Toynbee Tosh

I came across this opinion piece by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian the other day and came quickly to view that the 'Tory vandalism' claim is a load of old tosh - because these terrible child abuse cases have occurred time and again over the years.

Labour Governments have been running the country at some times as have Tory ones - and now we have a Coalition Government - and local councils of all political stripes have been in the firing line when things go wrong - as continues to happen with depressing regularity.
  
I'm not convinced that Polly's much heralded ContactPoint would have made much of a difference to Baby P or Hamza Khan - because in both cases these children were on on the radar of health and social services - yet at key moments professionals within the system still failed to take decisive action.

I remember being interviewed by Polly Toynbee many years ago in London - outside Central Middlesex Hospital, if I remember correctly, during some NHS pay dispute - she struck me at the time as a bright and intelligent person - but now I find her opinion columns unconvincing, as if she is little more than a cheerleader for the Labour Party.  

Which could be interesting though because I read somewhere recently that Polly was a big fan of Tony Blair for a while, until she stabbed him in the back (metaphorically speaking of course) - then 'La Toynbee' became a great admirer of Gordon Brown, apparently, until she realised that Gordon was a disaster as Labour leader and a terrible Prime Minister.

So, Ed Miliband - don't say you haven't been warned.     

It is the Baby Ps and Hamzah Khans who pay for this Tory vandalism

Michael Gove's dismantling of successful schemes like ContactPoint has left abuse victims even more vulnerable



By Polly Toynbee


Sure Start centres have lost funding, while Every Child Matters and ContactPoint have been abolished. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian


As Baby P's mother is let out of prison, yet another horror emerges. An 18-year-old mother in London's East End is charged with the death of her four-month-old baby and wilfully neglecting her three other children. You know what comes next – a long inquiry costing a fortune reaching the usual conclusions – professionals never talked to each other, questions weren't asked, chances were missed and no one heard the children. Under any government and any system, some children will be abused, but this government wilfully dismantled Every Child Matters – an approach with the best chance so far of protecting and caring for children.

The first inquiry I covered was the 1973 death in Whitehawk, Brighton, of seven-year-old Maria Colwell: starved and battered by her stepfather, pushed by her mother in an old coal pram to the hospital, where she died. "Never again," said the report, but on goes the list of children famous for terrible reasons: Jasmine Beckford, Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly and, last week, Hamzah Khan. Appalling details emerge from each inquiry, encouraging more public reporting, though Action for Children says a third of those worried about a child still don't report it. Even so, child abuse deaths have fallen by 30% in 30 years.

Short of putting a CCTV camera in every home, the state can never protect every child – but government action is key. The 33% cuts to local government are taking their toll on social services, with far worse to come. The British Association of Social Work finds most social workers have unmanageable caseloads and inadequate supervision, and work at high risk with posts increasingly left vacant. Half say they are afraid to speak out about dangerous practices.

Michael Gove's scorched earth arrival at his department was signalled by his scratching out of "children and families" from the nameplate, leaving plain "education". He ordered the eradication of any mention of Every Child Matters, which was a whole new approach initiated by Margaret Hodge as children's minister. That programme broke down the silos locally, obliging all the professions to work together, as strongly recommended by both the Climbié and Soham reports. Every inquiry finds doctors, social workers, teachers and police failing to speak or share information, passing the buck and leaving the child unheard. Locally, Every Child Matters obliged all professions to work under a single umbrella with joint responsibility. But that statutory requirement to co-operate is abolished, though some wiser councils stick with it. Free schools and academies have spun off into total isolation, with no need to work with anyone. Sure Start children's centres were a hub for young families, just starting to yield results, but more than 500 are shut, the rest mostly hollowed out.

ContactPoint has been expunged from memory. It was a register for all the nation's children, so none could disappear across local authority boundaries. Any professional with a concern put a flag on the register against the children's name – though no confidential information. Any other senior teacher, social worker, doctor or police officer worried about that child, seeing a flag, would make contact to find the details and confer. Hamzah Khan fell off everyone's radar, but ContactPoint would have raised the alarm that he was never seen by a GP or registered at school.

The children's commissioner for England, Maggie Atkinson, was director of children's services in Gateshead, where she ran a first ContactPoint pilot. She says: "It changed the way people thought, as we saw when a child was flagged. Shared training and information broke down old barriers as professionals got to know each other locally as never before." She recalls a family of abusers that kept moving children to avoid the authorities: "ContactPoint found them." That 2006 pilot was rolled out later: such systems take years to bring in, but only a day for a new minister to destroy.

ContactPoint was abolished in 2010 in the coalition agreement "to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion". Despite strict limits on who had access to the register, with no private reports posted on it and parents free to gain access to their child's entry, a hue and cry against ContactPoint was mounted by the Tory press. A register to protect children fell victim to an ideological privacy paranoia, now strangely absent from those same papers over the wholesale surveillance by GCHQ and NSA of everyone's emails and phone calls.

The one refreshing moment in David Cameron's conference speech last week was a surprising riff: "Social work is a noble and vital calling … Let us in this hall hear it for Britain's social workers who are doing such an important job." His party looked a bit bewildered, but dutifully applauded a group so often reviled as if they were the murderers of any dead child on their patch. Appointing the first chief social worker for children is a good move. So is Cameron's Frontline scheme to recruit a few top graduates to social work before they enter other professions, following TeachFirst. Raising the profile of social work, this will also give people who later become financiers or executives an unforgettable taste of the harder world beneath their feet.

But the deliberate destruction of Every Child Matters and ContactPoint was an act of ideological vandalism. Gove's approach to education refuses to see how a child's educational success depends almost entirely on good enough home circumstances.

Neither the ContactPoint register nor the Every Child Matters collaboration could protect every child from every abusive family. Children are saved by kind humans with the time, expertise and empathy to intervene – but systems matter too. Every Child Matters and ContactPoint were just bedding down, created at the express instruction of the Climbié and Soham inquiries. Let's have no more "never again" inquiries if the government just ignores their findings.

Meanwhile, the new shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, has a clean sheet of paper to rethink how to educate and nurture every child. This week's shocking OECD report on Britain's low basic skills shows that a child's social circumstances usually trump time spent in school. Most unequal nations do the worst, with the UK and US at the bottom. Children stunted by poverty and neglect fail to learn, so Labour should set out to wrap care around education with schools as the heart and hub of communities and a child's whole life.