and local authority departments, in the health services, and in the trade unions, who not only did not understand or want to understand the problems and find solutions, but were more interested in maintaining and expanding their personal power and status. In 1971 the Association of Child Care Officers published a souvenir portrait in which as the last President Elect I wrote " one must observe that the very people making these accusations appeared to be more concerned with protecting their own power and status than with the future interests of the poor and the deprived." (i) Then I referred to Medical Officers of Health who were fighting to keep their jobs and remain in Local Government but after my subsequent experience from involvements at a national level I refer particularly to those concerned with finance, with personnel and with legal issues and in general management and administration, although I can say and mean it, that it was my good fortune to work for many years with some unique and rather special individuals who were very different and who showed exceptional professionalism and great courage and conviction about what was right and what was wrong in the every day carrying out of their duties.
There have been, as I have said, hundreds of investigations and many published, concerning the treatment of individual children in care, or under the supervision of public and private professional carers and which have rightly concentrated on the role of the individual directly concerned and the general framework in which they operate, but few if any, have looked closely at the managements, especially from other parts of the local authorities and health services or at the politicians who often took key decisions but who were not directly involved in the services in question and who were not members of the Children's, then the Social Services Committees, and then the education and children's services committees and review mechanisms.
The problem which I faced when I first joined the child care service as a student in 1962 and which remains to-day is that there has been no political and public consensus of how to deal with people whose lack of basic social skills and standards placed their children at a severe disadvantage to everyone else, with the consequence that children were often harmed in a life long damaging way, creating cycles of deprivation and further harm, and in a few instances children were tortured and killed.
It was because of one case and other concerns that the Curtis Committee investigated and reported in 1946 and that local authority managed Children's Departments were created from 1948 with an emphasis on the placing of children in foster homes rather than keeping them in large residential establishments where their treatment was often worse than that of criminals in prison. At first the officers appointed to undertake the work were called Boarding out officers but then they became child care officers signalling the emphasis of their work, and provisions were then made for their training, although even by 1963 when I embarked on professional training the numbers of trained officers were few and the number of trained men was even smaller, and the quality of services varied from the exceptional to the diabolical. I had experience of both.
I went into local authority child care work by accident.
After I completed the six months in prison for refusing to enter into recognisance following a non violent protest against the possession and potential use of weapons of mass destruction in 1960 I became a member of the Labour Party, served on a local executive committee and had an interview with the senior officer of the Labour Party about my future and was advised of the Adult Labour and Trade Union college located at Oxford, Ruskin College. Sponsored by my local Labour Party and with a further education grant from my local authority, I gained a place in 1961 to read Politics and Economics for a university Diploma and which then could lead to take a college based university politics, philosophy and economics Honour degree, spread over three years for the second public examination and bypassing the first.
The attraction of going to Magdalene or Balliol was strong and although I gained good marks and comments in economic theory I could not grasp the basics of how the theory was translated into practice, so towards the end of the first year I went to see the Principal and said that I wanted to study criminology and psychology. The Principal responded in a way which enabled me to do this and to retain my local authority further education grant. He recommended me for a place on the combined University Post Graduate Diploma in Public and Social Administration and professional social work course to become a Probation Officer, Child Care Officer or Psychiatric Social Worker under Olive Stevenson, who subsequently became a Professor. Apart from two other Ruskin students already on the course the other students were first or second class honours graduates and I shared Criminology tutorials with a brilliant 1st Class honours man who subsequently became secretary of the Association of Child Care Officers and a senior manager in a Social Services Department.
These academically bright students were taking the two qualifications over a seventeenth months period whereas Ruskin students took only the Diploma over two years. Switching courses midway between the two years meant I was required to take four academic subjects over three terms, Criminology, Psychology, Public and Social Administration, and to cram social casework teaching from two years into one and to participate in three hastily arranged practical fieldwork placements. In order to get on the course I had to indicate a social work preference and choose probation because of my prison experience a couple of years before. This was an on the spot required decision.
However I quickly changed my mind during three months with the Manchester Family Services Unit, working mainly in Salford where by coincidence I had met the Member of Parliament, sitting next to him on a private bus to Aldermaston for the CND March. We kept in touch for a number of years after that.
The Family Services Units was a remarkable organisation originally established in Liverpool and which provided intense practical help and support to the poorest families. Later when undertaking professional child care training I was also attached to a residential unit for families with multiple problems for four weeks over Easter and when one of my functions was to call daily to check that some of the mothers were taking their contraceptive pills. One of my first visits after joining the Family Services Unit for three months in the summer of 1962 was to visit a family who had become so well known that they appeared in a television programme because addition to their own problems all their children had problems and were supported in different ways when they grew up and had families of their own. For two hours I did not get a word in, which those who know me will know was an amazing feat, because the mother went through all the workers from all the agencies and all the students telling me what she had learnt about their lives and if they had helped or she had helped them. I got the message loud and clear, regardless of their behaviour, the lack of basic education and poverty, they possessed remarkably developed understanding and intuition about the welfare services and its workers: look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you.
