The brutal murder of Liam Fee has raised concerns about children at risk going 'off the radar' from child protection processes. It is hard to understand why professionals did not recognise the seriousness of the risks to Liam and take appropriate action. Cases of cruelty such as this are rare but they highlight a serious weakness in social work practice.

What concerns me most is the complacency demonstrated by social workers when things go wrong. Clearly social workers are feeling overstretched but they should not ignore the evidence that social workers sometimes fail to recognise cruelty and extreme neglect. The whistle-blower who reported concerns about Liam Fee here used gut feeling and knew intuitively there was something wrong. It would be a good idea if social workers had this degree of common sense.

Many child and family teams in Britain are struggling to carry out their child protection duties. Their difficulties are rooted in a profession which questions whether it is the right one to carry out child protection duties. Furthermore, the deliberate removal of the term 'child protection' from official guidance has diverted attention away from this area of work and allowed much practice wisdom to be lost. Weaknesses in child protection work have arisen because it has been dragged away from its original purpose and, in the more dysfunctional authorities, much of this work is now of a 'hit and miss' nature.

The current arrangements in children's services therefore depend on all children's social workers being properly trained to strike the right balance between family support and 'safeguarding' work. It is assumed that social workers doing assessments and providing support to families will incidentally pick up any child protection concerns in the course of their work.

It is well known that infants are at a higher risk of death at the hands of a parent than any other age group. Good social work practice is based on the recognition that need and risk are inter-related and allows for margins for discretion in determining thresholds for intervention. Social workers often work with the most troubled and deprived people in society whose parenting is on the borderline of acceptable. They try to tackle problems arising out of the family circumstances, or personal life experiences, but achieving change in the family is a complex and time-consuming task.

I have no illusions about the difficulties inherent within the social work role and understand how mistakes are made. I know how difficult it can be to meet the needs of parents without losing sight of the over-riding duty to protect the child. There is an inherent dilemma regarding the question of how social workers can share responsibility with parents over the upbringing of their children.

Some hard-to-reach parents make the possibility of collaborative work very challenging. Fine judgements may then have to be made about whether it is safe to downgrade the case, or whether the presence of known risk factors shows the need for a more structured, inter-agency approach enabling the social worker to keep a closer watch on the family. Although this is a matter of professional judgement, the shortage of experienced social workers means there is often managerial pressure to downgrade child protection cases here and in some situations this is leading to dangerous practice.

Training courses do not prepare social work students adequately for the child protection role. Newly qualified social workers need mature and experienced social workers around them who consistently model how to do the job, enabling them to develop their skills and find satisfaction in the work. However, in recent years the departure of many experienced social workers has left teams without their mentors. It is not surprising that some young social workers soon become disillusioned and leave.

Many difficulties have arisen because there is much uncertainty about what the real priorities are. Public concern about child protection failures has now led to demands for 'Daniel Pelka's Law' to enact mandatory reporting of child abuse. However, this would achieve little if the social work response when serious child protection concerns are reported to them is ineffective.

A clearer separation between the two social work functions of 'child protection investigation' and 'ongoing safeguarding work' would have many advantages. Improved arrangements for child protection enquiries/investigation would help referring agencies develop a better understanding of the threshold for investigation. Separation of functions would provide a new opportunity to clarify roles, develop staff expertise, and provide training which is more focused on staff need. Tighter regulation of social workers with child protection duties is also necessary to ensure that this work is only carried out by accredited social workers of the right calibre.

Social workers who carry out investigations need different skills from social workers who provide family support. The investigative role requires a more decisive and probing style of working than that normally adopted by social workers and, in some ways, it is more like that of a detective. If this work was recognised as a specialised area of work, requiring a forensic mind-set and skills in crisis intervention work, it might be seen as an interesting and challenging role for those social workers who like variety and are good at thinking on their feet.

In the more dysfunctional authorities a centralised team for investigations seems to be the right way forward. This team would ensure that suspicious incidents, injuries and allegations of abuse are thoroughly and promptly investigated. Those cases where continuing child maltreatment is suspected, in a more generalised sense, could still be dealt with by the district team if it already knew the family and thought the assessment should be carried out over a longer period of time.

The key to good practice is social workers who are more confident, less defensive and more explicit about what they do. There is an urgent need to improve arrangements for high end child protection work.

Hilary Searing

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