How will children taken into care learn to parent?

The final programme, broadcast on BBC2 last night, in the Protecting our Children trilogy provided us with a compelling if depressing range of virtually textbook examples of significant harm. The determined, single-minded realism of Bristol's child protection social workers intervening to protect various children with little more than their courage as armament has to be admired. The straight talking of the social workers displayed in this programme - usefully stripped of the euphemisms that bedevil the profession and puzzle parents - was refreshing.

Hard messages could not be and were not misunderstood. Nor was one of the social workers wryly observed comparison between the response of the state to the Baby P case (the summary removal of Sharon Shoesmith, Haringey's Director of Children's Services) or the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes (the tiered ranks of the state closing around the Metropolitan Police Service). Governments understand how to position themselves when it comes to the police. None has known what to do without social workers. Or with them. 

I had cause some years ago to undertake a review of the hierarchy of risks in child protection. Anyone observing the agonies of the impoverished and wrecked lives of the drug or alcohol dependent parents filmed stumbling through lost lives will not be surprised that substance abuse is the quickest route to parenting disaster. Likewise, there's not much evidence to suggest that paedophiles, also featured in this episode, when left to their own devices do other than arrange their lives and relationships to deliver up more victims.

So what was the common thread running through these three powerful programmes? That social workers do a near impossible, thankless, remarkable and unapplauded job, often with parents whose own life narratives have become incomprehensible to them? True enough. That temperament makes fate? Certainly. But there seems to be a more important lesson. Our system, at least as portrayed, focuses as it has to on rescue but lacks the hinterland of therapeutic and supportive services that enable those free-falling through society to change their behaviours, which, for most, is the only redemption and route to keeping their children. This system can only require tests of parents they will too often fail, followed by taking the first, then second and most or all of their children into care. And then what? The next trilogy of BBC documentaries might best engage and educate us by following each of the children over five, 10 and then 20 years. The test of early rescue cannot be in the measure of three hours of television, however good. It must be understood in the murk of that much harder test: that collision of nature versus nurture whose balance is weighed through transmission. What will the rescued children achieve as parents?

Andy Lusk is director of autism services at Ambitious about Autism. Follow Ambitious about Autism on Twitter https://twitter.com/#/ambitiousautism