Baby Peter and ICT in Children’s Services

Sue WhiteProfessor of Social WorkUniversity of Lancaster

Real Problems: Poisonous Prescriptions?

Magic?

The transporting of the log is not an easy task… the natives resort to a magical rite which makes the canoe lighter. A piece of dry banana is put on top of the log. The owner or builder beats the log with a bunch of dry lalang grass and utters the following spell: “Come down defilement by contact with excrement! Come down, rot! Come down fungus…” and so on, invoking a number of deteriorations to leave the log. In other words, the heaviness and slowness due to all these magical causes are thrown out of the log (Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1932, p. 129)

Magical Thinking?

‘The index will enable practitioners delivering services to children to identify and contact one another easily and quickly, so they can share relevant information about children who need services or about whose welfare they are concerned’ (ECM Fact Sheet December 2005).

Magical Thinking?

The Integrated Children’s System will provide an assessment, planning, intervention and reviewing model for all children in need under the Children Act 1989... bringing about optimal outcomes for children (Department of Health, 2000).

The Horrible Truth?

The result is a system that is bureaucratically perfect - literally, no one is to blame - and humanly a nightmare…. As the LSE's Eileen Munro noted: 'Haringey had a beautiful paper trail of how they failed to protect this baby…The ICS fails on all counts. So, yes, heads should probably roll over the awful death of Baby P. It's just that they are not the ones most people think should roll. (Simon Caulkin, The Observer, Blame bureaucrats and systems for Baby P's fate, 23/11/08)

Human Factors

Technology does not in itself necessarily have the capacity to protect more children, because:

1. Human mediation of technology – people are not moral dopes, and moral or personal imperatives are sometimes at variance with bureaucratic versions of ‘good practice’

2. Professional cultures and working practices are not easily eroded by the demands of the technology – ‘the day job’ still needs to be done

3. The ‘technical mediation’ of human agency by the technologies themselves, which often act in unintended ways, like simply failing to work, or ‘locking out’ users, or recording non-existent e-children.

Human mediation of technology?

Percentage Breakdown of Scores for Q1

0.3%

0.5%

0.8%

4.6%

18.9%

73.5%

1.4%

0

1

2

3

4

5

no score given

Call for Evidence – Responses to Themes

92% Agree

Theme 1 “We have been told that social workers do not have enough time to devote directly to the people they want to help. They are overstretched by staff shortages and tied up in bureaucracy.”

1. The Task Force Process2. What We’ve Been Hearing

10/12

UNISON wishes to draw attention to the seriousness of the problems being experienced by social work staff with the Integrated Children’s System. The problems appear to be fundamental, widespread and consistent enough to call into question whether the ICS is fit for purpose…. we have reports of a number of industrial disputes or collective grievances brewing … and in many more cases staff are voting with their feet and not using the system when they can get away with it (Unison 2008, pp. 8-9).

What is the ICS?

• ICS is not a standard software package

• It is a standard specification, comprising a set of data requirements, a “process model” and a reference set of a data collection forms, known as ‘exemplars’.

• Against this specification, suppliers are able to develop ‘compliant’ software implementations

Dystopiary?

WORKFLOW, SCREENS AND TIME SCALES

Team leader: There are 50 contacts in your inbox . . . you are under pressure because you have to clear them by the end of the day . . . and the question of whether you are more likely to close them in these circumstances? Well yeah . . . so, really we are looking to close cases not open them . . . that’s why we work to the highest thresholds.

Timescales? Well, I don't know where the timescales have come from. I think they've just been plucked out of - who says 5 weeks for a core assessment? And our children with disabilities, especially when they were complex, in and out of hospital … so often core assessments go out of date, you know

So there is a big difference, it is not that the electronic system is bad, it is the way they have designed the forms forcing you to repeat yourself over and over again (Social Worker)

The worst is, parents can’t understand them (child protection plans). They are broken into domains and dimensions … Repetitive, loads of boxes. I have to apologise to parents. We do our own old fashioned child protection agreement in Word and give them that to sign, so they can see what we expect them to do (Team Manager)

It’s much worse since ICS. Like when you’ve got a child in need and you need a conference, you can’t get to the conference without going through strategy discussion and ‘outcome of section 47’ forms which populate from the strategy discussion forms. You used to just be able to write like half a side … but now you’ve got these terrible forms. You have to do one on each child, so if there are 5 children that’s 10 forms and they are nothing to do with the work… they are just pointless and get in the way (Team manager).

E-cloning!

Social worker:I have certainly heard people say ‘ok give me the youngest child’s and the oldest child’s and I will just read them. But because largely the issues are going to be the same and if there is anything for the individual child on the other children in that instant then you know tell me about it but otherwise I am only going to read two of the reports’. And again that is quite disheartening because again I’m compelled to write 7 conference reports for quality assurance […] But you just think well why are we compelled to write this way why can’t we write one report for the family and then just have individual sections for the children you know. I mean everybody tears their hair out with it I think.

Workarounds…

Option 1a)

LAMPOON!

Option 1b)

LEAVE!

Lampooning…

Social Worker: I have a dreadful case where there were 6 children and 5 fathers and I couldn’t work out who was who, so I had to go to mum and pretend that I was really stupid... And I said I really don’t understand it who is this?, who is that?... And she wasn’t living with any of the fathers but the computer had her down as living with one.. so there was quite a few changes with people in the wrong addresses, like I say, a 7 and 5 year old that the computer said were living on their own!

