Ed Balls the children's minister has responded to disquiet over the Baby P and Shannon Matthew cases, among others, by arranging that people involved must undergo further training and/or experience.
So in future social workers will have to spend time in a school to see what dysfunctional children look like, and headteachers may have to travel in the other direction.
This could make a difference to school age children who are badly treated and who are not able to articulate to others what has happened to them, but will do little for pre-school children like Baby P.
What Balls and others do not notice, or are not willing to admit, is that these new policies are merely scratching the surface of the problem, mere gestures.
The real problems are two-fold:
1) There are many dysfunctional families, living in sink estates on benefit, and with a succession of fathers or none. These are the broken society to which Balls is applying a sticking plaster. The only real solution is much wider and deeper, as diagnosed by Ian Duncan Smith.
2) The fault is in the system, with overloaded social workers having to spend too much time in ticking boxes and back-covering, and the ideology which pervades the whole area and turns keen and well intentioned entrants into bureaucratic pawns. The system will be ineffective as long as it is subject to the politically correct, centrally controlled, ideologically driven bureaucracy it has become.
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