The Baby P case has
raised the issue of child protection in recent weeks.
Failures at Haringey Council led to the death of the 17-month
old, but the concern now is that
these problems are systemic, not isolated - and
poor IT is playing its part.
The IT system -
the Integrated Children's System (ICS) - that
social workers use to manage their case load has been
pinpointed as one of the problems at Haringey Council. Haringey,
however, is not the only local authority to report problems with
the system. Academics and charities in close contact with social
workers claim the ICS system is generally
unfit for the purpose of helping social workers protect
children.
One complaint is that form-filling takes too much of social
workers' time, leaving them with less time for working directly
with children and families. Sue White and Karen Broadhurst from the
University of Lancaster, Chris Hall from the University of
Huddersfield and Dave Wastell, from the University of Nottingham,
looked at the impact of performance management on front-line
services at five local authorities in England and Wales. They say:
"One assumes Baby P's records in ICS were complete and up-to-date,
but the complex sense-making that may have saved him will have been
compromised as a result."
They also point to the performance targets that social workers
are given under the system. Not only does the ICS take up too much
time, it encourages social workers to aim for the wrong goals. They
must aim to move cases forward a stage within the required
timescale. If a case flashes a red light, it indicates they must
concentrate on moving that case to the system's next stage.
The academics say in their report: "Switching off the flashing
red light bears no relationship to protecting a child - something
of which social workers and managers are acutely aware, but
workflow slippages carry sanctions."
Terri Dowty, director of the campaign group
Action on
Rights for Children, says the design of the system is
inherently flawed, because front-line users were insufficiently
consulted at the design stage. "The problem is that it's a 'top
down' system," she says. "It's making people change the way they
work to fit the system. They didn't go out and ask social workers
what they wanted to see."
Even IT suppliers who work with councils admit there are issues
with the ICS.
Denise
Harrison is co-founder of
Liquid
Logic, which has installed the system in 28 councils. She
insists having an electronic care record such as this one is better
than not having one at all, and explains that some of the problems
stem from many social workers not being used to IT.
"Social services traditionally haven't used IT because of the
personal nature of the job," she says. "This system is imposing a
way of working on them that in many ways will give them less
flexibility. In the past, they won't have had to follow an exact
pathway." She says user-friendliness is an issue, although this
varies with different implementations of the system. But despite
the problems, she says, the ICS has in many ways achieved what it
set out to do: provide an evidence base for how decisions are made,
and systemise the collection of information about children and
their families.
But the criticisms are unavoidable and the consensus appears to
be that, while the aims are applauded, the ICS's method is not the
right one. David Wastell, professor of information systems at the
University of Nottingham, says the ICS attempts to restructure
practice in two ways: by focusing on performance management and by
moving social work away from pure child protection to a more
holistic approach to child welfare.
"There is nothing much wrong with this framework in principle,"
he says. "The problem is with implementation. The framework has
been operationalised in ICS via a vast plethora of incredibly long
and repetitive forms, which busy social workers just do not have
time to complete. A core assessment form is around 35 pages
long."
The system was rolled out after Lord Laming's review of social
care, following the death of 8-year-old Victoria Climbie in 2000.
Its aim was to improve communication, but Terri Dowty is not
convinced the ICS was the right answer.
"I have the feeling that the government has something of a
bunker mentality in the wake of Baby P," she says. "Lord Laming is
going round looking at how well his reforms have been implemented.
But the question is, whether these reforms were the right ones to
implement."