IA ‘front and backing’

Ubiquitous in all sites – generated by performance demands.

Sections seen as irrelevant – can’t ‘tell the story’ – often very little history, or information - done on basis of very brief visit.

System lags behind the work so ‘just get it done’.

HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?

DESIGN DOGMA AND THE ICS: A TALE OF ESCALATING

COMMITMENT

• Origins can be traced back to the early 1990s - ‘Looking after Children’ (LAC) project

• Well intentioned and designed to ensure local authorities fulfilled their responsibilities as ‘corporate parents’

BUT - was it properly designed?

The format does not encourage good communication between the worker and the child because they are structured in such a directive and interrogative way... The crude and alienating numbering and lettering system lends itself primarily to computer input and as such encourages the worker to simply become a collector of data. This is not surprising since they evolved originally as research instruments for academic researchers as opposed to tools for social work (Calder, 2004, p. 228).

First mention of ICS…

The Assessment Framework is being integrated with the Looking After Children materials to produce an Integrated Children’s System. This will provide an assessment planning intervention and reviewing model for all children in need. The evidence-based knowledge that has informed the development of the Framework has been drawn from a wide range of research studies about the needs of children and from the accumulated experience of policy and practice (DH 2000)

The Core Mantra of the Devotees

The Integrated Children’s System (ICS) has been developed in response to findings from inspections, research and inquiries which found that within children's social services there were failures to record, retrieve and understand the significance of information about children. These findings suggested the need for a more systematic approach to work with children in need. The ICS provides a method of practice and a business process which aims to support practitioners and managers in undertaking their key tasks of assessment, planning, intervention and review (DCSF, 2008, p. 1).

Failure to Listen!

There are many substantial problems associated with the originating LAC and AF systems that do not appear to have been satisfactorily resolved while constructing the ICS. Given that the systems have been issued by the Department of Health and they are supported by senior civil servants and strategically placed senior managers in social services departments and authoritative academics, the opportunity for critical discussion and analysis has been limited (Calder 2004, p. 238)

Input from practitioners limited and from service users non-existent

The main message was that the forms were too complicated. We spend a lot of time making the forms more user friendly. At that stage it wasn’t clear that there was to be no negotiation, that the forms couldn’t be changed. This caused a lot of disappointment- staff thought they were shaping things. Every time there’s a DCSF forum, we keep telling them that the forms aren’t user friendly. If they said, well let’s set up a task group to look at that, then at least we’d feel listened too. But they don’t – they just say it can’t be changed… (Local Authority ICS project Manager)

And the band played on…

Criticism written off as teething problems – carry on regardless!

although the change from hand-written to electronic recording will increase the time spent using IT, the findings suggest that practitioners’ resentment to (sic) the change owes much to unresolved problems with IT systems and the unfamiliarity with new systems” (Cleaver et al., 2007, p. 177)

Ignoring Commissioned Research!

well intentioned national IT projects such as the Integrated Children's System have often been poorly planned and actually create more difficulties for social workers than they solve, as well as diverting attention away from professional approaches to meeting the needs of children and families. We agree. ICS is promising and well-intentioned but has not shown it is fit for purpose. Its problems must be addressed (Bell et al, 2008)

The Brave Few! Kensington and Chelsea

[Kensington and Chelsea’s] approach differed from the Government’s specification in the Council’s emphasis on the family unit and an avoidance of a simple tick box approach to assessment. These differences in the interpretation of the ICS specification were communicated to the DfES at the time work was started on the information system … Throughout this time the Council has continued to engage with the DCSF, inviting government officials to see demonstrations [of the system]…. contributing to reviews of the national ICS project and feeding back comments. However over the last 2 years, the DCSF’s position has appeared to change. Instead of promoting the aims of the ICS, the government has increasingly emphasised the need … to meet detailed and extensive requirements in order to receive grant funding (2008)

The system has been extremely well received by practitioners and many new social work recruits from other London boroughs have commented favourable on KCics in comparison with those systems used elsewhere … [which are] difficult to use, time consuming and overly prescriptive.

Getting IT wrong?

• Good socio-technical systems design requires designers to get close to the ‘end users’

• It also requires modification in response to trying it out

• Literature on reading electronic documents ignored, or not known?

• Escalation of commitment!!

Ripe Time for Some Proper Design!

We still have a long way to go before we can come close to designing e-texts that compare favourably with paper for most routine uses. The process will be accelerated by good design, but conversely, it will be hampered by weak design… The human is the key; only by relating technologies to the needs and capabilities of the user can worthwhile systems be developed. (Dillon, 2004, p. 185).

Reading times for electronic documents 30% longer, even for simple documents – Harzell, 2002

Many IT-enabled change projects fail, despite how much is known about ensuring success… failure to employ best practices in IT-enabled change stems from mistaken belief about the causes of change - belief in IT as a magic bullet… IT is not a magic bullet. Change in human behavior cannot take place at a distance but requires direct personal contact between change agents and targets…. Successful change takes good ideas, skill, and plain hard work — but it does not need magic (Markus and Benjamin 1997 pp. 66-67).