Respect is in the style, too.

Bullock, Roger

I was working recently in a local authority office on a research project concerning looked after children. Suddenly the tapping of keyboards and phone conversations was drowned by a much louder noise of files being tossed across the room. As the distance was sufficient to produce a roar at Twickenham, papers inevitably fell out onto the floor, only to be gathered up and shoved into the nearest available folder. Eventually all of the files were crammed into a cupboard, the closure of which was only possible when two sturdy people put their full weight against the door.

Several people enquired what was going on, only to be told that they were care leavers' files which the manager wanted moving to make space else where.

For some reason, I was oddly disturbed by this. These files were about children who, through no fault of their own, had been taken into care and to see this record of their lives thrown about like a rugby ball seemed utterly distasteful. 'There's no respect,' remarked one of the more sensitive bystanders. As a researcher, my mind also looked to the future and envisaged the difficulties of trying to retrieve information from this disorganised pile and the awful possibility that important documents might have been put in the wrong folder.

As Humphreys and Kertesz write in their article, 'the records of children and young people growing up in care have multiple purposes and audiences'. Somehow they have to collate dry summaries of assessments and plans, record cross-agency collaboration, chart the progress and emotions of children and families, provide data for managers and auditors and, much later on, help adults understand what happened to them earlier in their lives. As social workers change, records form the only continuous account of the child's life in care.

An emphasis on any one of the above functions inevitably means that others will be depressed and information collected for one purpose may find itself being used for another. Checklists and tick boxes alert professionals to important areas of children's lives and to risk and protective factors, but they can be anathema to those valuing face-to-face work with 'real people'. Hence, files either accumulate into a rich but chaotic jumble or stay slim and focused with, in Humphreys and Kertesz's opinion, a need to 'put the heart back' into them. Both of these situations raise problems at different times. A rag bag of information is not conducive to evidence-based practice, but recording that 'the cat sat on the mat' might be vital to 'prove chronic neglect', a procedure described by Judith Masson and Rupert Hughes as fundamental to many decisions about adoption and fostering. Later still, evaluations of life story work and of adults searching their adoption details reiterate the frustrations of incomplete records.

There is no easy answer to this problem and various initiatives like the Social Information Systems in the 1980s, the Looking After Children materials in the 1990s and the Integrated Children's System this century, as well as the electronic storage of information, have all helped moves towards a better system that makes clear what information is relevant to what.

Respect is a much used word at the moment. The football authorities want more respect for referees, government ministers seek to restore respect for parliament, pensioners grumble about lack of respect from children, and so on. But respect is not a given right, neither is it necessarily a good thing if accorded to dictators or criminals. It can also be intrinsic to a system, even if we personally disrespect the people it serves. So the criteria for good record-keeping in children's services have to vary for each function. High-quality professional observation and analysis inform decisions, whereas for storage and later use the 'my child' test, debated by Ian Sinclair and Michael Little (1) in an earlier edition of this journal, is likely to be more useful.

But the aim of this editorial is not to pontificate to professionals--there is too much of that already--and those in the local authority concerned were just as good as anyone else. Yet one cannot escape the fact that the disrespect shown in that throwing incident reflects a wider culture. Public services in the UK, even when privatised, are inclined to be shabby, utilitarian and insensitive to customers and while the 'Have a nice day' insincerity of naked commerce is equally sickening, their style could be different.

The file-slinging authority is visibly run down, with parts displaying the bombed-out look characteristic of some US cities. I have always suspected that it is the place described 80 years ago by JB Priestley in his English Journey as 'a parade of mean dinginess ... with not one single tiny thing that could raise a man's spirits'. (2)

There is a chain of disrespect here that by central governments in allowing the area to become so decrepit, that by the council to elbow children's services into a crowded backstreet building, and that manifest in practice which allows the lives of care leavers to be treated in this way.

(1) Adoption & Fostering 34:2, pp 3-13, 2010

(2) JB Priestley, English Journey, London: Heinemann, pp 85-6, 1933

Roger Bullock is Commissioning Editor of Adoption & Fostering and a Fellow, Centre for Social Policy, The Social Research Unit at Dartington