Just days after the head of Ofsted, Christine Gilbert, promised an overhaul of child protection inspection services in the wake of the death of Baby P, a new study claims that the IT-based procedures used by staff working at the 'front door' of local authority children's services could be putting the very children which they are designed to help at increased risk.
Research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), involved a two year study of front line children's services in five local authorities in England and Wales. It was carried out by The University of Nottingham, Lancaster University, Cardiff University and The University of Huddersfield. The results are due to be published in the British Journal for Social Work early in the New Year.
Researchers say the computer system - the Integrated Children's System (ICS) - set up to standardise procedures and micro-manage decisions has the potential to undermine good social work practice. The need to spend more and more time inputting data into overly complex assessment forms and the pressure to take short-cuts in order to meet inflexible deadlines create, what the researchers call, "latent conditions for error".
The Study claims that changes brought in by the Laming Report in 2003 - following the death of Victoria Climbie - together with on-going resource constraints have served to further burden front-line workers already under heavy pressure in busy offices.
Latent conditions for error, the researchers say, may have limited adverse influence where staffing levels were good. However, in situations of high referral rates, inexperienced staff, turnover or sickness, they will become increasingly dangerous.
David Wastell, Professor of Information Systems at The University of Nottingham said: "ICS is a crude technological attempt to transform social work into a bureaucratic practice to be governed by formally defined procedures, involving sequences of tasks to be accomplished within strict deadlines."
The researchers say that the case of Baby P illustrates the paradoxes of the inspection regime and many of the unintended consequences of audit. The "tactical behaviours" criticised by the Ofsted head are not aberrations of the audit regime but are systemic adaptations directly produced by it.
Social work is quite different from teaching and cannot be observed in the same direct way as classroom performance. The researchers are concerned that Ofsted have only now considered the validity of their inspectorial methods.