Quartet set to probe case reviews

The government wants more rigour in serious case reviews and has now named the quartet it believes can ensure that happens.

The four members of the new Serious Case Review Panel are a diverse bunch, ranging from new NSPCC boss Peter Wanless and family law barrister Elizabeth Clarke to Evening Standard columnist Jenni Russell and Nicholas Dann of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

“The panel will bring rigorous independent scrutiny to the system,” says a Department for Education spokeswoman. “They will help local safeguarding children boards make the right decisions about completing and publishing reports so the same mistakes are not repeated.”

Those mistakes have been piling up in the past couple of years. The Munro review criticised serious case reviews for being too focused on errors and said that local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) should look at how industries such as engineering learn from serious incidents.

A DfE-funded study published in 2011 found serious case reviews were confusing and often failed to account for wider issues such as poverty. And Lord Carlile’s review of the Edlington serious case review recommended appointing an independent team of experts to advise and monitor LSCBs.

Second guessing
While the panel clearly draws on the recommendations of these reviews and studies, some within the children’s sector are questioning the make-up of the panel.

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and the National Association for People Abused in Childhood are disappointed by the lack of service-user representation on the panel.

Despite this, both organisations do agree that Dann’s appointment is a good one. “As a model for investigating and learning from mistakes, there is a lot to learn from the way the aircraft industry looks at accidents,” says Nushra Mansuri, BASW’s professional officer for England.

Directors of children’s services, however, are uneasy that the panel has been formed with little consultation. “We are not sure where this has come from,” says Hackney DCS Alan Wood, vice-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “It’s late on as a proposal and people across all sectors were caught out by it.”

The DfE spokeswoman argues that it was “clear” that LSCBs need access to expert advice from an independent source.

Wood also questions the panel’s remit of challenging LSCB decisions about starting and publishing serious case reviews. “I don’t see how they will be able to second guess a local decision unless they immerse themselves in that local area,” he says.

Mansuri wonders how a small four-person panel can fully investigate all the potentially dubious local decisions about the initiation and publication of serious case reviews: “It’s almost like they are going to need whistleblowers to let them know, but how will that process work?”

Taking shape
The DfE says it will issue more information on how the panel will operate by the end of June, but it expects LSCBs to “have due regard” to the panel’s advice on their work.

One of the quartet, Peter Wanless, says the panel is “still taking shape” and the four have yet to officially discuss what they want to achieve. But he adds that “fundamentally, it’s about ensuring the system learns as much as it can from these reviews”.

Asked whether he thinks the system has learned enough from serious case reviews, he replies that he does not know – at least not yet. “I certainly know, for example, it hasn’t been particularly easy to learn from the reviews that have been done in the past,” he says.

“At the NSPCC, we have a library which seeks to keep a copy of all the serious case reviews that have been published, and even gathering those together hasn’t been a particularly straight-forward task. Then there are a whole lot of other ones that haven’t been published for particular reasons which may or may not be good. The Secretary of State has a view that not enough are being published and more should be, so we’ll test that.”

Certainly, there is hope the panel can improve transparency. Jon Bird, operational manager of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, says he hopes it can end the “postcode lottery” in serious case review quality, where “some councils and agencies are keen to be open and ensure they can learn from mistakes, while others are not”.


Panel of diversity

The lawyer: Elizabeth Clarke
A family law barrister based at Queen Elizabeth Building chambers in London. Her legal work has an emphasis on ancillary relief cases.

The air accident investigator: Nicholas Dann
Senior inspector of air accidents at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which is part of the Department for Transport.

The journalist: Jenni Russell
Columnist for the London Evening Standard. Also writes for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2011.

The charity chief: Peter Wanless
Chief executive of the NSPCC and former chief executive of the Big Lottery Fund. Before that, he was a senior civil servant at the Department for Children, Schools and Families.