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The main thrust of the Report of the Panel of Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Jasmine Beckford was two-pronged: the underlining of the legal responsibility of a local authority for a child placed in its care by a Care Order; and the need of social workers, armed with a Care Order, always to focus on the child when working with the child's family.
The first of these points was expressed by the Report in terms of ‘the personal relationship between the local authority as the trustee-parent of the child and the child in its care’ (p. 16). The second, practical expression of such trusteeship stated: ‘It is axiomatic that the protection of the child can usually be achieved by working with the family, of which the child is an integral part. But the focus must invariably be on the child’ (p. 294). It was primarily the failure of the social worker and her supervisor to exercise their responsibilities towards the Beckford sisters which was the major flaw in their work. The flaw resulted directly from a fatal misdirection of their efforts.
During the twenty-seven months when Jasmine Beckford was ‘home-on-trial’ the social worker concentrated all her efforts on the parents, on the implied assumption that a positive change in the inter-personal behaviour of the parents and perceptible improvement in their parenting skills would spill over, to the lasting benefit of the child. They never saw their task as being founded on a child-protection service.
The Panel of Inquiry found that neither the key worker nor the health visitor (or indeed their respective supervisors) were either callous or indifferent to the child's welfare. The social worker indeed compiled a meticulous record of every visit to the Beckford household (whether effective or ineffective) and in it reflected