Sharon Shoesmith.

[Bill Hicks]

So Ms Shoesmith is trying to get a million pound compensation claim for unfair dismissal from Haringey council due to her alleged Illegal sacking.

BBC NEWS | England | London | Baby P 'witch hunt led to sack'

Personally I don't care that she has suffered Post Traumatic Stress or that she is now practically unemployable.
She proved herself to be incompetent in her role and a child died of terrible injuries due to her failings.
This I'm afraid is the penalty she must pay.
To award her any compensation would I believe just show that failure once again will be rewarded!

How about Ms Shoesmith being made to pay compensation to the father of baby P as recompense for her inaction in saving the child and for failures in her duty of care!



Rant over.

[mij]

The Sun could contribute.

[Jakeh1969]

Hopefully she'll (can't bring my self to use her name!) lose her case. On the news last night it was mentioned that she had been informed of 7 or 8 serious cases where there had been failings in her department by Ofsted so no chance of her denying knowledge.

It was also said that she was incompetent and relied on a number 2 who was over worked and also not up to the job.

And she's funding her legal costs of £50000 which makes me wonder how credible her claims of financial hardship are. With any luck she'll lose and also be made to pay the taxpayers legal costs as well.

I just don't want to see failure rewarded again by this incompetent government!

[Codehead]

I posted about this yesterday. IMO, if you are the head of an organisation, you take responsibility for the actions of that organisation. Hence the big pay packet and the kudos of the high profile job.

If something goes badly wrong like this (a systematic failure of the task in hand) the whole chain of command from the person who was directly involved in the incident to the head of the organisation should fall on their collective swords and resign. End of story, no ifs, no buts.

Why people feel that they should get all the perks and then get off scot free when the poop hits the ventilator is beyond me.

[Peridot]

Originally Posted by Jakeh1969

On the news last night it was mentioned that she had been informed of 7 or 8 serious cases where there had been failings in her department by Ofsted so no chance of her denying knowledge.

While I agree that is totally unacceptable and that there is evidence of incompetence in Haringey social services the really sad fact is that those cases made up 0.01% of the department's workload (based on overall number of cases).

I doubt that the department is resourced sufficiently to deliver 100% performance but I'd much rather Shoesmith made that point rather than trying to portray herself as some sort of 'victim'.

[rickinyorkshire]

This makes me very very angry.

[eric pisch]

I support her on this, which wont be popular

Gordo loves to palm of all his problems on one person and add fire to the media witch hunt to take the flack of him. Look at how all the sheep bleet about Sir Fred, nice bit of miss direction.

The no1 fundamental point on this case for me is Tony/Gordo set a max case load of 11 per social worker and they had 39 cases per worker because they could not get the correct funding for staff. It was only time before this happened, and will happen again.

[Bill Hicks]

Originally Posted by eric pisch

I support her on this, which wont be popular

Gordo loves to palm of all his problems on one person and add fire to the media witch hunt to take the flack of him. Look at how all the sheep bleet about Sir Fred, nice bit of miss direction.

The no1 fundamental point on this case for me is Tony/Gordo set a max case load of 11 per social worker and they had 39 cases per worker because they could not get the correct funding for staff. It was only time before this happened, and will happen again.

Baby P was visited at least 60 times by Haringey's social workers. That doesn't include visits to GP's etc.
Are you suggesting that it's Gordon Brown's fault that none of these times were visible injuries or behavioural abnormalities noticed.

As much as I despise this present govt (Read my previous posts regarding GB & Labour) I don't believe you can continually blame them for the shortcomings of everyone.

This only bolsters the commonly held belief that people are not to be held responsible for their own mistakes, something that a lot of the British public feel is a direct result of Labours 12 years in power.
You are in a way saying the same thing. Don't blame the leader of Haringey's child care services, Blame Gordon Brown!

What did David Cameron say this week.
Stop treating children like adults and ADULTS LIKE CHILDREN!

If she felt that she was understaffed or that she couldn't perform the job correctly due to operational restraints and difficulties, maybe she should have resigned her post and let someone else try to do the job instead. Considering the importance of the role and how many at risk children were in her domain that would have been the brave and honourable thing to do.


She should accept her responsibility and fall quietly on her sword!
The buck stopped with her, period!
That's why she was paid £120,000 per year!

[Codehead]

Originally Posted by eric pisch

I support her on this, which wont be popular

Gordo loves to palm of all his problems on one person and add fire to the media witch hunt to take the flack of him. Look at how all the sheep bleet about Sir Fred, nice bit of miss direction.

