Reviews ‘must be shared with staff’

REPORTS such as the serious case review (SCR) into the death of Hamzah Khan “will not be worth the paper they are written on” unless their lessons are passed onto staff, a body representing social workers has warned.

The review published yesterday by Bradford’s Safeguarding Children Board, the body set up to protect vulnerable youngsters, is the latest to attempt to analyse the death of a child due to neglect or cruelty.

But the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) says many are not being shared with all child protection social workers, meaning they have no opportunity to use the findings to improve their practice.

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Chief executive Bridget Robb said: “There is often confusion and lack of agreement on the purpose and format of serious case reviews. This has to be resolved before more time and effort is put into the creation of documents that may ultimately be meaningless.

“Equally, unless the recommendations made in all serious case reviews are acted upon, they will not be worth the paper they are written on”.

A recent BASW survey revealed that a quarter of its members never get to read SCRs when they are published and two-thirds say they “only sometimes” are able to read the recommendations.

One social worker told the organisation: “I often hear about serious case reviews in the press before I am informed by my local authority”.

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Another said: “Staff have so little time to read a serious case review given all the competing priorities and information being sent”.

Ms Robb said serious case reviews should contain general recommendations for all workers involved in children’s services, rather than for individual agencies.

Last year, Education Secretary Michael Gove rejected the serious case review into the notorious Edlington attack in 2009, in which two young boys were sadistically tortured in Doncaster by two brothers with a history of family violence.

The report revealed an astonishing catalogue of violent assaults, arson, alcoholism, shootings, and even attempted murder by primary school boys, but Mr Gove ordered a new inquiry into the case to be overseen by Lord Carlile.

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In a letter to MPs he said: “The redacted serious case review overview report does not meet my expectations. It is an example of how the current model of SCRs is failing. It documents everything that happened but with insufficient analysis of why and what could have been done differently.”