Let's kick a social worker

Not every death is regrettable.

This is not about malice and  unforgiving small enmities.

Some deaths may be a release, some may be planned. Some are a giving up of the military metaphor model of illness.

But when children are concerned, there is nothing to ameliorate the death. There is the sense of lost potential, the vicarious ache of lost hope, the subjunctive sadness of what might have been.

And maybe this is what makes us so thoughtlessly angry with social workers, most recently in Birmingham, where their 'failure' leads to the death of a child.

The difficulty here, though, is that there is a wholly unreasonable expectation that systems and the people who run them can operate without error. When deaths occur unexpectedly in hospitals, doctors often find themselves accused of failure by relatives struggling to accept the unacceptable truth. When we accept medical treatment, part of the deal ought to be made explicit: there are no guarantees, here, but only probabilities.

And so it is with social workers. A child dies, and the reflex reaction is that something went wrong, someone is to blame, someone screwed up, someone was negligent.

It isn't really a very difficult task to recognise that this view is inherently unfair and unreasonable. There will never be a city where children do not die at the hands of parents maddened by incompetence, poverty, ignorance, personality disorders. Social workers, however well they work in the most perfect system, can never eradicate child deaths. No they can't. Not ever.

Social workers are dealing with families which are often dysfunctional, at the edge both collectively and individually. They are dealing with the anguish of poverty, and the failure of society to address or even understand mental illness. Social workers are dealing day-to-day with those who are at risk. At risk of violence, abuse, poverty, starvation, illness, suicide, despair. And the work social workers undertake is about assessing those risks and responding appropriately.

This is support as bomb disposal. One error, one slight misjudgement, and dominoes may start to fall inexorably towards a focused tragedy, a small disaster of devastating force.

We can never know how many deaths social workers prevent. We can never know how many distressed families keep on the rails because of the support they get from social workers. We cannot measure the gratitude of those voiceless children whose lives may be less unhappy because of the work of social services departments.

You'd have to be a Michael Wilshaw to be so bombastically damning of systems which fail to attain 100% levels of effectiveness. Not only is his public naming and shaming of Birmingham completely inappropriate, but it is in itself shamelessly unreasonable, irrational, ill-thought-through.

What a model of education and improvement he has ! Dish out the severest criticism publicly, loudly, indiscriminately, and wait for morale to soar and boost performance.

Let's hear it for risk workers everywhere. They do a phenomenal job.