Yet the past decade has seen the rise of a powerful belief among policy makers and many managers that social work practice can be fixed, and children saved, by technology.
By technology, I don't just mean various electronic media, but also the attempts to organise and standardise practice with a range of different prescriptive forms and labyrinthine procedures.
This is perhaps best exemplified by the now notorious Integrated Children's System (ICS), the horrors of which my own the research went some way to exposing.
It is cumbersome, badly designed, time-consuming and distracting. Yet it was proclaimed a magic solution that would inoculate social work against sloppy professional practices.
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