During this placement I was invited to join three of the existing staff taking a mini bus of young people for a weekend in the countryside and I discovered I was able to communicate with the young people and together with what I learnt over the three months, and my experience in prison, I asked if I could switch to child care and a placement was arranged for me with the Manchester Children's Department over the following Easter.
I also attempted to gain acceptance on a professional child care course but without success which was not surprising as I had no full time experience and a politically active background as well as having an odd upbringing by three aunts one of whom I only discovered was my mother where I went to school, and where the two aunts and other sisters were required to leave their homeland Gibraltar by the British Government because of the World War Two. My mother's grandfather had been a sergeant in the British Army who married a Spanish girl and then settled in the peninsular after retiring on health grounds as a Royal Chelsea Hospital pensioner out payments and where one of his sons then worked for the Navy and the Army in Gibraltar as a civilian marrying a Gibraltarian with Italian and Spanish backgrounds.
The sisters were the among the first refugees in a then Surrey London suburb speaking only Gibraltarian at home although my mother worked an unqualified teacher, with first year primary school children, having become a pupil teacher at the age of fourteen in a convent run school. Being a single parent teacher in the 1940's was the reason which justified being brought up in secret, until I learnt the truth shortly before my sixtieth birthday. Recently I examined my Medical records and those if my mother. after her death at the age of 100, and there are no records until my age of ten on either file. For those years I shared one double bed with the three aunts and it was only the intervention of the Constituency Member of Parliament which led to the allocation of a wartime requisitioned flat, and the sisters voted Conservative thereafter, until their 90's when they switched to Liberal Democrat.
Before this happened application was made for me to be received into care and I retain a vivid memory of being interviewed and saying that my father had been killed in the war, of being taken to what may have been a small child care home by the aunt who provide mothering and who may well have presented herself as my mother and of persuading her to take back home within a day or two.
In 1962 after being turned down by my local authority for a second further education grant, I had successfully applied to the Home Office for one of their special grants but did not return the paperwork when I failed to be invited for interview. I was contacted by the Home Office with a reminder and after explaining situation I was offered three interviews, accepted by the third. I had several previous dealings with the Home Office and security services for as a full time temporary organiser for the Direct Action Committee I had meetings in London and Scotland with the authorities to detail our plans for a sea and land protest following the deployment of a Nuclear Weapon carrying submarine at the Holy Loch on the Clyde estuary. I had also attended a meeting with a Home Office Minister having chaired a group of CND ex prisoners in making 100 constructive suggestions to improve the effectiveness of prisons, called Inside Story, for the Prison Reform Council, arranged by our president Lord Stonham who subsequently became a Minister of State. I felt I had become a prison after care protégé of the Home Office and this continued through to when I was placed on the list of suitable candidates for the position of Director of Social Services in 1970 for recommendation to the Secretary of State.
However my career was nearly cut short by my own making. I found the Birmingham University course even more of a challenge than the academic Oxford Diploma course because throughout the academic terms it was necessary to combine days of lectures and seminars with days attached to Birmingham Children's Department, one day, two days and then three days a week, as well as working throughout the Christmas, Easter and subsequent the summer holiday. Towards the end of the first term I had cause to visit a family in a multiple occupied dwelling where the conditions shocked.
As mentioned I had kept in contact with the Member of Parliament for Salford and he had taken a party from Ruskin around the Houses of Parliament at my request. The contact led to my having correspondence with High Gaitskell about the CND and Harold Wilson about prison reform. I wrote to Frank Allaun, subsequent chairman of the Labour party about my concerns on the housing conditions I had encountered, unaware that a short time afterwards he was speaking in a housing debate and read out extracts of the letter which then were reported in the national media, I think the term twilight zone was used. Without warning I was told late one evening that the Home Office were on the phone, only to find it was a local reporter who had been given my telephone number by the MP and I made the mistake of confirming that I had written the letter and that I was training in child care. There was a brief note in the paper which was spotted by the wife of the Deputy Children's Officer who told her husband, who told the Children's Officer, who told the politicians and the head of the child care course. I was read the riot act and told to apologise to the Children's Officer and the family in question but had not been identified in my letter or subsequently and told that if my placement with Birmingham was ended I would leave the course. The Children's officer was a kind man and offered me a job although by then I had applied to Oxfordshire and the Deputy Children's Officer had come to Birmingham to interview me and I was put in the books for a vacancy when one arose upon completion of the course. For the second time in three years my heart had ruled my head but I had survived.
