Well, They've At Least Learnt Not To Use The Phrase 'Learning Lessons'...

Paul Dyson, independent chair of Hull's safeguarding children board, said: "The board takes extremely seriously cases which result in injuries of this kind to children. The board is aware of this case and, now that the criminal case is concluding, will consider whether any further learning is required."

Because that's always a dead giveaway...

As is the fact that - despite concerns - there was no official record:

Jon Plant, city safeguarding children manager, said: "The child was not previously on an 'at risk' register or child protection plan with Hull children's services.

"Following the incident, immediate steps were taken by professionals to remove the child and ensure their long-term wellbeing and to ensure that those responsible for causing the injuries were brought to justice."

Yes, you were very prompt after the baby was scalded with the bathwater. Pity you didn't do something before...

Health visitors and social services are understood to have had concerns about the baby in the months before it happened and had failed to gain access to see her on 12 separate occasions.

And yet, the squalor in which an inadequate young couple were bringing up a child provoked no urgency:

The Mail can reveal the authorities failed to gain access to the Bransholme house the couple were living in, despite warning signs such as 20 bags of rubbish and hundreds of soiled nappies piled high outside.

If that's 'taking cases extremely seriously', one can only wonder how they deal with the rest...

You'd Need An Electron Microscope To See My Tiny Violin This Time...

The social services chief sacked over the Baby P scandal has spoken of how her life has been unable to 'move on' since she lost her job four years ago.

She has, it seems, given an interview to - what else? - Public Servant magazine in which she seeks to portray herself as hard done by.

Isn't there a clinical term for such detachment from reality?

People used to know ask me what I'm doing now, and they're shocked when I say "nothing",' she says in the January edition of the magazine. 'They can't quite grasp that my life hasn't moved on at all in the last four years; that I can't find any work and I'm living on benefits.

'I used to have a £130,000-a-year job running my own department and was a national reference point for Ofsted for special educational needs, but no organisation will take the risk of employing me because of who I am.'

Well, actually, it's probably because you didn't run your department, you were exposed as less a 'national reference point' than an example of how not to do things, and you've become a liability and they don't want to have to spend time fighting lengthy court cases which you are still somehow fighting despite 'being on benefits'...

Shoesmith is battling for £1 million compensation after the Supreme Court refused in August 2011 to allow an appeal against a ruling that the former Haringey children’s services chief was unfairly dismissed by the then Children’s Secretary, Labour’s Ed Balls.

Who's financing this? Is it legal aid? It better damned well not be!

In the interview, Shoesmith says children are now more at risk than before the Baby P case because of the damage done to the social work profession and how social workers are now people to hide from rather than work with.

Hang on...didn't the Baby Peter murder happen because the injuries (and the men Connolly was shacked up with) were hidden from incompetent social workers under your command? Weren't they just pretending to 'work with your social workers'? Who couldn't tell the difference?

So nothing's really changed at all, has it?

Call A Whole Fleet Of Whaaaaambulances….

‘Frank’ an anonymous social worker, gets a column in ‘CiF’ to bleat about his job and how the politicians are ruining it:

In my nearly 30 years of practice as a social worker, I can say that the situation on the ground for social workers is worse than it has ever been.

Oh, here we go, hankies at the ready…

Social workers dedicate their lives to preventing the abuse of children, and sometimes, sadly, this is not possible. Child protection is an extremely complicated process – not only does it require very finely tuned and skilled decisions to be made, they have to be made within a detailed legislative framework. Contrary to the portrayal of social work in EastEnders, social workers do not simply pop by and check that everything is all right within a household, and whisk a child away at the drop of a hat if it isn't.

And some would say that that’s part of the problem. If there’s a more dysfunctional family than the one prortayed in ‘Eastenders’ I’d hate to see it. The poor (fictional) sprog would stand a better chance if it were raised by wolves…

Social workers spend the majority of their time navigating laborious and unwieldy data-collection systems… Most people would be astonished to see the amount of paperwork and form-filling we do.

Not really, no. They passed ‘astonishment’ long ago when looking at the police service’s paperwork burden.

And what caused both of these? Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head, inadvertently:

Social work often feels like a virtual computer game where you have to complete stage 1 to move to stage 2. You are no longer able to use your own professional judgment.

That’s because so many of you have been found to have none!

You've ignored obvious cases of cruelty, either because you gave too much credence to ‘cultural issues’ or because you were incompetent or lazy. You've persecuted the innocent while ignoring the evil. The ‘unnecessary form filling’ that you complain about is part of your job because you are granted enormous power, and you must be accountable for its use.