The no1 fundamental point on this case for me is Tony/Gordo set a max case load of 11 per social worker and they had 39 cases per worker because they could not get the correct funding for staff. It was only time before this happened, and will happen again.

That's a valid point and many public sector areas have been feeling the squeeze recently, despite what the media say about overstaffing and cushy numbers. However, it is her job as a manger to get that funding and sort it out.

All I have seen in this case is her saying she was treated unfairly and she was kept out of the investigation. (Duh! standard practice)

Perhaps if there were more workers at the coal face and less executives drawing big salaries without actually doing anything, the situation wouldn't be so bad.

[Decadence]

Disgraceful behaviour.

[eric pisch]

Originally Posted by Bill Hicks

Baby P was visited at least 60 times by Haringey's social workers. That doesn't include visits to GP's etc.
Are you suggesting that it's Gordon Brown's fault that none of these times were visible injuries or behavioural abnormalities noticed.

As much as I despise this present govt (Read my previous posts regarding GB & Labour) I don't believe you can continually blame them for the shortcomings of everyone.

This only bolsters the commonly held belief that people are not to be held responsible for their own mistakes, something that a lot of the British public feel is a direct result of Labours 12 years in power.
You are in a way saying the same thing. Don't blame the leader of Haringey's child care services, Blame Gordon Brown!

What did David Cameron say this week.
Stop treating children like adults and ADULTS LIKE CHILDREN!

If she felt that she was understaffed or that she couldn't perform the job correctly due to operational restraints and difficulties, maybe she should have resigned her post and let someone else try to do the job instead. Considering the importance of the role and how many at risk children were in her domain that would have been the brave and honourable thing to do.


She should accept her responsibility and fall quietly on her sword!
The buck stopped with her, period!
That's why she was paid £120,000 per year!

As head of the department she had some responsibility of course, I don't have the figures to hand but weren't a large amount of the visits by 7 or 8 different members of staff at least half of which where temps.

Even so, she does not deserve this vitriolic hatred and witch hunt that has gone on, her department was massively over worked / underfunded and this is just a smoke screen for me.

[eric pisch]

Originally Posted by Codehead

Perhaps if there were more workers at the coal face and less executives drawing big salaries without actually doing anything, the situation wouldn't be so bad.

with out a doubt, but at the end of the day there case load was nearly 400% of what the government have set as a maximum target, at that level a disaster was always going to happen

[Duncan G]

When a dead child is known to us, that's the biggest horror. We knew the size of that'

In her first interview since being dismissed as head of Haringey's children's services over the Baby P case, Sharon Shoesmith tells her side of the story

Guardian 6th February 2009.

The first Sharon Shoesmith heard of Baby P was when her deputy came into her office on 3 August 2007 and told her a child was dead. This in itself was not unusual – she was informed every time there was a child death in the borough. "So even at the weekends I would sometimes get a message to say three-year-old died not known to us, two-year-old, 16-year-old not known to us. But when you get a child who's died is known to us, is on our at risk register, that's the biggest horror that could have been and we knew the size of that."

Sharon Shoesmith has not changed her appearance, as some might expect her to have done since she was dismissed as Haringey council's director of children's services last year: she still has short, dark hair above heavy designer glasses, and, apart from dropping them a few times, and apart from a sudden snag into tears, she is very composed, very still. She called the leader of the council, who was on holiday. Not much needed to be said. They both knew the gravity of what they were dealing with. She decided not to call Liz Santry, the council cabinet member for children, who was also on holiday, and immediately regretted that when Santry found out on the news, because someone had leaked the nature of Baby P's injuries to the press.

All the information related to the case was immediately put in a secure room. The social worker was told, as was Ofsted, and every child on the at-risk register was looked at again. She says she could have left right then; she was being headhunted for chief executive jobs elsewhere. But "I always, always, always felt that that was the last thing that I was going to do. That that was the weakest thing that I could do. That was betrayal, to walk away from the council and leave them to handle this."

She also says that in an organisation just regaining its morale after the Victoria Climbié case, she could not afford to panic. "Other social workers knew the size of this and if you're not careful you begin to lose your staff and the department could go into meltdown basically, and could go into being a very unsafe place." She knew the drill: a couple of internal reviews were commissioned, one general, and one about compliance with the Laming recommendations after the death of Victoria Climbié. A serious case review was also begun.

