CYP Now - Blame games make the job of a DCS untenable

Last Friday, the Reading Post published a story about how children's services in the town received only one application for each of the three senior social worker jobs it advertised. On the same day, the Coventry Telegraph reported that 30 demonstrators had gathered outside the city's town hall calling for more action to be taken against the agencies involved in the Daniel Pelka case.

Are the two stories linked? Certainly, Reading Council thinks so – a spokesperson for it blamed high-profile serious case reviews (SCR), such as Daniel's, as being a factor behind the poor recruitment response.

Certainly, the damaging impact that high-profile child protection tragedies has on the morale and appeal of the profession is hard to deny. The effects are seen right across the sector: from low applicant rates for social worker vacancies, to high turnover rates for senior managers.

The analysis for our special report into directors of children's services (DCSs) lays bare the full extent to which children's leaders are vulnerable to paying the price of failure with their job.

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