Child care review calls for single national IT system

Lord Laming's report comes only months after councils complete implementation of local ICS applications

Children are not being supported properly

The Integrated Children's System (ICS) project, intended to improve collaboration between child welfare professionals, is hampering social workers rather than helping them, and should be replaced by a single national system, according to a government-commissioned report on child protection in England.

The recommendation comes just months after most councils completed the implementation of local ICS applications, often after long delays.

The latest report by Lord Laming follows the Baby P case in which a 17-month-old boy in the London Borough of Haringey died after months of abuse despite being seen 60 times by child care workers. Laming had previously written a similar review highlighting systemic failures following the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie in 2000. One of the results of his original recommendations at that time was a new integrated computer system to improve collaboration.

Local authorities in England and Wales have recently implemented the latest set of mandatory enhancements to ICS, which aims to provides a consistent framework, method of practice and business process to support all social workers, despite serious delays at the majority of councils, revealed last year by Computing.

But Lord Laming's latest review of child protection found that ICS systems are counter productive in many cases.

While emphasising that practitioners and managers are committed to the principle of an electronic system and have no desire to return to paper-based case management, the report highlights many concerns with the current system.

"Professional practice and judgement, as said by many who contributed evidence to this report, are being compromised by an over-complicated, lengthy and tick-box assessment and recording system," says the report.

"The direct interaction and engagement with children and their families, which is at the core of social work, is said to be at risk as the needs of a work management tool overtake those of evidence-based assessment, sound analysis and professional judgement about risk of harm."

Local authorities are having to find ways to work around their systems, often introducing parallel systems to capture data, with the result that the benefits of the system are being undermined.

While the problems have less of an effect on local authorities that ensured practice strongly informed the implementation process of new systems, stronger IT leadership is needed centrally to support those that did not, the report says.

The report calls for the Department for Children, Schools and Families to undertake a feasibility study within six months with a view to rolling out a single national ICS.