Child protection standards slide

Three years after the Victoria Climbié tragedy and months after the Baby P Tragedy, local authority child protection services are still struggling to raise their game.

Most council children’s departments have found it difficult to improve their services, and more than one in five have seen performance ratings decline since 2005, said an official report on 5 March 2009.

And last year standards dropped across the board, the audit commission study shows.The commission said England’s 150 children’s services departments “performed slightly worse in 2008 than in 2005”, a period when services such as housing, waste collection and care of older people all improved.

After the torture and killing of eight year-old Victoria Climbié at the hands of her guardians in 2000, children’s social care and education services were restructured in 2005 to tighten up child safeguarding. There was public outcry over the fact that Victoria was on Haringey council’s child protection register but officials across a range of services failed to spot that she had been abused.

These latest findings come just days before a former chief inspector of social services, Lord Laming, delivers a government report on the 2005 reforms. Laming was asked to carry out the review by Minister for Children Ed Balls in November, at the height of the Baby P controversy.

Haringey, where the Baby P scandal took place, was among four councils to go from a three-star rating to one. The borough lost marks after the Ofsted review of its children’s services department was launched to try to explain how the toddler suffered more than 50 injuries by the time of his death in August 2007, despite numerous visits by social workers who failed to raise the alarm.

Haringey council Leader Claire Kober told the BBC: “We accept that things went badly wrong with child protection. We are committed to making things right. We need to make major changes in this area. We have started that process, and I am determined to drive through the changes needed.”

But there was a general deterioration in the level of children’s services performance across the board in 2008. Nationally, 22 children’s departments’ ratings dipped year on year, while just 13 improved. Christine Gilbert, chief inspector of Ofsted, one of the agencies used by the Audit Commission in its studies, explained why four authorities had achieved just one star for children’s services. “We felt the arrangements in place weren’t secure enough to give us confidence that children - mostly vulnerable children, and those in care - could grow up and thrive in those areas,” she said. “The sort of things that were missing were good systems for tracking progress, and sometimes there weren’t safe recruitment processes or prudent checks in place.”

The top-rated children’s services departments in 2008 were Camden, Corporation of London, Gateshead, Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Richmond, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth and York. Each was awarded four stars.

Written by Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children