The Inquiry into the State of Social Work report highlights particular flaws in child protection systems and practice, and which are impacting negatively on the ability of social workers to safeguard vulnerable children.
Drawn up from evidence given to the inquiry by social work practitioners and managers, the report says poor administration and IT systems are “chaining” social workers to their desks, resulting in a “poorer service for children”.
Janet Foulds, former chair of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), told the inquiry: “The IT systems are an absolute nightmare. Workers feel they are serving a computer system rather than computers serving them.”
Others said the demands of recording data and case histories multiple times meant they were spending 70 per cent of their job in front of a screen.
The report says that while witnesses recognised recording case information was a necessity, “the current approach to detailing cases appears born out of a need to ensure social workers and managers are protected from blame in case something goes wrong, rather than to achieve the best outcomes for service users”.
An anonymous senior social worker told the inquiry he knew of caseloads of 60 children being held at any one time. He said the prolonged rise in recent years of the number of child protection cases meant “we have to cross our fingers that we have picked the right cases to focus on and not ignored some of the more dangerous ones”.
He added: “The more cases we have the more corners we have to cut and… the more we have significant numbers of children for whom we haven’t had the time to do a thorough assessment. We have to make a decision on which cases to prioritise.”
Inquiry witnesses also frequently said financial pressures of cuts in social work meant professionals were being asked to practice in “unsafe conditions” for both them and children.
Anne Clywd, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Work, which produced the report, said: “Children living in chaotic households or where concerns have been expressed about their welfare need to know that there are professionals out there with the time and support to be able to come and make a difference to their lives, and keep them safe.??
“What MPs heard during this inquiry is that all too often social workers do not have the capacity they need to be able to concentrate on that vital duty of ensuring the safety of as many young people as possible.”??
The APPG report contains a series of recommendations to help address the obstacles to good practice, including proposals to get social workers out from behind their desks and located in the heart of communities, as well as the introduction of paid overtime to reflect the amount of evening and weekend hours practitioners currently spend trying to keep up with caseloads. ??
Commenting on the inquiry report, BASW’s chief executive Bridget Robb said: “The profession, and in turn those who rely on social work services, is struggling with vast caseloads that are continuing to grow as care applications continue to soar – a direct result of councils becoming more risk averse since Peter Connelly’s death – yet they are doing so at a time when downward pressure on local authority budgets has never been more severe.”
