Retraining a social worker A three year old child admitted to hospital with multiple fractures, inflicted by the drunken step-father over a period of several months. The social services had been alerted, visited the household, and scheduled a case conference which was due to take place the day after the child died. Once again, too little, too late. Sorting our social workers Guess what, it’s tim...

Is it really such a bad thing that there aren’t “enough” social workers? After all, as Parkinson’s Law of Social Work states that social problems increase to occupy the total number of social workers available to deal with them Yes, that was me being facetious, but the point remains that we don’t need huge numbers of social

A database containing details of every child in England will be rolled out today to ensure "faster contact" between doctors, social workers and police if they suspect a child is at risk. ContactPoint, a £224m directory, will contain the name, address, date of birth, GP and school of all under-18s &# as well as the name and contact details of any professional working with that child.

Following the conclusion of the trial of the carers of Baby P, The Sun led a major campaign against the social workers who worked with the child. In an open letter to the newspaper, Community Care magazine’s Daniel Lombard asks its editor, Rebekah Wade, to rethink its agenda on social work issues, which could ultimately

Looks like another stunning victory for social services. As ever, I say that if the problem was merely that social workers were untrained/over-worked/retarded or whatever, these horrors stories would occur pretty much at random. Ditto, with cases of social workers persecuting the innocent. On the contrary, the figures only tilt one way. Social workers have totally assimilated the cultural Marxist ...

Spending time on the frontline is what matters, children's secretary tells profession Child protection managers should spend less time in offices and more time supporting overworked social workers on the frontline, the children's secretary Ed Balls said today. Many social workers dealing with complex child abuse cases in England were too inexperienced and it was unacceptable for them not...

What is child abuse? (Click to enlarge) It’s time, once again, to vent our collective spleens. It’s time, once again, for those on the moral high ground to stand up and be counted. It’s time, once again, to crucify a social worker. Haringey Council has done it again. Eight years on from the Victoria Climbie scandal, their social service department has allowed another defenceless child to be ...

A task force set up to investigate the state of social work in Britain after the murder of Baby P under the very noses of social workers has come up with some wholly predictable and pointless recommendations. Basically, they suggest more pay and higher status for social workers. Yes, really. The reason Baby P wasn't helped, apparently, is that social workers - as well as, presumably, the poli...

You will be aware that in the weeks leading up to Christmas the Sun newspaper has managed to whip up a massive campaign against social workers blaming the individual social worker for the death of...

Social workers have taken a battering. I hope Lord Laming recognises how much we owe them There has long been an absolute conviction among social workers, statutory and voluntary, and politicians local and national, that taking a child into care is to be avoided almost at all cost. The unchallenged philosophy is that we should do everything possible to deflect children from the dreadful consequenc...