Sharon Shoesmith dismissed

[Comfreyfan]

New Government legislation after every tragedy and 'shake up' adds considerably to the administrative tasks of all social care staff. Next year's funding depends on completing 'paperwork'. This takes up a considerable percentage of everyone's time, they're spending longer at their desks than out doing the job they trained for. But caseloads remain the same, there are no extra workers. New requirements have already been fed down following Baby P - extra visits? more workers? more time out of the office? No - you guessed it, a new piece of paperwork for each and every safeguarding case.

It simply isn't possible to keep anything under wraps these days. Social Workers have been villifed for so long, the whole system is demoralised. They're somehow seen as uncaring and incompetent, when they're just regular folks trying to do their jobs the best they can - some of them are even gardeners! (And no I'm not a SW!).

[bluemoon]

I notice that with all this about Haringey (sp), the poor baby girl in Doncaster has been forgotten, her 'father' snapped her back in two, but i've not seen anything about the Social Services there being brought to book, so just how rife is it and how many more cases are those that should be brought to book getting away with because they've managed to keep it under wraps.

I read somewhere that one child a week is murdered by its parents/carers. - I can't remember if these were figures for the UK or just England - Either way this is way too many, but we do only tend to hear about the ones local to us unless the abuse happened in London. I don't know if this is because the national media can't be bothered to report from elsewhere or if the abuse is worse there (I'm thinking of one case here though that was just as bad as baby P, but didn't seem to make national T.V.) Sadly, according to statistics, we should be hearing about this on a very regular basis. We're not, so I can only assume that many social service departments are not being brought to book simply because there hasn't been the national outcry that there was about Haringay.