Just like the police.

What’s the alternative?

The police probably hold more information pertinent to child protection than any other agency as they attend more out-of-hours incidents concerning a family, but their information sharing can be patchy. Police can be reluctant to share information concerning children for a number of reasons: criminal proceedings may be ongoing, they may have "soft" evidence garnered from intelligence rather than hard facts, there may be a surveillance operation under way.

And note, this is all one way. Do YOU share information with the police?

Or do you hide it from them, as you do when you are seeking to foster damaged children?

Cases such as Rochdale show what can happen when police and social services do not properly share information about children.

No, cases such as Rochdale show what happens when everyone’s too deathly afraid of ‘cultural issues’ and stirring up the Muslim 'community' to intervene. It has nothing to do with information sharing at all.

While I welcome attention being focused on tackling problems within our child protection system, the impetus for change will lead to little positive improvement if social workers who act day to day to protect children and help improve their lives are not listened to.

But we've listened to you. You've whined that you think it’s ‘unfair’ that you should be held accountable when you foul up. You've shown little shame when caught bang to rights, simply returning again and again to argue that, despite a child dying, you’re the ‘victim’ here.

We've listened. We just reject what you have to say.

How The State Tricks You…

Meg Henderson on the changing face of adoption:

In 2003, the Guardian published an account of my family's experiences of the adoption system. We had fostered Louise when she was two and a half, and adopted her five years later, still optimistic – despite the hell we had lived through already – that all would end up happily. In the early years, she smeared herself with excreta, picked wounds in herself until she bled, attacked anything that moved, and screamed day and night. We told social services that we would not knowingly take a child with learning disabilities because we didn't think we could cope, but we were told Louise was suffering from emotional deprivation, and all she needed was tender, loving care.

You see, social services deliberately - and with malice aforethought - lied to her.

Back then we were naive and didn't understand the rules. For instance, if we wouldn't "knowingly" take a child with learning disabilities, they just wouldn't tell us.

Yes, it’s still lying if you do it by omission.

What they also failed to pass on was that she had brain damage from having been battered and had a family history of mental illness.

Quite a different kettle of fish, then, from a child with ‘emotional deprivation’?

The people at social services laughed when we wondered if Louise might have learning disabilities and by the time this became too apparent to deny, Louise was our child. That is what social services count on: if the child can be kept with you long enough, you will not want to give her/him up.

Just read that again. Blood chilling in it’s calculatedness, isn’t it?

I wrote the 2003 article in response to a surge of adverts featuring celebrities encouraging people to adopt smiling, but needy, children. Tony Blair was in office, feverishly burnishing his public image by volunteering as patron saint and saviour of little children.

And what’s changed? Well, as you might expect, just the faces…

What has changed since 2003? Well, David Cameron has assumed the mantle of patron saint and saviour of little children, abetted by Michael Gove, who was himself adopted as a baby. What they are ignoring is that adoption has changed from what they think it ever was.

Given the way our society has changed (in many ways, not for the better) it’d be amazing if it hadn’t.

For a start, there were never any well brought-up little orphans looking for loving parents. What we had were unmarried mothers who couldn't afford to raise children alone – though many did – and couldn't take the embarrassment and stigma of bearing an illegitimate child. But times have changed. Unmarried mothers are now single parents who have financial support from the state and there is no stigma these days – the "illegitimate" label that once marked children from cradle to grave has gone, and rightly so. What this means is that mothers are far more likely to keep their babies and there are virtually none available for adoption, so couples are encouraged to look at older children instead. And thereby a can of worms opens up.

Because if people can’t be ‘encouraged’ without being flat-out lied to, well, so what? They can hardly go to the Advertising Standards Authority, or the council’s Trading Standards team, can they?

The children available for adoption these days have often been removed from parents who have mental health, drug and alcohol problems. They have most likely been left with those parents until the bitter end because the state believes that children do better with their own parents. By the time these children are removed, they are already damaged by years of neglect and abuse. They are no longer children in need of an ordinary family; in fact often that is the last thing they can cope with, and they are the last thing an ordinary family can cope with.

But, to the adoption agencies, all that matters is getting them off the books. They have targets for that.

And they’ll hit those targets by any means possible…

But one thing that has changed since 2005 is that adopters are increasingly prepared to fight back. Social services are destroying marriages and lives, trying to get problem children off their books. It feels as though they will use any means, and that legal action against the local authorities concerned is the only thing that might stop them.

Except…they have shedloads of taxpayer cash to fight with. And adoptive parents rarely do.