Quality | 2010.03.19
Birmingham council sacks six social workers
Six staff dismissed for not meeting standards at council which was criticised over death from starvation of Khyra Ishaq
Six social workers at Birmingham City council, which was criticised over the death of Khyra Ishaq from starvation, have been sacked.
Colin Tucker, the council\'s director of children\'s services, said they were not doing their jobs properly.
Khyra died in May 2008 from starvation. Her mother and stepfather were jailed last week for her manslaughter .
The dismissals were not directly linked to Khyra\'s case, but they follow other child deaths in Birmingham in recent years. Tucker said the sacked social workers showed "no sign whatsoever" of meeting expected standards.
In an interview with the BBC, he said: "We are not appointing some staff. As well as that, we have dismissed six staff in the last year.
"They did not adhere to standards and expectations that we laid down. They showed no sign whatsoever that they were keen to do so, so we dismissed them."
All six sacked staff were frontline social workers, not managers. Tucker told Radio 4\'s Today programme that while no managers had been dismissed, senior staff were having to undergo rigorous training and assessment. "They were frontline workers, they weren\'t senior managerial staff," he said. "Since I\'ve been there, we\'ve introduced a whole new set of standards. That includes managers going through an intensive programme of assessment.
"We\'re remodelling in the autumn. That remodelling will have fewer managers in place, less duplication, more responsibility."
Tucker also revealed the extent of the council\'s reliance on agency staff. He said there were about 120 vacant posts that had been filled with agency workers, but that he intended to cut this to 40-50 as the department recruits more permanent workers and continues with new training and managing staff roles.
The shake-up comes after eight children known to children\'s services have died in Birmingham in three years. An official report last year condemned the council\'s child protection arrangements as "not fit for purpose". It found a shortage of experienced staff, inadequate monitoring, excessive paperwork and too little time with children and families.
Tucker said three serious case reviews were under way.
Asked about the death of Khyra, he said: "In the profession, in the city, we are so upset about that it is untrue. Staff don\'t come into social work to harm children or to miss signs of when they\'re being abused or mistreated.
"Believe me, their motivation is to safeguard children. This has cast, and rightly so, a real shadow over this department for two years. But we can\'t turn the clock back."
Tucker said Sharon Shoesmith, the former children\'s services chief who was sacked over the death of Baby P in Haringey, had been "relentlessly vilified", which was "not acceptable". He added: "I think we do have to encourage communities to trust us more, and that\'s very difficult in a climate where I feel with my staff often that we\'re damned if we intervene and we\'re damned if we don\'t."
Commenting on the dismissals, Harry Ferguson, professor of social work at Nottingham University, said: "It is always sad to hear about social workers\' careers ending like this. Child-protection work with families where parents are resistant to intervention and use hostility and other forms of manipulation to prevent workers from gaining proper access to the child are incredibly difficult to deal with.
"We haven\'t done nearly enough to prepare newly qualified social workers well to do this kind of authoritative work or to promote their skill development and emotional resilience while doing it. Having exacting standards that social workers must meet if children are to be protected is appropriate, and these are best met through a combination of individuals\' skills, knowledge, courage and, crucially, employers providing the necessary kinds of organisational cultures and supports."
Hilton Dawson, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, called for a "strong, independent college of social work" to improve professional standards. "There\'s undoubtedly an issue about the quality of entrants to the profession, about the standard of training, about the standard of practice education and certainly about the quality of some individuals within the cadre of social work professionals.
"I don\'t think social work is for everybody, and I think it\'s important for the public to realise that this is a highly skilled, very important, job."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/m[...]m-council-sacks-social-workers
