Social care representative bodies set to merge

The two largest social care provider representative bodies, English Community Care Association (ECCA) and National Care Association (NCA), intend to merge.

The merger will create a new body called Care England from 1st January 2014.

The two chief executives, Sheila Scott and Professor Martin Green, said: “We welcome the opportunity to bring the wealth of experience of these two organisations under one banner, and to work together to make Care England strong and vibrant as well as a one-stop-shop for providers, to support them in delivering a quality service.

“Additionally, for the first time, we will be able to demonstrate the strength of the united purpose which has brought us together and both of us welcome the opportunity to work with as many providers as possible to deliver a representative body which will be a powerful influence in health & social care through the 21st Century.”

Care England hopes that through this merger many more local, regional and national groups will engage and strengthen voice of the sector.

Responding to the development, Scie chair, Lord Michael Bichard said: “We look forward to continuing our excellent working relationship with the new body to ensure that SCIE’s products and services are relevant and responsive to the needs of the sector.”

Source: Social Care Worker

Drink-driving death rate 25% higher than 2011

Department for Transport estimates 290 people were killed in drink-drive accidents in Britain in 2012

The number of deaths in drink-drive accidents soared last year, according to provisional government figures.

An estimated 290 people were killed in such accidents in Britain in 2012 – around 25% more than the figure of 230 in 2011, the Department for Transport said.

The 2012 figures were made worse by the fact that the 2011 total was the lowest since records began in 1979.

The 2012 figures showed that the 290 deaths represented 17% of all reported road deaths.

There were 250 drink-drive accidents resulting in deaths in 2012, compared with 220 in 2011. Overall, the number of accidents involving drink-driving last year was 6,680 – fractionally down on the 2011 figure of 6,690.

The DfT figures also showed that those seriously injured in drink-drive accidents totalled 1,210 in 2012 – down from the total of 1,270 in 2011.

Slight injuries in drink-drive accidents totalled 8,500 last year – slightly up on the 8,420 figure in 2011.

Among those killed in drink-drive accidents, the majority (68%) were drivers and passengers over the legal alcohol limit. The remaining 32% were other road users involved in the accident but not necessarily over the legal limit themselves.

Although the death toll from last year rose significantly, the annual figure has come down considerably since the late 1970s and 1980s when figures of more than 1,400 deaths a year were recorded.

The annual death figure hovered around the 530 – 580 mark in the first years of the 21st century before dipping sharply from 2007 – 2011.

Source: Guardian Online

Inspectors find high levels of violence at youth jail

A young offender institution has been criticised by inspectors over high levels of violence and the use of segregation.

An inspection of Warren Hill YOI, a facility for 15- to 18-year-old boys in Suffolk, concluded that, overall, improvements following riots at the establishment in 2011 had been sustained. But they found that the number of violent incidents was very high and some were very serious. During the six months before the inspection, which took place in March, there had been 137 assaults on young people, 48 assaults on staff and 112 fights between young people. Most injuries were minor, but five young people and one member of staff had required hospital treatment for broken bones, unconsciousness and multiple injuries, including black eyes, stab wounds and grazes. There were also 94 recorded incidents of bullying. Inspectors also judged the segregation unit to be “a very poor facility”, which held some young people for extended periods. Meanwhile, although there were sufficient activity places for all young people, about a fifth were still on the units during the working day. Inspectors said more needed to be done to monitor attendance and improve behaviour in classrooms. Nick Hardwick, chief inspector of prisons, said: “The high level of violent incidents remains a significant concern and more needs to be done to reduce it.” Despite the criticism, inspectors praised a number of aspects of the establishment. Staff were found to manage and relate to young people confidently and work was in place to promote diversity. Most young people were engaged with some form of education or training, and the curriculum had improved, providing a good range of programmes in education and vocational training. “Warren Hill is very well led by a governor and management team who understand young people and their needs,” Hardwick said. “The institution is a respectful place that is equipping young people with skills and working well to prepare them for the future.” Michael Spurr, chief executive of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), said the governor and staff at Warren Hill were “working hard with a very complex and challenging population”. “We are not complacent about safety and will continue to work with our partners to manage and reduce the number of violent incidents and to provide opportunities for reform and rehabilitation,” he said. “The sustained improvements achieved at Warren Hill – particularly in education, resettlement and in tackling offender behaviour – are a tribute to the hard work of the governor, all her staff and our partners.”

