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19 February 2004

City of Edinburgh Council Meeting 19 Feb 2004
UNISON City of Edinburgh Branch Submission on Child Protection Audit

for audit details see www.edinburgh.gov.uk

UNISON wanted to make this brief submission to put the figures you will consider this morning into context. There has already been a level of press speculation and to be fair an attempt to understand what the figures mean.

The first thing we want to say is that - while everyone would want and expect that 100% of children on the child protection register have an evidenced child protection plan - we are encouraged at the 85% figure .

That is an achievement with all the vacancies rising by the week, with only about half the social workers needed with the necessary child protection and with the rise in workload.

If the BBC documentary last night was right in saying a social worker had 37 children on his caseload, you can see the level of the problem. Even if it was not right, figures near this are not unusual. They were commonplace when I came into social work but then there were no child protection procedures to speak of, and none of the huge expectations and standards that staff are rightly expected to deliver on today.

To put the figures into context, you have to look at the exercise itself. Managers were rightly looking for 'evidence' of a child protection plan and of a 'comprehensive risk assessment' in files.

It will be the case that some children did not have a spelled out child protection plan but that does not necessarily mean than nothing will have been done. Some will in fact be being visited weekly.

A 'comprehensive risk assessment' is a pretty vague term and there are bound to have been difficulties and anomalies in assessing this on files. Currently this Council, and few, if any, others have no specific risk assessment model or framework. Staff use a range of models and this will not always have been recorded specifically.

But it is important to remember that any model can only assess risk. It cannot assess certainties because there are none. Staff work with risk and staff need supported in that as the Edinburgh Inquiry stressed and the Council itself accepted at the time. It is also important to remember that an assessment that a child is 90% likely to be safe and only 10% likely to be harmed does not mean that the 10% risk will not happen. That is the nature of working with risk.

The 'chronological history' scores, we believe, very high at 81%. This is a relatively new concept from the 2002 Scottish Executive's "It's everyone's job to make sure I'm alright' and is mentioned in the 2003 Carla Bone inquiry in North East Scotland. There is always a history on file but not necessarily laid out in the way these outline. There had been no specific previous guidance on this and the assessment forms used do not always lend themselves to that process. So 81% is pretty good.

This is the first survey UNISON is aware of of this kind, of this detail and of this depth. That means there is really nothing to compare it with. In talking to colleagues around the country, the anecdotal view is that any authority would be quietly pleased with this kind of result.

The only comparator we could find was the "It's everyone's job…" document mentioned in the report before you today which used a smaller sample and based itself on different methodology - however it did use case conference plans as one of its indicators. That came up with a figure of only 46% of children being safe across Scotland. That puts today's results in context.

Yes we'd want 100%. But even in the 85%, the reality is that there will be cases with a clear risk assessment and clear child protection plan but no allocated worker to carry that plan out. It will be carried out by already overburdened senior social workers and practice team managers or through duty systems at nowhere

near the level we would want to achieve.

It is not all about resources and there are practice issues. Social Workers welcome their practice being audited but the audit exercise has thrown up serious resource issues and serious system issues. Individual workers must not be left carrying the can for those.

Many of these are internal issues but some are external. Social Work carried the can for just about everything in the O'Brien aftermath - often very unfairly. For example, ask any member of staff and they will tell you that there are numerous examples where we cannot get information from GPs, that they are still not attending case conferences and social workers are still forced into the position O'Brien unfairly put them in of being expected to collate medical information with none of the power or knowledge to do that. In saying that, our members would wish to recognise the important and helpful role of health professionals and not least the Zone Paediatricians. It is not an individual issue, it is a systems issue.

The O'Brien report is often quoted as demonstrating resources were not an issue. It only makes two comments about resources and one was that it was not in its remit to look at resources. That kind of puts things into context. That perhaps also partly explains why the staff inquiry is over-running. UNISON warned at the beginning that any such inquiry would have to look at a range of evidence and information that O'Brien chose not to seek out or evaluate - or where O'Brien mis-analysed. UNISON has provided a detailed critique of this which I would refer you to.

But resources are the issue and they are the main issue with vacancies approaching crisis level - a level in some places now which makes the job impossible to do to the standards expected or aspired to by staff.

The standards, expectations and the quality of service staff aspire to did not suddenly appear after 16 October last year. The cases audited did not suddenly appear after 16 October last year.

Your employees have been working under these pressures with these expectations for years. Yes, we want improvements. Our members have a role in this but more and more it is becoming clear that you as a Council have the key role in addressing resources and addressing morale so we can keep our staff and encourage others to come to fill the vacancies. That means councillors being thoughtful about what they say and do. I am afraid that as yet our members do not feel either valued or supported by their Council.

These results did not come without a cost. The cost of workloads, pressures and all to often very long hours by managers and main grade workers alike. The message your employees should get this morning is one of congratulation for delivering these results in these circumstances and under these pressures.

ENDS

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