Reducing bureaucracy in child protection

I’m all for reducing unnecessary bureaucracy – the clue is in the word ‘unnecessary’. And I do believe that ministers, officials and local authorities have done their best to ensure that children are kept safe by promoting and designing ever more complex systems that ensure good professional practice. So some of the IT systems have been clunky, burdensome, and unhelpful. Worse, some of the systems have been ill-designed to do what they were purposed to do.

So a radical slimming down is welcome. And of course the accountability framework is being made sharper and sharper.

But… and this blog has been leading up to a ‘but’, we must not go back to a free-for-all where agencies did not talk to each other, where records were patchy at best, where practice was variable and often poor, where professional management of performance was poor or lacking. We have seen, alongside the increase in bureaucracy, a marked improvement in practice as assessed by Ofsted. And we need to remember that bureaucracy is not of itself bad; it’s what makes our monthly pay appear in our bank accounts, for example.

Good bureaucracy is effective, efficient, proportionate and responsive, and that’s what in hope the new guidance for child protection will deliver.