Shoesmith, who is from Newtownabbey, Co Antrim, began working with children when she was 15, helping in a residential home for special needs children. She left Northern Ireland when she was 20, after she was caught in a bombing of the Europa hotel, and worked as a special needs teacher, then as a director of special needs support services, and then as an Ofsted inspector, all over England. She was hired to run Haringey's educational service, a job at which, according to an open letter later signed by 61 headteachers, she was "outstanding". The next step up was an entirely new job in 2005, created by the Children Act 2004, which after the Victoria Climbié inquiry recommended that education and safeguarding be combined to increase communication between the two. "Professionally I felt that I'd waited 30years for it, so I was very, very fired up."

The job came with a budget of £100m, a staff of nearly 3,500, and some very specific challenges, among which was no official provision for training in the safeguarding aspect. Many directors, Shoesmith says, had to organise their own training, in education if they were from a social work background, and social work if they were from education. There was the so-called "Climbié bulge", of many more children than usual taken into care; there was also a new, post-Climbié IT system. The independent Ofsted report would later criticise her department for excessive box-ticking, and emphasis on numbers and targets.

She says she was always worried that social workers were spending 70% of their time in front of computers instead of with families, although she didn't pass this worry on to her superiors; as for targets, if she didn't meet them, it had a direct effect on her budget, which was already forcing her to get rid of staff ‑ from management, she insists, not the frontline. Were there any complaints about her performance? "Never. Never."

Inspections in 2005 were positive; two reviews were overall good, and adequate for social care: "We put that right, they pointed out some issues. In my own performance I had very positive appraisals every single year and those are all on record."

The October, after Baby P died, Ofsted gave Haringey a three-star rating out of four, saying it provided a good service for children, although it was later pointed out in parliament that this inspection had been carried out by a former employee of Shoesmith's, and was based on desk research. Much would later be made, by ministers, and press, and in the final Ofsted report, of the fact that she chaired the serious case review, and that this was a conflict of interest.

Shoesmith is outraged by the suggestion. "It is on record that some 70%-plus of directors of children's services chaired their local safeguarding children boards and if you look at London, I'm told at the time of Baby P's death only seven of the 32 local authorities had an independent chair … So yes I chaired it and there's absolutely nothing unusual about that anywhere in the country." The two independent writers of the serious case review looked into much of the information that has since been made public: that Baby P first came to the notice of a social worker in 2006, when "all the action that was taken was absolutely correct" (a quote Shoesmith says was then taken to be her opinion on the entire process, which was not the case); that twice social workers sought legal advice about taking him into care, and twice were advised that the threshold had not been met.

No one knew, until Baby P died, that there were two men in the flat, because there was no trace of them, even on repeated, unannounced visits. Social workers believed they were dealing with a chaotic single mother who was honestly worried about a child she kept voluntarily bringing in for medical assessments. Shoesmith says it has since emerged that she mentioned a boyfriend in a parenting class – but the class regarded that information as confidential, and it was not passed on. But she knows that there doesn't need to be an obvious perpetrator for a child to be taken into care, and there were other things at work. In April 2007 bruising and swelling on Baby P's head was diagnosed as possible meningitis; in June bruising to the face prompted arrangements for a family friend to supervise his care. The weekend before Baby P died he stayed with his natural father, who reported no concerns. Two days before he died, a paediatrician missed a broken back. The day before he died, police "saw the mother with the social worker and said there was no evidence to press any charges". They told the social workers to go ahead and organise a short holiday for her. "I was in the room when the police came to tell some of those staff that she had been charged with murder and I'll remember the scene for ever because they simply couldn't believe it.

"One of the huge learning issues I think that comes out of this is they were operating this rule of optimism, that this mother was working with them and there was huge – well, I say there was huge deceit. I don't know to this day what the mother knew and understood either." After the serious case review two social workers and a lawyer were given written warnings. No one was found guilty of gross misconduct and so there were no sackings, a decision by which she still stands.

Shoesmith says it is a mistake to assume that the injuries that killed Baby P were a constant throughout the eight months. "They didn't have the evidence to take the child into care but they constantly were unhappy. You know, 'is there something here?'

"But we've got a helpful mother working with us, and then something colossal happens. There was a brutal attack on the child and if the public think that this child was being severely abused, when all of this time we're going in and out of this house and that's what they think, I would have walked immediately. I would have resigned on the 5th or 6th of August 2007, of course I would have."

She didn't go the Old Bailey trial, but read the transcripts every night. She got the verdict by text and was instantly on a train into central London to brief the press. She had requested specialist training for this eventuality ("to me that was not unusual at all, and shouldn't be seen as such"), and a statement was prepared by the council, which she part-read along with the chief executive from Great Ormond Street hospital. "I obviously wasn't looking forward to it but I felt it was my responsibility to step up to that role, and to explain to the public, try to explain to the public what had happened. And it was a complete disaster, which I fully recognise."

