Education Committee, 19 Nov 2003

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Official Report 296KB pdf

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Child Protection Reform

The final item concerns child protection, which was raised at an earlier meeting by Rhona Brankin and others. We have before us the response from the Minister for Education and Young People and the Deputy Minister for Education and Young People, as well as the clerk's note.

It may well be that we should discuss the matter when we discuss the committee's forward work programme, but does anyone have any comments in the meantime?

I support the matter being included in our work programme. I would like the committee to take evidence on the matter.

A paper on the work programme will come to the committee next week. We can perhaps have a detailed discussion on the matter then, vis-à-vis other priorities.

It is interesting that in the letter, and in the debate last week, the minister talked about the proposals to have a conference in the new year with all the different agencies to drive the programme forward and to consider the proposals on multidisciplinary inspection, which he intends to publish early in the new year. That might be an opportune moment for us to examine the proposals.

I am conscious that the committee has engaged with HMIE, not necessarily formally but in informal briefings, but I do not think we have given such attention to the social work services inspectorate. It will have far wider responsibilities after the introduction of the multi-agency inspection service, so I am keen that we engage with it. I assume that we can liaise with the minister on the time scale so that we choose an opportune moment for our work that ties in with when the Executive publishes its proposals. We should either feed into the conference or examine what is produced as a result of the conference.

That matter has been very much in my mind and in the mind of the deputy convener as we have considered potential issues for the work programme. I am sure that we will want to consider it, subject to timetabling issues.

I want to deal with the same issue—the multi-agency inspection team—but I want to do it from a slightly different angle.

It is not the job of the committee to parallel all the work of the Executive, which has hundreds of people to do the work. Our role is to scrutinise whether the Executive is fulfilling its role properly. My anxiety about the multi-disciplinary approach is that there is a three-year programme and the Executive said a year ago that it was going to come up with a tough new multi-agency inspection team. There is no more detail on that in the letter. The ministers say that they will publish plans early in the new year. That is encouraging, but the slight anxiety is that the Executive has stated that it hopes that the first pilot will be completed after three years.

Many of the Executive's other proposals are good, but they are essentially exhortations to third parties. None of us would expect the education system to run without having HMIE in existence, and it is clearly laudable to try to adopt a multidisciplinary approach.

The letter from the ministers indicates that we will have had only one pilot at the end of three years. That pilot needs to be evaluated before the system is put in place, so that means that, after the programme has been initiated, it will be more than four years before the multi-agency team is likely to be in place. In the letter from Donald Anderson, we received an honest, helpful and encouraging response to all that has gone wrong. He indicated that the process will be helped by external scrutiny and support, and that it is vital.

I am anxious that we should write to Peter Peacock and ask whether if we have one pilot, or even two pilots, by the end of three years, which then need evaluated, the implication is that it will be more than four years before the planned inspection team is up and running and operational throughout the whole of Scotland. That would reflect our role, which is to scrutinise the Executive rather than to hold parallel inquiries to investigate whether the Executive could do better. I am not against our improving the proposals, but I think that our first responsibility is to perform our scrutiny function by writing to the minister.

I support Wendy Alexander's comments. We should remember that the initial impetus for some of this work was the death of Kennedy MacFarlane three and a half years ago. We are talking about pilots that might be complete two years hence. In the period since Kennedy MacFarlane's death, there have been other high-profile cases in which the lessons had not been learned and I am concerned that the time scale for bringing real actions to bear will be so protracted.

I strongly support what Wendy Alexander said. In addition, I hope that another item can be added to the list in the minister's letter. The independent report on the tragedy of the death of Caleb Ness recommended that the guidelines be amended. As far as I can see, the letter contains nothing about amending the guidelines. That specific call for action needs to be addressed.

The issue is the time scale—I want to know now what the social work services inspectorate is doing about cases. I also want to find out what proposals there are to make changes; it would be reasonable to ask that in the new year. We need to find out whether legislative change is necessary. We will be facing a bill to beef up the powers of HMIE, even though it says that it would hardly ever use such legislation. It is quite clear that the social work services inspectorate, rather than HMIE, might need legislation. We need to know not only where we are at the moment, but what the proposals are and whether the time scale is satisfactory.

I am more than happy with that. We might or might not want to proceed on the specific issue of child protection or on the wider issue of social work resources. There are a number of different ways in which we might want to deal with the issue in the work programme. In relation to the minister's letter, we have a note of all the relevant matters and we will follow them through.

Are there any other observations?

I would be keen to have the minister in front of the committee at an early stage to address the issues in question.

Okay, we will include that in next week's discussions. I am grateful for everyone's attendance at what has been a fairly lengthy meeting.

Meeting closed at 12:31.