21 Oct 2008

DCSF officials attack the Tories?

A weird thing has crossed my desk. I understand it to be a piece of communication which DCSF has sent out today to all local authorities. In an strangely partisan way, it specifically (and bizarrely, rather unconvincingly) seeks to undermine Tory plans to replace Contactpoint’s universal (unless you are the child of Madonna or an MP) system with a selective system covering only vulnerable children.

Read below for the memo itself. It seems to suggest that decisions about children’s safety and wellbeing are never subjective - if only it were that easy. A key reason for cross-agency case-conferencing is that multiple agencies engaged with a family need to pool their subjective knowledge to try to come to a consensus view on what the right thing to do is. Social services may doubt Mum’s’ capacity to cope or nurture; the health visitor may be concerned about conflict in the home on the weekends when Dad is around; youth justice and education may both argue that the child has made good progress in recent weeks and has achieved a level of stability which might be lost should the child be removed from the home. Decisions on intervention are rarely purely clear-cut, objective, quantitative. They can involve complex ‘gut-feels’ from highly skilled professionals who have to make highly complex judgements.

Anyway… is it not a bit inappropriate for government officials to be sending out something like this (esp to Tory councils)? It makes me wonder how poor the crucial local authority sign-up to Contactpoint is, if the department is at this stage sending rather desperate communications like these.

Above all it’s also pretty inept: I must admit I got confused, and when I read the first paragraph I thought it was arguing convincingly why the Scottish approach makes sense. I suppose the DCSF will have to hope that busy local government officials have time to read all the way to the end....

Views?

Unfold and continue reading...

CONTACTPOINT - UNIVERSAL SYSTEM VS SELECTIVE SYSTEM
The Conservatives propose to replace ContactPoint with a selective system covering
only vulnerable children, such as those in care, on the child protection register or
with backgrounds of domestic violence. This is similar to the approach being
developed in Scotland – Getting it right for every child - and is more akin to what the
electronic Common Assessment Framework (eCAF) and the Integrated Children’s
System (ICS) projects are seeking to achieve in England, than it is to ContactPoint.
ContactPoint has a different, wider purpose. It is, principally, about supporting early
intervention for children who need additional services (30% at any one time and 50%
during their lives) and is universal by design.

A ‘universal’ system recognises that children move in and out of the spectrum of
need and that it is not possible to predict the need for, or timing of, additional
services. It is much less stigmatising - no judgement is required about who should
be included or not. With a selective system, such as that proposed by the
Conservatives, practitioners may make decisions about the needs or vulnerability of
a child in absence of all of the available information, because they can only contact
and speak to practitioners they can identify and locate, rather than all those known to
be working with the child.

Holding records only for children judged to be ‘vulnerable’ would require subjective
judgments about whether the threshold for inclusion on the system had been met
and, importantly, further judgments about when to remove records from the system.
It is proportionate to hold a small amount of information on all children, rather than
continually making threshold decisions about which children to put onto a system
and which to take off.

Without ContactPoint, being able to identify and contact others working with the
same child is a frustrating and time consuming process. Practitioners would much
rather invest time in providing services to children, young people and families. A
survey of nearly 3,000 said that, on average, practitioners need to make contact with
other services 107 times a year, averaging 4 hours each time.

Universality: in the light of the case of Victoria Climbié
Victoria’s Aunt was claiming child benefit and had registered Victoria with two GPs.
On both counts, Victoria’s details would have been supplied to ContactPoint and so
would have been available to authorised users, regardless of any cause for concern.
Had ContactPoint existed, social workers who came into contact with Victoria and
had looked up her details, would have found that she was known as a child living in
England and was registered with a GP. She would also have been listed in a
Children Missing Education report and her absence from education would have been
followed up by her local authority. Consequently, she may have been placed in a
school, where her condition would have been observed daily and a Common
Assessment may have been undertaken as a result.

Victoria was not assessed, by those who saw her as a child with additional needs. It
is questionable whether she would have appeared on a selective system of
vulnerable children.

Wrap up...

Posted by Ideal Gov administrator on 21/10/08 at 9:06pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: user-oriented · Foundation of Trust · Identity · Data nitwittery · Save Time and Money
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21 Oct 2008

DCSF officials attack the Tories?

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