Well – DUUR!!

News just in from the FLBA: The Report from Francis Plowden – the Review of Court Fees in Child Care Proceedings – was published yesterday. Francis Plowden recommends (unsurprisingly?) abolition of fees for Local Authorities bringing child care proceedings. The Government has accepted this recommendation, and will implement it in April 2011 alongside the next three-year funding settlement [...]

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Protecting All Children – jus’ like that

Jill Kirby, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies writes a piece in the Opinion section of Wednesday’s Times entitled ‘It’s not hard to spot the children really at risk’. Self evidently it is a little harder than we would like to think or we wouldn’t have had to add Baby P to a long list of other [...]

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Rise in Child Abuse Calls

The NSPCC has seen a dramatic increase in calls about suspected child abuse since Baby P – referrals from the NSPCC to the police or social services are up by a third in two years. I was astonished to read that between April 2008 and March 2009 the NSPCC passed on 11,243 suspected child protection [...]

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O-VER-LOAD! [Dalek voice effect]

The Guardian reports that 7% of CAFCASS Guardian appointments in care cases are unallocated. That is 653 of a total of 9060 cases. The only surprise there is that the figure for unallocated cases is so low. You can’t get a Guardian for love nor money round these here parts, and Judges have all but [...]

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Fear or Favour

Camilla Cavendish writes an excellent article about (amongst other things) the tendency towards back-covering in child protection and the consequent fear of professionals that many good parents now have. She is right – I am anxious each time I take my son to the GP for a routine appointment that whatever minor knock or scrape he may [...]

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Red Light for Children’s Databases

A report published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust this week entitled ‘The Database State – Scrap it Fix it or Keep it?’ has given the ‘red light’ on privacy grounds to several databases used to track children for child protection purposes, namely ContactPoint (details of every child in the country and who is working [...]

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