As we suggested a couple of weeks ago there's a witch hunt going on in social services in the wake of the Baby P tragedy and Sharon Shoesmith, head of children's services at Haringey, has now been fired without compensation (although her lawyers, if they're engaged, might have something to say about that). The overly-confident Sharon, brandishing her Ofsted three star inspection result, was the obvious witch. Good job we don't burn them at the stake any more. By the way, does anyone know the name of the PR firm that was brought in to help Haringey with its response to the Baby P verdict? They had a year to prepare for it and still got it wrong. And how much were they paid? But, as a senior person in education told Mr Blatherskite the other evening, this is all tosh. Anyway children's secretary Ed Balls has got his victim's head on a spike and so therefore he thinks he's solved the problem. But will anything be different? The social services, police and Ofsted (God help us) have got to work together on the ground, by making co-ordinated visits to problem families and working together to provide sensible solutions to deal with the problem (which doesn't necessarily mean ripping children away from their families). As it is, you get a junior social worker sent on their own to deal with what is very likely to be a highly intimidating social circumstance with the police and Ofsted nowhere to be seen. All these 'solutions', noisily announced by Ed Balls, just amount to more top-down management, sticking plaster to try to convince the voters that something is being done, when nothing really is. In the meantime lots of other children will suffer. As Shoesmith pointed out, you can't save all the kids if the parents or hangers-on really want to torture and kill them. It's not very politic to say so but it's true. But you can have a system in which social workers are supported and managers can actually concentrate on their case list, as opposed to dealing with stupid government targets and ridiculous IT systems that don't work in practice and deliver no useful results even when they do. So are we any further on, having secured a few scalps? Suspect not.