They had hoped the press could read the serious case review, which didn't happen. The police had also pre-empted them by releasing an electronic picture of the damage done to Baby P, and briefed the press before the verdict, whereas the council had remained silent until after it, so feelings were already running high.

The statement was rehearsed ‑ "perhaps we shouldn't have rehearsed it" – and as she read she could feel the tension in the room rising, of a "nature which I found hard to describe". Perhaps it was what she was saying. Was the word sorry in it at all? "No, and in a sense you sort of think, my goodness, it wasn't. You know, I've thought and thought about that and I thought, well in some ways we were so sorry and distressed about this, we almost did not say that. Nobody, you know nobody was more sorry and distressed than I was, to be sitting there telling this to the public through the press representatives."

She also regrets the moment when she was asked two questions at once, and turned to answer one when the other was "have you apologised to the father"? "And once I'd taken my attention away, this person – I don't know where they were from – said, 'Oh, that's a no then.' And actually that was a grave mistake and that probably made people angry. I should have gone back and addressed it, and had I done, I would have said that we'd had good contact with the father. He'd been asked to contribute to the serious case review if he wished. He did decline. And we also clearly wrote to him and gave him our condolences."

After the press conference, "Haringey's team, who were with me, said you need to deal with this thing of, of sorry, and what I was saying back was, 'Well of course we're sorry' and I said right, OK, I need to say that better than I was doing." There were 15 interviews after the press conference, three of them live, and she says she said she was sorry, and deeply distressed, in every single one.

But the damage had been done. She was called cold and calculating, arrogant and smug. She says that "if anything, what I was doing was working hard not to break down, to deliver this message in a way that was not emotional ..." She knows that she simply "wasn't in touch with the mood of the public. When I had to answer the question as I'm asked it live – can you guarantee this won't happen again? – that's a really difficult question to answer but there is only one answer to it, you know. You have to say no. You can't stop people who are determined to kill their children. You can work as much as you can to prevent it, but that is the case." Scotland Yard, the Association of Directors of Children's Services, and the NSPCC all subsequently gave similar assessments.

The next day, 12 November, David Cameron called for sackings because there had been "a raft of excuses and not one apology … the buck has got to stop somewhere". The Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, called for resignations and sackings, and a nationwide review of child protection procedures was ordered by the children's minister, Beverley Hughes.

Shoesmith had already been asked, at the press conference, if she would resign, and she had said: "No. None of the agencies involved with the family are responsible for the death. Those responsible for this tragedy have been prosecuted." That might be true, according to the letter of the law, but did she not understand that there was an emotional, symbolic requirement as well, above and beyond the law, particularly in a borough that had been through this before?

"Well, I would absolutely emphasise the sadness of the fact that there's a child dying every 10 days at the hands of their family or their extended family. Actually during the aftermath of Baby P that was shown to be more than that. Now if you are going to sack every director of every children's service where there is a child death, you're going to turn them over at the rate of a third a year."

On November 13 the Sun demanded sackings, and vowed not to rest until it got them. If Shoesmith wouldn't go, it said, the government had to put in a new boss. "A price must be paid for his little life, and we will not rest until that price has been paid by those responsible."

It ran pictures of Shoesmith and four others, with phone numbers underneath, urging readers acquainted with them to call in. Ed Balls, the children's secretary, ordered an independent review, and Haringey council made a formal apology. Sixty-one headteachers wrote to the papers in support a couple of days later, but they were swept away by a campaign notable for the ugliness it permitted in some of its readers. The first time Shoesmith realised the size and nature of what was being unleashed against her was a call from her 89-year-old mother in Belfast, who had been told by a reporter that Shoesmith was responsible for the death of a child, and was immensely distressed. In order to avoid photographers outside her flat she had to leave for work at 6:30am and wait, at night, until neighbours told her the coast was clear. Both she and her youngest daughter received death threats, and her daughter had to be moved out of London. Her email inbox and voice messages filled with support but also with people calling her a child killer.

She began to suffer periods of uncontrollable shaking. One man called her at 5am every morning with a different suggestion for how to kill herself. Police advised her to stay away from tube platforms, because it would be so easy to push her off. She did, she admits, think of doing it herself anyway. "You do consider how to stop it all, you know. You can just walk off the end of the tube platform and stop it all and I certainly did think about that on occasion, and there was certainly another occasion in the middle of the night when I gathered up all the paracetamol that existed in the house and there was nothing like enough." Her daughters moved in to be with her day and night.

