In a new government-funded initiative which involves a collaboration between the NSPCC and the Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE), Serious Case Reviews are being put under the spotlight, yet again.
Serious Case Reviews typically take place after a child has either been badly injured, or died as a result of suspected abuse or neglect. Google “Failings of Serious Case Reviews”, and thousands of entries appear, citing flaws within our system and the many children it has let down, not to mention the many consultation papers, reviews and studies highlighting the ongoing problems with these reviews. They are a growing thorn in the side of the child welfare system.
The Learning into Practice Project (LiPP) – an unfortunate name, given that the acronym is very similar to the already existing LIPs, another sector related phenomenon with an altogether different connotation – has been created to improve the quality of Serious Case Reviews. But they need your help.
As part of this project, the organisations involved are hosting three summits to gather as much information as they can on why Serious Case Reviews aren’t as effective as they could be and what can be done to make them better.
The summits are being held in the following places and on the following dates:
Friday 25 September 2015 – London
Monday 28 September 2015 – Leeds
Wednesday 30 September 2015 – Birmingham
Please click on the links above to reserve your place at one of these summits – they’re being fussy about who can attend, so we would advise booking early.
These summits are a good idea, and we hope people with experience and insight share their thoughts and contribute to them. We also hope that positive and helpful ideas are received by the government and implemented quickly.
Researching Reform 
Bit like waiting for the patient to die before calling the ambulance. Sad to see.
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Grant your mind is working wonderful so true what you say, your comment should go far and wide into the Governments and the rest of the so called experts “In a child’s best interest”
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Thank you for your comment, Grant. It’s a terrible shame. If the system worked well, we would have very few SCRs, but we have a lot in relative terms. They are not supposed to be used as primary bastions of protection, but there you are.
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Well well Natasha yet again as I continually say more meetings and more money “all in a child’s best interest” what a farce yet again, as for the NSPCC all they do is ask for millions and send kids back to those they have reported abused them, boy I would love to tell the world WITH EVIDENCE of the NSPCC so called protection of children, so I wonder how much the tax payers will have to pay yet again for these so called meetings “in a child’s best interest” it is time children stopped being the silent witnesses because here lies the truth, but then we can go to a top Cafcass officer who said to me, ALL KIDS TELL LIES AND NONE KNOW WHAT THEY WANT, what planet is she on and how many kids have been abused in care due to an ignorant women. On my web page is the info of a child age three who told the court who she wanted to live with and I having more experience with kids then them who go to collage and university just so they can earn a wage “In a child’s best interest” say most are as ignorant as they come, children tell the truth unless they are put into fear and believe me I have witnessed kids in fear, every kid born is beautiful even if born damaged but they are so honest and loving until the so called idiot adults get their hands on them and the court experts who interfere with the kids minds.
So Natasha I would not waste time or money for yet more meetings when all know the answers and that is easy open the family courts and allow evidence to be produced let a child speak and get rid of the courts crooked lawyers who supposedly represent a child’s wishes and wants along with Cafcass who work hand in hand with the child’s lawyer.
In the news in the past few days big story a girl of 14 stopped her own adoption. That’s the answer give the kids a voice
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/11/adopted-girl-wins-right-to-return-to-biological-family-after-abuse
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Yes, I read about this case this morning. Will write more on it later.
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Natasha that case of the 14 year old and the adoption has to be a landmark case.
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It’s certainly very unusual. There have been a small few cases where adoptions were overturned, but as you say, it’s a very rare thing when it happens.
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Social workers are eager to pounce on any parent that slaps a child but they totally ignore the horrific child abuse that goes on in care. Children are forbidden to tell their parents at contact of abuse in fostercare.If children or their parents report abuse by a social worker,fosterer,or care worker in a children’s home.If they try contact is stopped immediately.
If a child goes to the police or phones childline or nyas they are usually told to discuss it with their social worker (who may sometimes be one of the abusers).
If a child tries to testify in court they are told they either have no capacity or are too traumatised so a tame solicitor will speak for them.
Until children can testify in court when they want to,until police are obliged to take statements if reports are made of abuse of children,and until children have freedom of speech during contact , unecessary deaths will occur in care and continue to be be quickly covered up
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Thank you, FA. I still feel much of the problem lies in training and understanding children. I think it’s also true to say that the child welfare sector has never been considered particularly important -it certainly doesn’t further political ends most of the time – so what you have is a system government doesn’t feel it wants to invest in, and in turn that impacts quality of service. I do think we need to start raising the bar and looking to really gifted practitioners to forge a better path.
