Iron Angle: Khyra Ishaq case review won't be comfortable reading for council
The Serious Case Review into the harrowing death of Khyra Ishaq, which is to be released by the Birmingham Safeguarding Children’s Board next month, is likely to be one of the most heavily scrutinised public documents prior to publication of its kind.
So many organisations have a vested interest in the conclusions of the lessons-to-be-learned study setting out how the seven-year-old from Handsworth came to be starved to death by her mother and step-father under the very noses of the city’s social services and education department.
The city council, clearly, has most to lose, but West Midlands Police and possibly the medical profession are also likely to be criticised.
This will be one of the first serious case reviews to be published in full, apart from details of Khyra’s remaining siblings which will be redacted. It is difficult to imagine that the findings will be anything other than damning for social workers and education officials.
The facts surrounding the death of Khyra emerged in a family court hearing and represent a simple but ultimately tragic chain of events.
Despite persistent alarm bells rung by teachers at Khyra’s school, who were able to spot the early signs of malnutrition, education officers and social workers blundered from one mistake to another, finally agreeing without conducting proper assessments that she could be “educated” in the home that was her prison and death chamber.
Although the city council clearly had powers to enter the house, officials chose not to do so.
The decision was compounded afterwards when the council’s Strategic Director of Children, Families and Young People, Tony Howell, and the cabinet member Les Lawrence, sat in front of a press conference calmly claiming that staff had no powers to enter the house without approval from Khyra’s mother. This was untrue.
A few weeks after the press conference, the council began disciplinary action against the very social workers and education officials who were said to have done nothing wrong.
Not a word of apology, however, for so blatantly misleading press and public in the hours after the conclusion of the manslaughter trial into Khyra’s mother and step-father.
Perhaps the apology will come next month, although I wouldn’t bank on it.
All eyes will be on Children’s Social Care Director Colin Tucker, who must step forward now and show some true leadership. Mr Tucker is “clean” as far as Khyra Ishaq is concerned, having been appointed by the council after her death to sort out a failing department.
His strategy so far has been to change the council mindset which in the past appears to have been to take as many at-risk children into care as possible.
He points out, correctly, that it is far better for all concerned if a child can remain with even dysfunctional parents, or other family, rather than being removed into a home or with foster carers – but only if social workers are sure that the child will not come to harm.
This is a fantastically difficult call to make, particularly in a city the size and complex nature of Birmingham where police receive tens of thousands of phone calls each year from concerned members of the public alleging that children are being abused.
Each call must be investigated, each claim must be considered and pronounced upon by social workers.
Mr Tucker is already preparing the ground for Khyra’s serious case review. He expects reports of child abuse to soar after publication, as happened in the Baby Peter case in Haringey.
It is at this point, however, that Mr Tucker and I part company over what would appear to be his deep-seated hatred of the media, or at least of the Birmingham media.
He was at it again during last week’s vulnerable children scrutiny committee, bemoaning the difficulty Birmingham has in hiring social workers and heaping the blame squarely on the press for publishing unhelpful stories about the consequences of bad decisions by social care staff.
Mr Tucker is of course correct, up to a point. It is extremely difficult for all metropolitan local authorities to hire social workers because social work is a hugely demanding profession with precious few plaudits when staff get it right and howls of condemnation when mistakes are made.
It is impossible to know whether Mr Tucker has actually thought through the consequences of what he is saying, or whether his views are a kind of gut reaction designed to appeal to the social workers under his command.
If the former, Mr Tucker would appear to be harking back to a Britain that existed 60 or 70 years ago when children were still brutalised, possibly on a wider scale than today, but reports scarcely appeared in the media.
Since then decades of hardening attitudes against child abuse, the introduction of formal inquiries when things go wrong, a general acceptance that people have a right to know when public servants behave inappropriately, and the statutory function of safeguarding children boards have changed the ground rules. All of these developments point to a climate of openness.
Mr Tucker, if you suspect that the Khyra lessons to be learned from the report will bring a tide of criticism crashing on to Birmingham City Council, you are probably right.
If you think that the media in this city has it in for social workers come what may, you could not be further from the truth.
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