I completed the course obtaining the Birmingham University Diploma and the Home Office certificate of Professional Qualification and I went to work for Oxfordshire County Council. I learnt several years later after I had progressed within the child care service that a seminar was held each subsequent year on the role of the social worker and political action, what could be done and what could not, and my situation was used to get the discussion off the ground. A feature of the Birmingham Course is that once a week we attended a seminar on child care law and provided detailed notes which were used throughout my service and were kept to this day. The aspects of the law were discussed using real case situations provided by the Lecturer who was a children's officer and wrote a text book on Law in child care. I was quite clear that despite the shift towards preventive work and preventing children from entering and remaining in care that our first duty was to protect children and if necessary this meant bringing them before a court in need of a fit person order, and that in an emergency with the assistance of the police and the approval of a magistrate a Place of Safety Order should be taken.
In 1980 I was recommended by the Department of Health to sit as the social services professional on a judicial led panel of Inquiry into the accidental death of a child in East London where the mother had been sent to prison for neglect, and the inquiry had been caused by an awarded senior police officer hero of the Balcombe Street Siege who had in my view justifiably provided information to the media that the Social Services Department in question was proposing to discharge other children to the mother on her release from prison. During this hearing which went on throughout a summer, one of the barristers argued, (there were some fifty lawyers and their staff, involved defending the position of the workers and their agencies, but none representing the interests of the dead child or the foster parents and neighbours who had repeatedly complained to the responsible social workers), that the workers had a duty to do all they could to prevent the children entering and remaining in care. I intervened and asked if the barrister was seriously asking the inquiry to accept that this duty was equal or greater than the duty in law to protect the child. She explained that she was making a proposition. Had I not contested it may well have been accepted by the rest of the panel and indeed the chairman took the view that this was a difficult situation and the workers had done their best given their lack of training and experience, and the loss of the background file at the same time as the lead worker had left the department to commence as a trainer of social workers at a university.
At one point I asked the Deputy Director of Social Services if following the loss of the file, or since the death and in preparation for the inquiry the local authority had checked the statutory requirement to maintain a register of all children boarded out. He had to admit that this had not been done and the following day the local authority advised that two more foster parents had been discovered and had been surprised they had not be contacted to give evidence, especially as they had complained to department about the care provided by the mother and indicated their belief that the children should have remained in care.
I was shocked and saddened by the report prepared by the chairman in consultation with Counsel for the Inquiry because it amounted to a whitewash of the officers and their managements. I wrote saying that I was resigning from the panel and would not sign the report. I was then persuaded by two other colleagues, a recognised Paediatrician and a Health Authority Nursing officer to draft a report explain why I thought individuals had failed to act in response to clear evidence and that the local authority was corporately negligent, although I never used the term as such. This took some time because I had returned to my duties as a Director and there were some twenty lever arch files of documents. I was able to identify dozens of instances when workers should and could have intervened and this list was used by several national newspapers and TV stations when in due course the two reports were published
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I had presented the final report to the Chairman Inquiry before its publication and the Chairman amended his report in such a way as to cast doubt on the basis of the judgements which had been made collectively by all the three professional and experience members of the inquiry panel. One example is worth highlighting. It referred to a handwritten entry in the reports of a Health Visitor and the Chairman's stated that the health visitor had made two visits on day and not one as I had stated. One national newspaper highlighted what may appear to be a trivial point after such time. What the chairman had not done was to examine the handwriting and initials in which instance he would have realised that there were two visits but by two officers. This point if worth underlining in an era when the use is being made more and more of word processing, a position where records can change and deleted according to changing needs and circumstances. It is a feature of the present case at Harringey that it is said that some 60 instances or opportunities were missed when the child could have been removed to a place of safety It would be interesting to know how well these situations were recorded and shared between the workers and their supervising managers and how often the files were read and brought up to date.
Twenty five years ago there was justification for the attitude of social workers and their managements in arguing that without the main case file, with generic social workers who possessed only a few hours of study on child care law and the lack of effective leadership within the local authority and national government on the priority to be given to the care and protection of the children, and to rights and bests interests that there were excuses for what subsequently happened, but with one possible major, exception, which I will cover later, there is now no acceptable excuse or mitigation for what happened in relation to the baby tortured to death in Harringey. The second part of my concerns will follow tomorrow.
There was an interesting contrast between the reaction of the Question Time panel to this case and the late night Politics show which I will mention tomorrow or Saturday. It has been a wet and dark day with the evenings closing in rapidly to late afternoon. I am still working out the loss of date from the desktop but discovered why I was not printing from the internet with the computer asking me to save the item. While for other programmes the computer had recognised that the printer was the default this was not so for the internet but after taking a further look I worked out that it was the problem of the printer not registering as the default.
(i) Child Care 1949 1970 ACCO A souvenir Portrait. Published by the former Association of Child Care Officers.
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