Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey Council Leader resigns
Tags for Forum Posts: Ally Pally, george meehan, haringey chief executive, liz santry
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Bob, I don't think we have much choice when it comes to injecting money into the service. This reminds me of the crisis in teaching 10 years ago. Schools were failing all over the place, staffed by poorly prepared supply teachers, there was a lack of leadership and no quality new blood coming into the profession. Going into teaching was seen as a poor choice which reflected an inability to do anything else. Frankly some schools were dangerous and frightening places to be.
This government injected enormous sums into various schemes which rewarded existing competent professionals better, attracted graduates and competent older people who wanted a change of direction through golden handshakes, fast tracking and higher grants to train. It trained and paid leaders a better wage but held them much more accountable for the perfomance of the school. Ad campaigns showed the value of work in schools and with young people. Even supply staff were now given ongoing training and management. It was not without its critics and some were positively vitriolic but on the whole, the whole campaign succeeded in attracting better people who committed themselves to teaching and who got satisfaction from their job.
The social services have long been the Cinderella profession. Time for the fairy godmother to wave her magic wand and spend some cash on it. Asit was in teaching, there are many professionals who work hard, do well and are little rewarded for it in social work. There are many pockets of good practice and many children whose lives are improved by their intervention. Time to come up with something along the lines of the catchphrase, 'no one forgets a good teacher'.
The catch is that there must be greater accountability and scrutiny, more openess and a willingness to deal with incompetence head on. After all I have known top people in business lose their job over mistakes much less serious than the death of a child, and they were told to clear their desks the same day and not paid a penny from that moment on.
Poor performance must not be hidden by manipulating figures and those who are not able to do the job moved on quickly. The public sector should not be above scrutiny and those who draw a salary to manage must do so effectively or be moved on. It is right that those at the top are held responsible and let us now hope that those who replace them can put Haringey Childrens services back on their feet. Now is the time to lend our support to getting things changed whatever it takes, so long as things are conducted out on the open and honestly.
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Permalink Reply by RuthE on
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totally agree Liz, the government needs to inject an emormous amount of money into social services to attract and keep quality social workers. I was listening to the interview today with the social worker the so called whistle blower who allerted the council of the problems in Haringey six months before Baby P was killed, she said the council have been relying on inexperienced agency workers and people from abroad because they cannot keep their staff. The drive by the government to attract people to the teaching profession, older experienced people wanting to change careers, people with life experience not 21 year olds straight out of university, is what we need for social services.
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Well Ruth, I do agree that committed older people would be welcome but I would not go so far as to suggest that the age of someone is the problem. As a teacher mentor, I came across gifted young graduates who were naturals and much better than I was at their age (I was a mere 25 myself when I entered the lions den after all) and older people who were not cut out for the profession, despite their best efforts. Indeed one of the best and most intuitive social workers I ever worked with was a 22 year old who was marvellous with the neglected teens she was assigned to. I think its more about quality and committment.
What the front liners seemed to lack was the support and advice of managers. If you feel unable to cope with a case, you should be able to take it to someone and get quality and speedy help with it. It appears that this was what was really missing from the equation.
Being left to get on with it, trying to cope alone for fear that admitting you aren't is seen as weakness, not able to approach managers busy with their paper work, high turnover which means you are starting back from zero every few months, papering over the cracks with flipcharts and training days, this sounds all too familiar to me from teaching back in the day. That's why the clear out of dead wood has to start at the top. If you are not supporting and helping your front line staff you're not fulfilling your job description and you need to start clearing your desk 'cos you ain't helping anyone by clinging on.
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For those interested in how we move forward from this, here's a
profile of John Coughlin, the new Head of Childrens services, from the Guardian.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Rahman, Birdy, Bob, Liz - well and sanely said.
I suppose every profession and organisation has its own culture ("the way we do things here") which provides its members, especially its most junior members, with both their greatest day-to-day support and their greatest dangers. Like Liz I'm sure, I saw school managements (through the late '80s, '90s and well into the new millennium) managing to skate around the cajoling advice of local inspectorates, then pay lip-service for a few months every third year to the quite searching and helpful reports on 'significant weaknesses' from three OfSTED inspections, finally only waking to reality when their schools were placed in 'special measures' and their Heads and deputy heads began to roll. Only thing is, NOBODY DIED, GCSE'A-C'%s rose steadily - but the weakest and most vulnerable went to the wall. (And a few old teachers went slowly mad, of course!)
In this case, too, OfSTED too seems to have been taken in by the Haringey Children's Services culture, at least in last year's report. Over to new broom John Coughlin - yet for all his proven competence he's probably not going to guarantee that nobody will murder a child during under his directorate.
Just one thing. Political accountability is a sine qua non of course and, as Liz suggests, better men have died ere now and worms have eaten them. Yet I felt more than a twinge at watching George Meehan's resignation. Not just for old times' sake or "because he's one of us"(fellow Paddy). I found the media's (including elements of this 'medium') knee-jerk "He was Leader when Victoria Climbie died" mantra too often carried a hint of 'serial homicide' by association, rather than the more reasonable suggestion that the coincidence might have sharpened his antennae for future tragedies. No, George had two good(ish) stretches of leadership because, as Churchill said when appointing William Temple to Canterbury, he was "the one half-crown article in a sixpenny bazaar." None of us would claim that George was the 'guinea stamp'* outright, but would anyone prefer to have his interregnum successor/predecessor, Charles Adje, in his place?
* For those born post1971, I shall provide a ready-rockoner currency converter in my next. :)
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Just one thought, OAE. Rather than OFSTED being 'taken in', isn't there a wider problem? By which I mean the entire culture of box-ticking and targets?
Yes, of course there must be measures which tell you how you're doing; and which lead to the key aim of improvement - 'How can we do this better?'. But arbitrary targets from outside skew the work done by organisations - public or private. People turn their effort and ingenuity into meeting the targets - ticking the bureaucratic boxes and reporting the 'correct' data.
Albert Einstein had a sign hanging in his office. "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
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Alan, you're right of course, and so too was Einstein's sign. I was no stranger to that same skewing of our work to meet outsiders' targets. I suppose it's only when an organisation is confident enough to evaluate itself stringently as part of what it does that it can say to hell with box-ticking but still benefit from outside advice, guidance etc.
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Permalink Reply by phippsofacto on
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"The Haringey 6" - catchy title that. Surely suspending people without pay is to presume them guilty before knowing the facts. Let's remember that anyone of those 6 people may not have done anything wrong. The media keeps referring to social workers letting the child down, when actually the allocated social worker tried to have him taken into care. It was the managers that blocked it.
From this, and the Victoria Climbie case, the lack of support to overworked people dealing with complex cases is highlighted. I take my hat off to them.
I think it's high time that we appreciate that things are being dealt with and let the new people get on with the job. They are the ones with the expertise and I'm sure they will be monitored at all points in the future.
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but thats what we thought 8 years ago, that 'they will be monitored at all points in the future' and it turns out that this incident is not a one off, a fluke - Haringey have been running a less than adequate social services ever since.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Agree. We ought to be able to let the council get on with it and trust and expect that "things are being dealt with". But this council has proved over and again that in certain fields, it simply cannot be trusted.
While the new manager does appear to have lots of expertise the same cannot be said for the individual he is replacing. This area is too important just to ignore, and hope and trust that everything will work out right. We've been here before. For too long the Children's Service has been the Cinderella department at Haringey, possibly starved of finance in the past, with little status and little priority or political will behind it. Haringey ought to be an exemplar; 'Better Haringey' the Three Star Beacon Council is looking hollow at present.
The public, the media, whistle-blowers and external agencies must all help to monitor this area in the future. The public has been badly let down. I posted the important Ofsted report here for those who want to read all the findings.
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I understand what you mean Clive, but I am worried that the public and the media are not the right people to be monitoring this. They don't have any access to information and therefore act on heresay and conjecture, which ends up in finger pointing and constantly looking backwards.
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