Who would want to be a social worker today?

Blaming them will help neither the profession nor the children whose lives may depend on them

The 100 or so recommendations to be published today in Lord Laming's two-part report into the Victoria Climbie case will no doubt receive as much scrutiny as all of the other reports that have been carried out in response to the deaths of so many other children. Lord Laming insists though, that this report will be different, and that it will finally signal a change in attitudes towards the protection of children at risk.

That very much depends on how much of it is taken up, and in what context. The next landmark for those concerned with vulnerable children will be the Green Paper next month which will draw on the Laming report and other submissions to cast a new emphasis on the protection of children in this country.

And certainly, the central suggestion in his report – that those professionals involved in child protection should work together as multi-agency teams out of the same office – seems eminently sensible. We have heard again and again about how lack of communications between departments allows children to slip through the net supposed to protect them. Centralising all those disparate elements at a local level would surely help tackle the communication problem better than anything else.

This idea is surely a better bet than that championed by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and viewed sympathetically by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Paul Boateng, which involves the insertion of a whole new layer of bureaucracy, answering to the Government and specialising in the investigation of allegations of serious child abuse.

The well-founded fear here is that such an agency, by its very nature, would become detached from wider issues of child protection. Conversely, all the other professionals involved in those wider issues might be reluctant to pass on cases in which evidence of abuse was slender.

Yet, there is one aspect of this suggestion that is attractive. The IPPR claims that such an agency would "help remove families' uncertainties about whether social services are investigating them or supporting them". This end would be achieved rather crudely by basically assuring parents that they were not under suspicion of systematic abuse because they had not been referred to the agency investigating this.

But at the same time, it is important to remember that one of the facts that makes the work of social workers so difficult, is that nearly all families approached by them resent them, whether they need help, are suspected erroneously, or are deliberately covering up abuse.

In fact, it is often the parents who feel wrongly suspected that are most angry and resentful towards social services. This means that lack of co-operation is par for the course, rather than the danger sign it might be in a society which did not attach such a stigma to the "meddling" from outside agencies.

Sadly, the other side of this coin of mistrust is that families seeking help all too often find that it is hard for them to get it. Kathy Evans, of the Children's Society, points to the way in which parenting orders have been working, to illustrate how counterproductive the one-way traffic of social help can be.

Many parents, according to the Children's Society, are told that they can avoid parenting orders simply by attending the parenting classes they would be obliged to if an order was enacted, voluntarily. When the parents take up this offer, they are more receptive to what the classes have to teach them, and often say that if they had been able to access such support at an earlier stage, then they would have jumped at the chance.

Clearly parents under stress have to start feeling they can refer to social work departments for help – and get it – instead of turning up on doorsteps like dark stars sent from other parts of the social control industry. Obviously such a sea-change would not have a direct impact on cases like Victoria's, but a less distrustful relationship between the adult public and social workers would make unco-operative behaviour more significant than it is at present.

Yet at the same time there is a growing belief among children's charities, including the Children's Society, that the emphasis placed by social workers on their relationships with the parents of vulnerable children, rather than the children themselves, is part of the problem.

In the case of Victoria Climbie this emphasis manifested itself in the case worker's belief that Victoria was the victim of nothing more than good, firm African child discipline. No attempt was made to talk to Victoria directly in order to ascertain whether this was really so. Admittedly, talking to an abused child about the way in which she is treated by her guardians, is a difficult sort of psychological interview. But being able to deal with such challenges must form part of the extra training of social workers that Lord Laming calls for.

In the case of Ainlee Walker, such an emphasis on the parents rather than the child was even more direct, and even more dismissive of the needs of the child. Professionals were simply intimidated by Ainlee's violent and aggressive guardians, and left them alone out of fear.

It is from this belief that children are not being heard or even seen by the agencies charged with protecting them any more, that calls for a children's commissioner come. The idea is that an advocate for children at the heart of government, with deputies in the regions, would be in a good position to start changing attitudes to children more generally. Certainly attitudes need to change – and the heart of government is a very good example of a place where attitudes need to change a lot.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland already have children's commissioners, but it is far too soon to say what effect their appointments have had. The desired effect though, is that such a concern for children's rights at the heart of policy-making would drive a more widespread change in attitudes towards children across society.

Children, some charities believe, are not being seen as people in their own right, but are still viewed as somehow under the ownership of their parents, or, when they are at school, as potential adults who can be shaped by a one-size-fits-all system into one-size-fits-all adult workers and consumers.

One of the great ironies of this observation, which I think is a correct one, is that the sort of one-size-fits-all adults our society concentrates on creating, are not the sort of adults who would be tempted by a low-paid, low-status, glamour-free career in social work. Again, Lord Laming is concerned with the status of social work as a profession, as well he might be. The public is rather sickened by the sight of social workers, confronted with the evidence of a dead child, turning to their workloads, their lack of resources and their stress as excuses for their failure.

But the fact is that so few people are attracted to social work now, that in some parts of the country vacancies are running at 40 per cent. it need hardly be added that the parts of the country experiencing such shortfalls are the ones in which most social problems occur. Social workers are finding it difficult to cope with the task they have been set. Blaming them for that will help neither the profession nor the children whose lives may depend on its sensible intervention.

d.orr@independent.co.uk