Someone told me a joke today which I remember hearing at the time of the last recession:Q: What's the difference between a merchant banker and a pigeon?
A: A pigeon can put a deposit on a Porsche.
Back then the word yuppie replaced the word banker but that apart it was word for word the same. The papers were full of lip-smacking relish about the upcoming gloom, and everyone giddily wondered how we got here so incredibly suddenly when just a few weeks ago everyone had been high on the loadsamoney ethos of the time.
The papers warned about the terrible dangers of deflation in the same slightly reproacheful tones that they'd used weeks earlier about the dangers of inflation. They told us that it was our duty to go out and spend to stimulate the economy at the same time as gleefully predicting massive job cuts. And if anyone dared suggest that there was something slightly unseemly about the press's role in the economical vortex, then they came over all sanctimonious.
Now as then, a slightly more upbeat tone, or at least a balanced one, might be a good idea.
And then there's Haringey Children's Services. Another sickening blast from the past. My brother was an expert witness for the enquiry into the Climbie murder and the failure of the social services to prevent it. An now we have this pitiful toddler. What we've read is appalling enough, and no doubt there are details which we have been spared. It's just too dreadful. That a child should have the misfortune to be born into that parentage, and then for that woman to meet up with those men is just a catalogue of appalling events...
The insistence on lynching the social services make me uneasy though, as does the queue of professionals queuing up to say that henceforth pursuing the interests of a child will mean that social workers will need to take a more combative and challenging line with parents. Does this mean that social workers start off from the position that parents are trying to pull the wool over their eyes? Are they, because they are on the side of the child, necessarily on the opposite side to that of the parents? Because if that is the case, they will be able to do very little - sad to say, the parents will always have more power over what happens in their homes that the children or the social workers. And sure as eggs is eggs there will soon be a story where a child is removed from parents whom children's services suspect threaten its wellbeing and there will be howls of protest about heavy-handed social workers ripping innocent families apart.
I don't pretend that I have an answer. But I'm pretty sure that shouting very, very loudly and acres of newsprint vilifying social services won't help as much as taking a deep breath and a long, cold, hard look at what needs to be done. Preferably out of the public eye.
2 comments:
Self-inflicted lynching more like. A social services manager/director standing in front of a Tv camera showing performance graphs when she was asked how she felt about it all, doesn't need lurid headlines to create an abysmal impression. A lot of the headlines were created by that one act.
I rememember an event called the Battle of the Beanfield, and the active involvement of social workers in rather rather nasty expression of their work. I particulary disagree with your views that what needs to be done be done out of the public eye.
No, I can see how you would take issue with that, although I think you're taking issue with something I didn't actually say. I do strongly believe that the more time organisations spend making their plans palatble to a critical public, the more time is diverted from their core business.
I struggle with all the bereaucracy which goes along with public work these days. I don't understand why as a teacher I have to spend time assessing pieces of work, and the children who produced them, against notional and nonsensical abstract letters and figures when I could better spend the time preparing better lessons to enable children to learn more, and giving them 2/10 or 10/10. We all understand marks out of 0, but what the hell is a 3b in ICT? Police fret about the fact that something like half their time is spent doing paperwork rather than protecting and serving out on the streets, and personnel money is diverted so that police bureaucrats can massage figures. Police know that if they're called to a domestic, rather than pouring oil o troubled waters if they goad the couple into an argument and someone slugs someone, they can have a crime and the solution of a crime right there, and improve their figures. Social workers, it seems to me, have to spend so much time covering their backs and drafting policies or whatever that their ability to do their job is impaired. I firmly believe that if you look at someone very, very closely, you do not help them do their job better - what you do do is teach them the importance of APPEARING to bo doing what you want them to do. I don't say that they should do their job unobserved, but I think that if you tell them to decide what went wrong in public, you won't find out what went wrong, because the focus of the exercise will morph into something else entirely.
I didn't see the clip you refer to. I don't tend to watch television news - I get mine from papers and radio 4.
Post a Comment