The one time she does cry is when she thinks of Maria Ward, the social worker, being the subject of a similar campaign, and becoming unable to operate; she was eventually moved away for her own safety. Even uninvolved Haringey social workers were reporting that they were finding it suddenly more difficult and frightening to do their jobs, because clients were refusing to co-operate, or being abusive. On 18 November the Sun quoted an anonymous Shoesmith family member saying they wanted her to go; she says this was completely untrue, but she knew it was a turning point. "Whatever that report said, there was only one route for me."

On 20 November, when questions were asked in parliament, Balls agreed that deception by the family played a great part, but that actions were also not taken that should have been taken. He saw no evidence of a conflict of interest in her chairing of the serious case review. When MPs demanded to know why Shoesmith was still in her post he answered: "I do not rule anything out, but people want action, and they want it in the fastest possible way."

A week later he reiterated the point in the Sun: he was waiting for the independent Ofsted report, to be published in three days' time (he had asked for it to take two weeks instead of the usual three months), and added: "I will not hesitate to act on what they say."

On 26 November the Sun delivered a petition with 1.2m signatures to Downing Street, demanding that those involved be sacked. On Friday 28 November Shoesmith offered the council her resignation; they even agreed a form of words, that she was leaving by mutual consent, but the decision was quickly overtaken.

At 6pm on Sunday night the independent report was delivered to Balls. It made devastating reading. It identified insufficient strategic leadership and management oversight; failure to ensure full compliance with post-Climbié recommendations; a lack of communication between social care, health and police authorities; a conflict of interest in the serious case review; failing to identify children at immediate risk of harm; inconsistent quality of frontline work; inconsistent and often poor record-keeping; too much reliance on quantitative v qualitative data.

"Of course I expected criticism," says Shoesmith. "Nothing is perfect. But not that. And I was really very shocked." Her objections are that the Ofsted inspectors' reference to a conflict of interest discredits her; no feedback was allowed, as is usually the case, with allegations put to the director, who can then try to defend herself. She says she had been led to believe it was an interim report, even though it clearly wasn't. It was also written in bald, unambiguous statements "quite unusual in a report because [usually in] the same paragraph you'd get some examples".

She is struck by how there is almost nothing positive in it, even though she knows that in interviews some positive things were said. She also thinks it strange that two numbered paragraphs seem to be missing.

But was she making serious allegations against the writers of the report? "Well, I don't know," she answers. "I don't think I'm putting an allegation to the writers of the report because they may not have written it that way."

She only realised she had been replaced when Balls announced it on the news, on 1 December. A week later the council announced that she had been dismissed with immediate effect, without compensation, or payment in lieu of notice. Despite stories about million-pound pensions, she says she now has nothing – no savings, no income, and no pension. She is being supported by family and friends until she can get back on her feet. The Sun immediately claimed a triumph "for the biggest crusade of its kind in newspaper history". A few weeks later she would learn about her permanent successor from "a reporter shouting the news through my letterbox".

Thinking about it since, she says she was "shocked at how fast it became a party political issue, both locally and nationally. I just think it's a huge travesty for Haringey and if there's anything I want to say it's that they deserve much better than this, because I know who the people are and how they've worked and how they've achieved, and it just has been deeply reckless, breathtakingly reckless, and I don't think people really understood quite what the potential impact could be. And now you've got this, a local tragedy and a national catastrophe."

As after Climbié, there is anecdotal evidence of an increase in care proceedings, and Haringey, already struggling with recruitment, has had to appeal for social workers from other London boroughs "to try and cover Section 47 investigations, which are urgent investigations into potential abuse of children".

Shoesmith is deeply sceptical of Balls's recent statements about needing to rejuvenate social work as a respected profession. "Well, he's certainly made it a much more uphill struggle than it was."

Was he acting under pressure from the press? "I'm not going to answer your question directly," she says, "because I don't think I can, but I think what I would say to you is there are a number of people who need to quietly reflect on what it was they did in this whole story. And be open unto themselves as to how they behaved and why they behaved as they did, and to understand – not to blame them – but to understand, and to show greater courage the next time round.

"I think that's what I'd want to say."

[Crocodile]

....she says she now has nothing – no savings, no income, and no pension.

For someone on a six-figure salary to have no savings would seem further evidence of incompetence to me.

[shahedz]

Originally Posted by eric pisch

Even so, she does not deserve this vitriolic hatred and witch hunt that has gone on, her department was massively over worked / underfunded and this is just a smoke screen for me.

Completely agree with Eric on this one too. The public love a bashing, her job must be such a tough one. It's not easy to remove a child from a home- espeically in this age where you can get sued for sneezing. i feel for the woman. She isn't soley repsonsible for what happened.