Child deaths highlight the case for doing better

Lawyers have long argued that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases, and inevitably bring with it a major risk of unintended consequences. Is this true for our family welfare system? Should we be thinking about changing policy or practice guidance? How should we respond to the harrowing details in the reporting of the trials of the killers of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson?

We have yet to see what a detailed, informed analysis of the individual practice, local system performance and capacity, and national learning will bring. This has not prevented people in positions of power and with access to the media from calling for something to be done. In parliament, the Education Secretary raised the temperature of the debate by sharing his view that “any inkling… of harm to any child” should lead to that child being taken away from their parent immediately. Other voices have called for child protection work to be undertaken by a new breed of specialist services. I, too, question whether it is time to contemplate structural or systemic change if that might save lives.

The reality of the work undertaken by our children’s services argues against this. Practitioners grapple daily with uncertainty, ambiguity and transient risk: there is no handbook to give them definitive and lasting solutions to family problems. If every decision they took was guided by the principle of avoiding, at all costs, the mistake they least want to make, they would become paralysed – and spend their days working out how to navigate thresholds set by specialist teams, reducing still further their ability to provide expert support to families that are struggling.

Most of our child protection services are focused on chronic neglect and emotional harm rather than acute episodes of physical or sexual harm. Although it is impossible to make direct comparisons with other countries (because the conventions for recording child death vary widely), intra-familial child homicide in the UK is consistently at the low end of the range. Additionally, our comprehensive system of reviewing child deaths tells us that a number of these tragedies occurred in families where there was no evidence that predicted the possibility of such a catastrophic event, so they would not have been prevented by child protection services.

For me, the case for change has not yet been made. However, the case for doing consistently better what we are already doing is loud and clear. Our policy makers need to ensure that the children’s workforce has the skills, capacity and resources to support families that are struggling, and, most importantly, to address the inadequacy of services for adults (who happen to be parents) who are dealing with mental ill health or with substance dependency or the pernicious, crushing impact of living in poverty.

• Andrew Webb is independent chair of the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies