Innovation in protecting vulnerable children

Posted by Peter Gilroy, Chief Executive, Kent County Council on April 21st, 2010


I have just completed a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of child protection arrangements in Kent on behalf of the County Council. I have couched my recommendations in the context of everything that has flowed from the DCSF since the case of Baby Peter hit the headlines in 2008.

Good policy and best practice do not come on the back of reacting to the latest tragedy, so I have steered my recommendations away from so-called “improvements” to regulation, targets or performance management (the NSDU seems to have that well covered!). Over-regulation also diminishes personal responsibility and suggests – misleadingly – that “the state” can and should be responsible for everything.

Instead, I focus on what we can do to improve and sustain front-line practitioners and their practice standards. ICS has shown us how NOT to use technology to best advantage – I’m suggesting that harnessing technology to training developments is potentially more fruitful.

It’s a common-place to say that practitioners in this work (and of course, I would include police officers and health visitors) have to go into some pretty dark places of the human condition. There is much very good research evidence on which practitioners can call to help in skilful assessment – but the moment you are behind the front door, you can be dealing with chaos dysfunction and, more than occasionally, aggression, threat and deceit.

What I’m suggesting is more than just role-playing, helpful though that can be. Kit out a “training house” with high-quality audio-visual equipment, with well-researched scripts and with ‘proper’ actors and we can create any number of life-like scenarios in which practitioners can be exposed to difficult situations, coached and supervised through them ‘live’, to become more adept and more confident at handling and processing the bombardment of different, sometimes conflicting, “messages” we have all encountered out at one time or another, almost to point of feeling overwhelmed.

People will be helped in a relatively safe environment to develop better assessment skills and personal strategies, to better assess risk dynamically. We can look to academic colleagues to help us with this (in Kent, we already know this is the case) and other agencies and professions have things they can offer – and learn – as well (this is the case with Kent Police).

Given the growing burden of regulation and prescription, some creativity in learning how best to do this most difficult of jobs, is not asking for too much, is it?


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