Coventry kids

As an voluntarily exiled Coventry kid I was curious to watch this evenings Panorama on the beeb, even though it includes Jeremy Whine. The subject was the child protection social workers at Coventry City Council. After getting over the fact that no one spoke with a Cuventry accent- am I the only one left?- I became engrossed in the programme just as some are drawn to watching horror films. But although, fortunately, there were no explicitly grisly horrors, the apparent every day story of Coventry City folk, and their kids, was well deserving an X rating. The social workers, with not a Citroen 2Cv between them, were each faced with as many as three times the recommended maximum case load and each case representing at least one child in danger, another potential "Baby P".

My good friend Passmore Edwards wrote, in 1850, that child delinquency was caused by lack of home life. Do they have homes that are homes, he asked? No, was his answer, they have places where they stay at night, eat, get scolded and whipped. Fifty years later, when looking back over his life, he said that the economic and moral waste produced by the neglect, disease, and death of children is incalculable. We should as a nation, either prevent or at least materially diminish the vast waste of child life in our midst, or say less about our national virtues.

We might have prevented the child killing diseases but it does not appear that we have made much headway on tackling neglect. The children we saw, or heard of on the Panorama programme were not the rowdy out of control hooligans so much in the news, just apparently ordinary little children let down by our society.