Source: CYPNow

Academic urges flexible schooling for summer-born children

Schools should allow summer-born or pre-term children to delay their education at the stage most suitable for them, an education expert has said.

Professor Barry Carpenter, co-founder for the National Forum for Neuroscience in Special Education, said children who are younger than the average school admissions age should be allowed to break their education at any stage – not necessarily when they enter reception class.

His comments follow the Department for Education’s publication of advice for local authorities, schools and parents on the admission of summer born children, which states that schools can decide when to admit children.

The document states: “School admission authorities are required to provide for the admission of all children in the September following their fourth birthday, but flexibilities exist for children whose parents do not feel they are ready to begin school at this point.

“There is no statutory barrier to children being admitted outside their normal year group.”

Carpenter welcomed the advice but urged schools to allow parents to hold children back at later stages in their education if they felt their child needed more time to mature.

“It’s not just about the cognitive and the academic development, it’s also about the social and emotional development,” said Carpenter.

“The DfE’s advice is best applied at some stage during Key Stage 1. However, some children may go into reception and seem to be ok, but when they move up to year 1 the academic pressures become greater.

“Knowing that some sort of formal testing is on its way in year 2, parents may wish to keep the child back so they can mature.

“I wouldn’t want a blanket rule – it’s about consolidating the correct academic skills in Key Stage 1,” he added.

The DfE advice states that school admissions authorities are responsible for taking decisions related to delaying education.

While it does not include guidance on breaking education once a child has started school, it does confirm it is unlawful for an admissions code to include a blanket policy that says summer-born children who delay starting school to the September after their fifth birthday will automatically be admitted to year 1.

Charity Bliss backed the advice after working with families who had been denied the option of delaying their child’s education.

In one example, a local education authority told the parent of a prematurely born child that if he did not enter school when they wanted him to, he would lose his pre-school place and have to enter directly into year 1 when he did start.

Bliss’s campaigns and policy manager Rebecca Rennison said: “We are very pleased this advice has been published to clarify the current position. It will give both parents and admission authorities much-needed guidance around this important choice for a child.“

In March, a study from the Institute of Education found the youngest children in a school year were far more likely to be considered to have low ability compared to autumn-born pupils.

Source: CYPNow

Bing introduces child abuse search pop-up warnings

Company says anyone in UK using Bing search engine to seek out such illegal material will trigger warning message

Microsoft has introduced a pop-up warning on its Bing search engine that tells UK internet users that they are searching for illegal child abuse images.

The company said on Saturday that anyone using the engine to search for such material will trigger the Bing notification platform message warning, which tells them they are looking for illegal content and provides a link to a counselling service.

The move comes after David Cameron this week threatened to impose tough new laws on internet service providers if they fail to blacklist key search terms for abusive images by October.

A Microsoft spokesman said: “If someone in the UK tries to use search terms on Bing which can only indicate they are looking for illegal child abuse content, they will activate the Bing notification platform, which will produce an on-screen notification telling them that child abuse content is illegal.

“The notification will also contain a link to Stopitnow.org who will be able to provide them with counselling.”

Microsoft said it already has a policy of removing links to illegal content as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, a survey of social workers found that many struggle to deal with the online grooming and the sexual abuse of the children they are meant to protect.

The study by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and children’s charity the NSPCC showed that almost half the 327 staff surved did not know how to recognise the signs of online sexual abuse of children, while more than two-thirds felt they needed more support in tackling online abuse cases.

Although almost half (49%) said a quarter of their sexual abuse cases now involve some form of online abuse, 30% said they did not feel confident dealing with child protection sexual abuse cases using the internet.

A third (34%) of social workers surveyed said they did not feel confident about understanding the language used by young people online, and 47% said they did not know how young people communicate via social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said: “Vulnerable young people are now being coerced into sharing explicit images of themselves via mobile phone messages and apps. It’s worrying that the majority of social workers surveyed by BASW are struggling to understand how online child abuse happens.”

BASW professional officer Nushra Mansuri said: “The number of cases in which the internet plays a part in the grooming and abuse of children is rising, and social workers need to be equipped to recognise the warning signs.”

Source: Guardian Online

Twitter to introduce PhotoDNA system to block child abuse images

Microsoft-developed system may be introduced this year once complication of handling pictures posted alongside billions of tweets can be overcome

Twitter is to introduce a tagging system to prevent child abuse images being posted on its service, which now sees millions of pictures posted among the 2bn tweets every five days.

