Iron Angle: Khyra Ishaq is the sad legacy of council's failure
Very sombre faces at Birmingham City Council’s Khyra Ishaq press briefing. You’d almost have thought someone had died.
Oh, hang on a moment, someone did die. Poor seven-year-old Khyra, starved to death by a demonic mother and stepfather while the city’s social services and education department did nothing to save her despite being tipped off on several occasions by teachers about the poor girl’s deteriorating state of health.
A Serious Case Review setting out the circumstances behind Khyra’s death tracks in chilling detail the failings of the children’s social care unit and of the Education Welfare Service.
Social workers and education officials didn’t understand the powers available to them to order an immediate assessment of Khyra and to enter the house in Handsworth where she was being held, having been removed from school by her mother to be “educated” at home.
And when Khyra’s mother screamed abuse at them and claimed to know all about the law and her rights, they meekly went away and said of course it would be all right to teach her at home.
An education plan setting out lessons to be taught and the processes to be followed? When the mother’s promise to stick one in the post failed to materialise, the clueless council officials simply shrugged their shoulders and walked away.
GPs and health trusts must also share part of the blame. They knew about Khyra’s poor health, but didn’t notify social services. Even if they had done so, is it really likely that the final outcome would have been any brighter?
And so poor, tragic Khyra Ishaq died in the most harrowing of circumstances, her tiny body so emaciated that hardened medics said there had been nothing like it since British POWs were starved to death in Japanese prison camps during the war.
But not to worry. For Birmingham City Council, an organisation incapable of resisting spinning even the most dire of events, managed to concoct what the PR professionals refer to as a “line”.
Les Lawrence, the cabinet member for children, young people and families, attempted to suggest that a positive outcome to flow from Khyra’s death would be the “creation of a children’s social care service that better protects our young people from those who would harm them” and that this would be “Khyra’s legacy”.
A better service? Who is he trying to kid? Khyra Ishaq died two years ago and in the meantime millions of pounds thrown at children’s social services and thousands of glib words and promises have made not a jot of difference.
The unit was inadequate when Khyra died and remains inadequate today, with Ofsted’s latest condemnation ringing around Birmingham: “Critical deficiencies remain in front line work with children and young people despite significant attempts to deliver improvements.”
Lawrence’s legacy line represents the second attempt to spin the story away from the professionals whose failure to perform their jobs adequately contributed to Khyra’s death.
At a press briefing held earlier this year, Lawrence and Children’s Director Tony Howell suggested that nothing could have been done to save Khyra because councils had no powers to enter the homes of children being educated at home.
This turned out to be misleading, to say the least, since social services could and should have used powers to carry out an immediate assessment of Khyra using the police if necessary to gain entry to the house.
It was also suggested at the first press briefing that social services would have intervened if only members of the public who had become concerned about Khyra’s plight had spoken out.
In fact, as the Serious Case Review points out, a member of the public did speak out, taking the unusual step of making a personal visit to Children’s Social Care on March 14, 2006, more than two years before Khyra’s death.
Given that social services were already aware of referrals of domestic violence from Khyra’s house, alarm bells ought to have rung loudly when a stranger stepped in off the street with yet more evidence about maltreatment. But the opportunity to investigate slipped away as it did on so many other occasions.
One face missing from this week’s press briefing was that of Colin Tucker, the council’s newish director of children’s social care.
It is rather odd that Mr Tucker was not there to answer questions about how he intends to turn around social services, since the responsibility now rests on his shoulders.
His plan involves reducing the number of children in care by intervening at an earlier stage when signs of possible abuse emerge. This is to be done by using multi-agency teams involving police and health experts as well as social workers.
The problem is, as the Khyra inquiry demonstrated, that Mr Tucker is working with people who have shown themselves incapable of following even basic rules of social care.