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Natasha your comment of course they want to invest BUT not in the kids BUT only in their meetings and talking’s making thousands for them self’s, I keep calling them “In a child’s best interest” idiots how wrong I was it is “In the governments best interest”
money money money and to hell with the kids being abused
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Well, that’s what’s wrong with government. It hasn’t been about society for a long time.
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“By failing to acknowledge the huge emotional needs of an abused or neglected child, he says, the social worker comes to resemble an abusive or neglectful adult.
Examples include those interviews where the social worker spends more time “gathering evidence” than properly listening to a vulnerable child.”
(childhood trauma expert Dr Chris Nicholson, of Essex University.)
Cawley, L. 2015 Aylesbury sex ring: How it started with an investigation into the victim, BBC, 24 July.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32786263
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Girl, 6, makes legal history…
Published On April 17, 2010 | By Children Screaming To Be Heard | Abuse, Adoption, Child Protection, Family, Fostering, Human Rights, Law, News, Politics, Uncategorized
Judge in child abduction case allows her to choose whether to live with her mummy or daddy
By Andy Dolan Daily Mail 15th April 2010
In a landmark case, a six-year-old girl caught in a tug-of-love battle has been allowed to choose which parent she will live with.
She became the youngest child to have her wishes influence the courts in an international child abduction case.
A judge heard how she had been left with a ‘visceral’ fear of being sent back to live with her father in Ireland.
The girl and her two brothers, aged three and eight, were brought to the UK by their English-born mother last summer.
They are now free to remain with her in this country after the Appeal Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling by a family court judge to refuse the father’s application for them to be sent back to Ireland.
Giving her decision last month, Mrs Justice Black said the six-year-old and her older brother had ‘attained an age and level of maturity’ to have their wishes taken into account. She said it would be ‘intolerable’ for their younger brother to be separated from them.
The court heard the three siblings had spent all their lives in Ireland, their father’s homeland, before their mother ‘unlawfully removed’ them last summer. Their father’s counsel, Edward Devereux, said it was a ‘ clandestine and well-planned’ operation carried out while the father was at work. He asked to have the children ‘summarily returned’ to Ireland under the Hague Convention, the international treaty which tackles-child abduction in family cases.
Mrs Justice Black refused to order their return after hearing the strength of the two older children’s objections to the move. A social worker who interviewed the pair said that, when she told them they might be sent back to Ireland, the boy ‘became very fidgety’ and his little sister started to cry. The youngsters said that, if they had to return to Ireland, they wanted to live in a secret location as far away from their father as possible, the court heard. In her ruling, Mrs Justice Black said the children’s objections were rooted ‘in their own experiences of family life and their fear of their father’.
She added that there was nothing to suggest that they had been influenced or put under pressure by their mother. At the Appeal Court, Mr Devereux argued that the judge’s ruling undermined the whole basis of the Hague Convention, which requires that the future of children in such cases should be decided by the courts of the country from which they have been unlawfully abducted. Describing the case as ‘unique’, the barrister said that six ‘is the youngest age in the reported jurisprudence at which a child has been found to have attained an age and degree of maturity at which it is appropriate to take account of her views’.
Mrs Justice Black’s ‘radical’ ruling, he said, would have ‘a far-reaching impact’ on child abduction cases. However, after a two-hour hearing, Lord Justice Wilson and Lord Justice Sedley refused to grant the father permission to appeal, with the result that the children will now get their wish and stay with their mother in England. Recognising the potentially widespread importance of the case, Lord Justice Sedley said the court would give the reasons for its decision at a later date.
Last month’s Court of Appeal hearing attracted much attention in the national press because at first instance Black J had taken account of the views of two of the three children involved. The younger of them was five years old at the time of her interview by a Cafcass officer. Edward Devereux, representing the father, told the Court of Appeal that Mrs Justice Black’s decision to consult the girl had been “radical” and “unique”. He said that five was “the youngest age in the reported jurisprudence at which a child has been found to have attained an age and degree of maturity at which it is appropriate to take account of her views.”
The father’s application for permission to appeal was refused.
Delivering the main judgment of the Court, Wilson LJ cited the observation of Baroness Hale in In Re D (A Child) (Abduction: Rights of Custody) [2006] UKHL 51, that “children should be heard far more frequently in Hague Convention cases than has been the practice hitherto”. He shared the concern that “the lowering of the age at which a child’s objections may be taken into account might gradually erode the high level of achievement of the Convention’s objective, namely – in the vast majority of cases – to secure a swift restoration of children to the states from which they have been abducted.” However, he added: “A considerable safeguard against such erosion is to be found in the well-recognised expectation that in the discretionary exercise the objections of an older child will deserve greater weight than those of a younger child.”