The intention is to introduce the system, which uses a Microsoft-developed industry standard called “PhotoDNA”, later this year if possible.

Twitter’s move has come independently of UK pressure. Microsoft and Facebook already use PhotoDNA to monitor images posted to the social network, Microsoft’s Skydrive service and accessible via its Bing search engine.

PhotoDNA works by producing a “hash” – a single number generated from the binary data of a picture or video, and some biometric information in the picture. The method still works even if the image is resized or altered.

When an image is posted, its hash is compared against known images of child abuse which have been flagged by operations such as the UK’sInternet Watch Foundation and the US’s National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) Child Victim Identification Program. The latter found 17.3m images of abuse in 2011 – and since 2002 has reviewed more than 65m images and videos of child sexual exploitation reported by the authorities. However, the “hash” database is reckoned to be much smaller.

Microsoft developed the system in 2009 with Dartmouth College in the US, and donated the technology to the NCMEC. Facebook began using it in 2011.

“One of the most exciting things that we’re working on is implementing PhotoDNA,” said Del Harvey, senior director of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team. “It’s really fantastic that we’re making progress on getting that in place. And it’s good that others in the industry are working on it, or on implementing it, because this is one of those areas which is not about competition, it’s about co-operation. We’re trying to keep the user safe.”

Harvey worked on preventing child abuse before joining Twitter in 2008. She said that there are complications to implementing PhotoDNA on Twitter, based on the sheer scale and speed of the service. It is also complicated by the involvement of outside companies called Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which store copies of data posted online at locations closer to users, so they can be downloaded more quickly.

“You think ‘we’ll just delete the image’, but then you face the question of whether it’s hosted on a CDN. In that case, how do you make sure it gets flushed out? What if there’s a backlog of requests for images to delete? You start to wonder if these things really have to be this complicated just to delete an image – and the answer turns out to be yes, it really does have to be this complicated.”

Google said in June that it has used a “hashing” technology to identify child abuse images online since 2008. It does not use PhotoDNA, but its system is compatible with it.

Source: Guardian Online

Multi-agency partnerships improve child abuse detection

Multi-agency child protection arrangements are improving information sharing across partner bodies and helping to identify safeguarding problems quicker, a government review of local partnerships has found.

The Home Office early findings report, drawn up following visits to 37 local sites across five multi-agency safeguarding hub (Mash) partnerships, found that the arrangements improved decision making among professionals, cut duplication of case work by different agencies and reduced the risk of borderline cases “slipping through the net”.

However, the Home Office-funded research flagged up a range of IT problems, such as the lack of secure email systems making some agencies reluctant to share sensitive client information for risk assessments, that were hampering partnership working among agencies.

High staff turnover and an over-reliance on social workers to take the lead in cases because of a lack of understanding about safeguarding among other professionals were also raised as issues hindering Mash development and work.

Mash is the name given to locally developed arrangements for managing child protection and vulnerable adult cases among a host of agencies, often co-located, including social services, health, probation and police.  Although each site varies in its structure, they have at their core a joint approach to decision making, information sharing and co-ordinated intervention on handling cases.

The report found that local Mash identified better information sharing as a key improvement to come out of the partnerships. This enabled hubs to pool isolated information from partnership agencies to give a more complete picture of a child and recognise long-standing patterns of abuse and neglect that required action.

It also helped to engage health services, whose input was found to be “particularly valuable and beneficial” across agencies in helping to identify risks and intervene early.

The report says this was a key feature of a number of the Mash studied: “Good engagement from health is very important as their information/perspective is often crucial to effective decision making on risk assessments.”

Despite this, client confidentiality and health professionals’ understanding of what information could be shared under the Mash arrangements was identified as a key barrier to progress. “This could result in low confidence and uncertainty about what information can be shared,” the authors said.

Pressure on funding at a time when the number of child protection referrals being dealt with is rising was identified by Mash teams as an increasing problem. This situation had also meant that partnerships had mainly focused on “fire-fighting high-end need” rather than doing preventative work that could reduce the number of emergency cases needing intervention.

Source: CYPNow Website

Is this your impression of what is happening on a daily basis ?

Pupils need their own union, says young activist

A youth activist is seeking to set up a national association for school pupils to give young people a say in education policies.

Luke Shore, 16, from Nottinghamshire, says England is behind other European countries in not having a dedicated body through which pupils can voice their views.

