In Britain we often talk about August as being the ‘silly
season’. It is the time that everyone is on holiday and journalists have to
devise innovative stories to fill the column centimetres.
It looks like this year the unusually warn summer has
extended the silly season into September – at least as far as child protection
is concerned.
There seem to be people popping up all over the media who
have the solution to the Daniel Pelka tragedy. I’ve already mentioned a group
campaigning for mandatory reporting – before, I might add, we even know how
often Daniel’s case was drawn to the attention of Coventry’s Children’s Social
Care.
Then there are a lot of ‘experts’ quoted in Community Care this week.
A representative of the College
of Social Work tells us that “… closer working between teachers and social
workers is needed, such as shadowing days and more observations in schools”. That
sounds like a lot of work to organise without any clear or definable benefit.
And we don’t yet know how much (or how little) ‘co-operation’ there was between
the school and social workers in Daniel’s case.
Then a representative of the teachers’ union NASUWT waxes
lyrical about the doomed computer system ContactPoint. He is quoted as saying: “The
seeds of good partnership working were there with children’s trusts and the
ContactPoint database, which had real potential to be built upon. But this
government has smashed it to pieces.”
At this point I begin to wish it was the middle of winter –
the sensible season. However little we know about Daniel’s tragic death it
takes a particular kind of mind to see it as being linked to the abolition of a
piece of ill-conceived IT.
Let’s be sensible and wait for the Serious Case Review
report. It might not explain what
happened but it will describe the
events and provide a chronology.
And let’s stop all those knees jerking in the late summer
sunshine.
