Three months after a decision is made, I often cannot tell whether it was a good one. Neither can a complaints panel. And that, not bad practice, is what most upheld complaints come down to.
I’ve written for Children & Young People Now about the patterns that repeat across statutory social care complaint investigations, and what services should do about them.
I’ve conducted more than 75 Stage 2 investigations across more than 15 English local authorities. Around half the complaints I investigate are partially upheld. The professional judgment is usually defensible. What fails is the process around it. The family was not told what was happening. The reasoning was not written down. Nobody checked the decision before it was acted on.
These are not findings about bad practitioners. They are findings about how services operate. Recording failures and communication breakdown appear in nearly every investigation I conduct.
None of this evidence is collected nationally. Hundreds of investigations a year produce detailed findings, and they sit in individual reports held by individual councils. Until that changes, we keep writing the same recommendations without asking why the same failures keep appearing.
The piece includes a five point checklist for practitioners and managers.
