it would probably be wise to know what to be scared of.
I first started writing this back in November and never finished it. I thought that it may be time to publish it though, given that I spent a while the other evening going through this for a friend. There may be other ppl with the same questions as well.
Contactpoint is being introduced to professionals (note here, professionals just means anyone working with a child who is going to require contact point access, it doesn’t imply any particular level of qualifications, experience or even common sense) working with children as a tool. This is an accurate description. A machete is a tool too. It can be used for good or harm, and ContactPoint will be much the same. It is a directory of services involved with a child, for many children it will list a place of education, a doctor, maybe a dentist, and that may well be about it. As a side effect, it will out every home educated child in England (only England, it could be time to make a mad dash across a border, pick a border, any border 😉 ) but as there is no money coming along with it, it’ll probably be a while before that has any discernible effect on the streets as it were. It does NOT contain case information, there are no gaps in it for that type of information. Merely contact details of the ppl who do hold the information in their own case management systems.
So, in a good use situation, a child who is carted to several different A&Es by carers attempting to confuse a trail of abuse, should be highlighted by this unusual pattern of contacts, particularly if the child is already known to Social Services. It will still rely on Social services then getting in touch with the individual at each A&E to follow up the admissions, so it won’t necessarily protect the child, but it will prevent the “we couldn’t know” defense of incompetent case workers. Yes they could. (Although I suppose this assumes that the carers give the correct name and address for the child on admission, or the entries won’t tie up in the database. Hm, think I’ve just spotted yet another flaw, and I suppose this is one that would be prevented by ID cards, but I can’t see them bringing them in for children just yet. Probably children need them more tbh, and then they could be ritually torn up when you hit 18.)
CAF – the common assessment framework, is a different beast entirely. It is also referred to as eCAF as it is soon (or already has?) become electronic as well. This is the questionnaire with the questions that ppl get upset by, such as about happiness and religion and all sorts of other stuff. The idea of it is particularly for children/ service users who need to access multiple services and the idea is that instead of spending their time answering the same questions multiple times, they answer them once with the lead professional and then that set of answers travels with them. It will be useful if it is used properly but I’m betting there will be a lot of services that won’t look at it and will ask their own questions anyway.
My guess is that CAF is more open to abuse than ContactPoint, but that the majority of ppl are never going to encounter it, while ContactPoint is more ubiquitous and thus will actually be abused more frequently. Hope that that’s of help to someone.
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