I was in Los Angeles this week and found the city to be more
welcoming than I remembered it – perhaps it was the pleasant ‘winter’ sunshine
and the 20 degrees Celsius temperatures!
But a sad report in the Los
Angeles Times caught my eye - http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-child-death-report-20130214,0,109306.story
.
It seems that the LA County Department of Children and
Family Services – which provides child protection services in the city - is the
subject of what is described as an ‘excoriating’ report which denounces the
department for a ‘… stifling bureaucracy and inept workforce…’. It is said that
this is linked to at least thirteen child deaths.
In particular two factors in the report caught my eye. Apparently in LA
the practice has grown-up of putting the least experienced members of staff in
crucial child and family facing front-line posts, where they are out of their
depth.
The second is that it seems a policy of wherever possible
avoiding removing children from their homes has resulted in staff being
motivated to avoid what they call ‘detention’ even when children were at
substantial risk of injury and death in their parents’ care. The corporate goal
of low detention appears to have blinded staff members to the more important
goal of safe children.
There’s a lot in this report of relevance to Britain. There
is still too much reliance here on newly qualified and agency staff working under pressure in
the front line. And, despite the lessons of Munro, the culture of performance
indicators and targets still lurks within many local authorities.
