Baby P and social work: putting the human craft back in

I read at the weekend the Observer’s reportage on the background to the defendants in the Baby P case. The article was excellent – nice to see some proper in-depth journalism going on for once. But it made for grim reading. One thing is clear, this did not come from nowhere: the defendants were on the wrong end of generations of abusive, unhealthy, uneducated, and loveless living. That is not of course to excuse what they did. It is to try to understand what we have to do to stop this kind of thing happening more often. I say ‘more often’ because violence by family members towards children goes on all the time. It is only because Baby P’s case was particularly grotesque and the fact that it happened on the watch of Haringey social services that it got the headlines at all. What a depressing thought.

I read at the weekend the Observer’s reportage on the background to the defendants in the Baby P case. The article was excellent – nice to see some proper in-depth journalism going on for once. But it made for grim reading. One thing is clear, this did not come from nowhere: the defendants were on the wrong end of generations of abusive, unhealthy, uneducated, and loveless living. That is not of course to excuse what they did. It is to try to understand what we have to do to stop this kind of thing happening more often. I say ‘more often’ because violence by family members towards children goes on all the time. It is only because Baby P’s case was particularly grotesque and the fact that it happened on the watch of Haringey social services that it got the headlines at all. What a depressing thought.

There are many things to say about the problems the article uncovers. Here is one.

The way social workers operate has become increasingly regulated, or regulated in the wrong kind of way. This regulation is the response to cases like Victoria Climbié – check boxes and cases like this won’t happen again is the thinking. But in a perverse and tragic irony the regulation that was a response to Climbié’s case has contributed to the occurrence of cases like Baby P’s. Too much of the wrong kind of regulation means social workers have lost touch with the vital human skills they need to call upon to do their difficult jobs.

What needs to be fostered is the craft of social work – people with the right ‘people skills’, so to speak. A large part of these skills are learned by simply following round a really good social worker and seeing how they do things; picking up all the subtle cues and intuitive judgements that make him or her adept. A child protection officer quoted in the Observer article makes the point thus:

‘… training needs to be improved, with much more emphasis on reality and practice-based learning, and lengthy placements in the sector.’

Another part of the change in working practices is adequate supervision – that is, the opportunity for social workers to run through the judgements they have made, think about why they made them, and constantly stay vigilant about the possibility of biases, blindspots and tunnel vision. This should be done in a supportive environment with a group of talented peers so that a culture of constant improvement and self-monitoring is established.

This combination of learning a craft and really good supervision will get the most out of social workers’ brains. It will allow them to deploy the mighty computational powers of their unconscious brains’ dopamine prediction-error systems (that is, to hone their intuitive judgement), whilst at the same time developing the ability to correct the tendency of those systems to get stuck in routines.

But also, getting really good at something very difficult in an environment of constant but supportive self-correction yields a culture of pride, self-respect and moral value (and hopefully, admiration from the general public). That has to be the ultimate aim.