Make Bad Parents Give Up Their Babies

In my tirade in Friday’s blog against irresponsible parents, I resisted the urge to suggest that children, and even babies should be removed from their parents, but it seems that I am not the only one thinking in these terms. When I opened my Yorkshire Post paper this morning, I saw that no less a person than Martin Narey, the chief executive of Barnardo’s is calling for something similar.

I am sure that by “sticking his head above the battlements” he is going to come in for criticism from the do gooders of this world, but let’s face it, what he says makes a great deal of common sense. He calls for less focus on fixing families that can’t be fixed, and social workers to be more pro-active in removing children who are at risk.

For some eighteen years I worked in a school in a run down area of the city. The local council estate had more than its fair share of out of work parents, drifters, alcoholics and drug abusers. As a result I sometimes felt that I spent more time in case conferences dealing with children at risk than I did teaching. I always felt that these case conferences were of very limited use, both to those who attended them, and in particular to the child/children who were at risk. Much was made of the Multi Agency approach, but little was done for the children. The conferences generated about 90% talk and 10% action (if you were lucky!)

I met many social workers who quite honestly must have lived on another planet. They were being duped left, right and centre by some of the unscrupulous and irresponsible parents they were dealing with. “The Social” (Money) was spent on alcohol, drugs, in fact just about anything except on the needs of their children. These were irresponsible parents of the highest order, and the social workers (some of them) genuinely thought that they were helping their children.

On one occasion at one of these conferences I drew a social workers attention to the fact that a little girl of seven used to arrive in school each day at around 8.00 am in the depths of winter in a thin summer dress, short socks and worn out sandals. We used to take her in and warm her up by the school radiators and give her a bottle of milk – she had not eaten before arriving at school. Despite being on the “at risk register” nothing changed during the winter. Why? Because the family were, as Martin Narey states “a family that can’t be fixed” The child should have been removed at the first possible opportunity – she had been on the at risk register from within a few months of her birth, but as far as I could see, the amount of good this had done her was precisely nil.

I had another child (a boy) who had been beaten by his father with a “barley stick table leg” I discovered this after weeks of careful observation during PE lessons when I noted bruising on him. He insisted that he had got carpet burns by being pulled along the floor by his older sister. He too had been on the “at risk register” for a few years. It was only when I called social services in to school so that they could see the extent of the bruising that something was done. Why on earth couldn’t they have done something before under their own initiative? Because they probably thought they were doing well by what they liked to term as “working alongside the family” It was another case of a family that couldn’t be fixed.

More power to Mr Narey. I sincerely hope, that for the sake of lots of these poor children some person in authority sees sense, and intervention, in the shape of removal from the home and their parents takes place at a much earlier stage, before it is too late, and before what has happened in Doncaster, children being killed.