Katharine Quarmby
no longer needed, we hope
Sharon Shoesmith, the council official, has finally gone. It is a pity that she had to be pushed. But its good news that Haringey council leader George Meehan, and the cabinet member for children and young people Liz Santry, actually fell on their own swords. And four more social workers have been suspended pending a review.
This is good news. And there is another chink of light, in this awful story. John Coughlan, who has taken over running the council’s children’s services, is a good man – one of the best in such posts that I have interviewed. He has plenty of impressive experience, including being the Joint President of the Association of Director’s of Children’s Services. He understands, at the visceral, getting hands dirty level, the importance of getting all the different parts working together. The children of Haringey will be better protected because of his appointment. But the bad news continues to flow through, as well.
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Katharine Quarmby
The Sun gets it right
The comments posted by many of those who responded to my blog yesterday were heartfelt and thought-provoking – demonstrating the wide-spread dismay caused by the torture and death of Baby P. Paul, however, disagreed with my argument that Haringey Council and other agencies involved in child protection should be held responsible at this early stage, even before Lord Laming’s inquiry has reported.
This view has got some traction in the media, part of a broader tendency on the progressive side of the fence to view media storms with suspicion. Peter Wilby, for instance, is a normally shrewd observer of the worst excesses of Daily Mail journalism. In his latest guardian piece Wilby tries for balance, placing at least some of the blame for the current controversy with: “the tendency of rightwing newspapers to assume social work and socialism (along with sociology) are the same sort of thing, and that the profession’s very existence contributes to “the dependency culture”.
I understand this point of view, and those of Paul in the comments to my previous post, and those of others like them want to let the review take its course. But I disagree with them, profoundly, at least in part because I, too, was once put in the care of social services….
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