He plans to establish a non-political union for 11- to 19-year-old students in schools, sixth-forms and further education colleges.

The body will enable pupils to address issues they feel are important, such as hidden fees, educational disadvantage and the increasing role of the private sector in education.

The project has already won the backing of school student unions from 19 European countries, as well as the board of the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions, which represents 23 national school student unions in 20 European countries.

Shore has also received support for the project from children’s minister Edward Timpson, and is due to meet Department for Education officials next month to discuss his plans.

“This is a completely student-led, student-run and student-focused initiative that seeks to give students that direct self-representation currently lacking in British education,” said Shore.

“While lots of different youth organisations have a mandate to focus on youth issues, there isn’t an organisation specifically designed to represent young people in their role as school students, and give them a voice on the development of their own education.”

Once the association has been established in England, Shore plans to expand it to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Shore is working on the project with student union leaders from six European countries through the Pan-European Working Group for School Student Democracy in the United Kingdom – an organisation he founded.

Source: CYPNow

Ministers face criticism over lack of youth custody visits

Department for Education ministers have failed to visit a single youth custody establishment in the past three years despite radical plans to replace them with education-focused “secure colleges”, it has emerged.

The lack of visits by current DfE ministers, highlighted in a response to a parliamentary question, has prompted concern about the level of involvement of the department in the ambitious reforms. Under proposals announced in a green paper in February, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) wants to replace the current youth secure estate with a network of “secure colleges”, with an emphasis on education, in order to reduce reoffending rates. Academy chains and free schools have been told they may be allowed to run the establishments, being paid for supporting young people on a payment-by-results basis. Tim Bateman, criminologist at the University of Bedfordshire, described the lack of DfE ministerial visits as “shocking” and suggested the department hadn’t been closely involved in the plans. “You have a government that is talking about transforming the secure estate based on an educational model, but to not have ministers from the department responsible for education closely involved is extraordinary. “Even if the green paper hadn’t been published, this rather demonstrates lack of concern by the ministry with responsibility for educating children if they are effectively ignoring the education of some of the most vulnerable children in society for whom we know educational failure and lack of attainment is a significant issue.” Rod Clark, chief executive of the Prisoners Education Trust, said collaboration between the MoJ and DfE is essential if the planned reforms are to be successful. “Justice ministers have said they want to see education at the heart of the youth justice system which we welcome, but to do this effectively it will be important to work closely with the DfE and that includes arranging visits across departments to meet with prison governors, education staff and the young people themselves,” he said. The information on ministerial visits came in response to a question from crossbench peer Baroness Stern asking which establishments in the youth secure estate Education Secretary Michael Gove or his ministers had visited since May 2010. Answering the question, Tory peer Lord Nash only stated that former children’s minister Tim Loughton visited Beechfield secure children’s home in West Sussex on 9 February 2012. It is not the first time the spotlight has been on the DfE over a lack of ministerial visits. In January, it emerged that Gove failed to visit a single youth project in his first two and a half years in charge of the DfE. The DfE has been contacted for comment.

Source: CYPNow

Social services for vulnerable children in England to be privatised

Serco may be among firms bidding for contracts as Labour show concern over removal of checks that safeguard standards

The government is planning to allow outsourcing firms to bid for contracts to manage social services for vulnerable children in England – while dropping laws allowing the removal of companies that fail to do the job properly.

A number of firms have expressed an interest in proposals that would allow them to bid for contracts managing foster care and providing other services for children in care.

But Labour says the plans would take away legal provisions that allow councils to remove a firm that has failed to meet national minimum standards. They would also relax the rules governing independent inspections of services that place and monitor children who are looked after by the state.

Concerns have emerged after two of the biggest outsourcing companies in Britain, Serco and G4S, were found to have overbilled the taxpayer by charging to tag offenders who were dead or in prison.

Lisa Nandy, the shadow children’s minister, said the latest plans would leave some of Britain’s most vulnerable children at the mercy of an unregulated private sector. She has written to the regulatory reform committee, which is considering a draft legislative reform order, urging it to reject the government’s plans.

“For the government to consider outsourcing a sensitive service such as foster care to the private sector, when we have just seen with G4S and Serco how a profit motive can have disastrous consequences for the public purse, is madness. The proposals remove many of the checks and balances required to ensure the safety of children whilst introducing the unchecked unpredictability of the market. They should withdraw these proposals now and think again,” she said.

Source: Guardian Online