This article is on the web page of http://www.childrenscreamingtobeheard.com
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Many thanks, Maggie. Researching Reform are big fans of Lady Hale.
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This is a must read for all of those people in Governments who may read from researching reform.
For some years now I have been researching into the illegal social workers and yes thousands from the third world countries who not only work and get paid by the social services, but also have their own companies registered , its called a conflict of interest and these social workers have to by law let the SS know, but do they hell, they use the SS offices for their companies wonderful paid twice for taking kids on allegations only and no expenses to pay, many s/w are in the property business what better then to use their own services to re-house kids from care and get paid, I have asked all families to check out their own social workers amazing the info now being exposed The media needs to pick up on this HUGE fiddle of stealing the kids for the S/W own companies.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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I am now on my 5th Ombudsman Investigation, 3rd PHSO and 2nd successive PHSO into Cafcass. I have also adressed the Euro Parliament Petitions Commission twice on it’s motion of ‘Systemic Failings Within UK Family Courts.’ Depressingly obvious is the sad fact that children’s welfare has become a fantastic vehicle of convenience for myriad vested interests. Lord Laming in 2001 did a huge investigation involving 3 Acts of Parliament and came out with 108 recommendations. In 2011 he stated post Baby P “none of my recommendations have been implemented.”
At some stage the intense gender politics around children’s services will have to be addressed if ever improvements are to happen. Gender Neutral Impartial Professionalism has to occur and replace Child Endangering Gender Discrimination.
Until then this gravy train of many carriages will continue.
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Many thanks for your comment. Apologies, but as per reporting restrictions, and for legal reasons, I’ve had to remove your name and edit your post.
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Under the children’s human rights it clearly states NO CHILD SHOULD BE SOLD and yet it is very clear the British children are a multi billion pound industry creating millions of jobs along with EMPLOYING illegal social workers from many countries whilst at the same time paying them many thousands of pounds for realication of tax payers money, and although there are rights for children they are ignored and for this reason in America as you will read in this link
http://www.senatorstadelman.com/news/74-stadelman-foster-children-bill-of-rights-signed-into-law
the laws are changing so that foster children have rights, but will it help the kids of the world its a maybe so perhaps YET another law passed to stop the abuse of children. I ask you to please consider the info in the link and if there is any one out there who agrees and can help then for the children screaming to be heard give them a voice.
www,childrenscreamingtobeheard.com
The silent witnesses here lies the truth
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Accidents don’t just happen! They are a culmination of a series of events that lead to a disastrous end. At any one time events could be changed in the lead up to the accident. The serious cases reviews are supposed to identify critical points where a situation starts to get out of control and then act to steer it back, thus averting any crisis. The trouble is we hear time and time again that this doesn’t happen because social workers and other professionals fail to identify those critical points.
Having sat in on Clinical Governance Meetings I was shocked at the stereo typical answers to the questions relating to how to identify victims of child abuse from very senior figures in an NHS hospital. There were no voices of dissention of a typical image of child abuse, spread by the kind of adverts put out by the NSPCC to pull on the heartstrings to elicit money. I could see a hundred different reasons for what was being presented as an abused child. It’s not always the dirty poorly dressed kid but the clean kid with nice clothes and her hair neatly tied in ribbons. That image is still not recognised as an abused child. Can you identify an accident waiting to happen?
I’m not sure that you can teach people to do what others instinctively do. To give a gardening analogy to child protection, there are those people like my mum who are great gardeners, who have never bought a gardening book in their lives and have a spectacular garden and then there are those like me who have shed loads of gardening books and access to all the internet gardening info and spend a fortune on plants but end up with a mediocre garden that prompts my other half to question why I buy plants at all just to let them die!! The plants that thrive are there without any input from me, I’m sure they were seeds dropped by the birds in their natural habitat!
Intervention by authority figures might be the catalyst that throws one over the edge! Maybe a different more thoughtful approach is required not the social worker sledgehammer tactics!
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Should you have the time to listen to the information in the link then you will know the truth and the powers of the SO CALLED Psychiatrist who mostly are the SO CALLED court experts after hearing the truth from the link is it any wonder that thousands of children are sent to their deaths which state “In a child.s best interest” this is amazing information and the powers these so called experts have and as time goes by it will be a mental illness just to go to the toilet.
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Link?
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