Baby P – Why The System Fails Children At Risk

A really interesting article in yesterday’s Times by barrister Martha Cover at Coram. It sets out why the introduction of procedures designed to protect at risk children may have had the opposite effect to that desired – by discouraging the issue of proceedings in favour of focus on the provision of low level support services. She explains very well the process of ‘threshold inflation’ which has put children at risk and the switch-on-switch-off mechanism which enables services to be withdrawn from families who bounce along the bottom, every time there is a minor improvement.