Daniel Pelka might have been saved by more sceptical social services

Some parents will try to manipulate social workers. Being alert to that fact will do more for at-risk children than hollow resignations

- Martin Narey
- theguardian.com, Thursday 1 August 2013 12.21 EDT
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Daniel Pelka, who died aged 4. Photograph: West Midlands police/EPA

I braced myself for the news coverage of the tragedy of Daniel Pelka's murder, knowing that much of the reaction would be a diversion from the real issues behind such a catastrophe. The NSPCC insists that Daniel's "suffering should have been plain to see" although the equally shocking neglect and abuse of Victoria Climbié, with whom the NSPCC were involved, was not, apparently, "plain to see".

Daniel's maternal grandmother blames social services, insisting that her daughter has been led astray. The local MP, Geoffrey Robinson, with wearying predictability, blames Colin Green, the director of children's services in Coventry, and demands his resignation. Green, the MP announced, "takes with him the indelible stain of Daniel's cruel death, which his department had failed to prevent".

I don't know Green particularly well but he has always appeared to me to be a conscientious, able and caring man. But, in any case, I'm not sure why, if the director of children's services needs to resign, why Robinson, the local MP for nearly 40 years should not be considering his own position too. Self evidently, he also failed to prevent Daniel's murder.

Frankly, what we don't need at this point are resignations. If the serious case review were to uncover negligence or recklessness on the part of Green or any other individual involved in or accountable for Daniel's care, that would be a different matter. But resignations can sometimes achieve little other than convincing the public and the media that this latest tragedy is unique and with a change of personnel cannot be repeated.

What we might need however is a reassessment of the approach we ask social workers to take when working with families where a child or children are at risk of neglect. I have long argued that over the past few decades we have been willing to tolerate child neglect for too long and have sometimes failed to intervene until neglect has turned into abuse. Many disagree with that and there remains a strongly held view that we have a crisis with the number of children in care in England. In fact, the care population would have to grow by more than a third to reach the number in care at the beginning of the 80s.

The reality is that for three decades we have expected too much of family support – which can and does work – when applied to the most difficult and intractable families. And sometimes we resist the use of local authority care because it is believed that care makes things worse. The poor academic attainment of children in care or the fact that many graduate to prison is blamed on the care system: a classic confusion between correlation and causation. The reality, despite the potential for it to be improved, is that care generally improves matters for children taken from their birth parents. Yet still, we return too many children from care and back to the parents who have previously neglected them, only for almost two-thirds of them to be neglected again within two years.

The simple truth is that although there are encouraging signs of a new realism, we remain far too optimistic about the capacity and willingness of negligent and neglectful parents to improve the care of their children. And too much of an emphasis in social work education is sometimes given to building relationships with parents and empathising with their own challenges. So neglectful parents are sometimes seen as victims themselves because of their own poverty and disadvantage. In those circumstances it is all too easy for social workers to be manipulated.

We have to do more to ensure that social worker compassion is accompanied by social worker scepticism. In the words of Lord Laming in his second report following the murder of Victoria Climbié, we need social workers who are "prepared for the realities of working with children and families who may have complex needs, and parents who, in some cases, may be intentionally deceptive or manipulative".

That means not accepting parental assurances and explanations of injury and neglect without scrutinising them. That's the challenge posed by this latest tragedy. We cannot fail to meet it.