Thank You Essex Children’s Social Care

I do actually mean that, i’m not being sarcastic, like everything I write, it’s true.

I have just finished 15 months of counselling and it has been absolutely fantastic and i’m over what happened.

I’m just completely over it. I currently weight 9st 5lbs, which in itself is amazing as I just didn’t lie about my weight. I’m in a healthy weight range but only just.

I’ve recently lost a ton, which has been crushing me since this all started, it’s gone, I can breathe. Apart from sometimes a small panic when I wake and think i’ve forgotten something and then realise the crushing weight of what happened has gone, i’m in a very good way.

What happened has made me stronger, not just a little bit, but by a huge amount. Not having gone through it in the first place would have been best, but it happened, and it made me stronger. I am now the best ever version of myself.

I was writing this blog because I had to, the weight of what happened was crushing me, it was suffocating me, I couldn’t breathe, writing this blog helped me, it was my coping mechanism and I needed it. I don’t need it any more.

It was a toxic relationship between me and this blog, at first I was hoping that Essex Children’s Social Care would actually investigate, i’ve talked at length about the short apology that would have made all of our lives better and would have negated the need for this whole blog.

Most importantly it would have stopped one of my children attempting suicide, and the serious mental health issues that child has been facing ever since, every day is still a huge struggle for that child because of what happened, we are a very strong family unit and child is being very well looked after and loved by all of us.

I needed to be heard, I needed acknowledgement, I needed Essex County Council to stop being cruel and put things right for my family. This blog alone proves that things went very wrong and ECC actively covered things up and did everything they could so they would not have to accept responsibility and apology. They wanted no record that things could have gone better, so from the very start we were never going to get an apology.

I know how they work now, it’s awful, and there are some really bad people in positions of authority at ECC that should not have any control whatsoever regarding vulnerable families.

The exact reason for the outstanding Ofsted and all of awards is the reason why they are so terrible at what they do.

You do not have an outstanding children’s services, you just have an Ofsted outstanding rating, it’s not the same thing.

The best school in Harlow, going by parents and children’s views, is one with only a good Ofsted, it’s not one of the outstanding ones, one of which is a terrible terrible school. The headmaster stated openly before they got downgraded from outstanding to good that they would not get outstanding at the next inspection. He knew exactly what he had to do to get an outstanding, he just refused to do it. His reasoning was that it would not be conducive to the students to do what Ofsted expected to get an outstanding rating. He’s a man who does solely what is best for the students and honestly doesn’t care about much else.

Not the best exam results around, because he doesn’t refuse to let some students take GCSE’s. If it’s in a students interests to take GCSE’s, even though their results won’t be at the top end of the scale and will bring the whole school scores down, that student will have the opportunity to take GCSE’s. All of the SEND students go to the school because he accepts them all. Each individual student is important, not him getting love because he scored outstanding on a tick box exercise.

They will never give up on a child, even when it would make the school look better as a whole if they did.

Essex Children’s Services are the opposite, willing to sacrifice children in order to receive praise from others, receive kudos, and feed their ego’s. It’s a toxic environment and a dangerous one for children as without allowing themselves to admit they have failed children, and at least gaining learning from that, it means that things will get worse and worse. All the while being portrayed as getting better and better with the more people who praise them, the more awards they get, together with the outstanding Ofsted.

Living their best lives at The Social Work Awards on the 4th November, in the same month a murder trial regarding a baby that was on a child protection plan when he was murdered is taking place. I find that utterly distasteful, I just couldn’t do it.

They are a good case study on how you can look like you are winning when you are utterly failing.

Everything i’ve been through doesn’t matter now, i’m over it and i’m stronger for having been through it and i’m grateful that I went through it in a weird way, I wouldn’t be the person I am now if i hadn’t, and i’m really liking how strong I am. I’m in a really good place at the moment.

So what do I do now?

This blog was about my need to be witnessed, I needed someone to hear what happened, hear our pain, acknowledge it all.

The bottom line is that now that has happened, I have no need for this blog, if every single post disappeared from this blog right now, i’d shrug my shoulders and carry on with my day. I do not have a need for all of the posts i’ve made to still be online and public.

The question now is what I WANT to do. That is still very much in the air, I think i’ve figured out what I want to do, but my options are wide open.

With regards to what happened, i’ve stated many times that I haven’t even looking into suing ECC over what has happened, the amount of paperbased evidence I have is huge and undeniable, it would be a sure thing. Not to mention the evidence of harm caused. I’ve just spent about £700 on counselling, it was £10 per week, so financial cost as well. Still not going to pursue that for all the reasons i’ve previously stated.

It’s more than possible my children will pursue that route at some point, they have years to decide, plus we have yet to find out the extent of the harm caused with regards to the impact on their lives. I’ll support them in whatever they choose to do, but it’s not my decision to make.

What I have enjoyed doing throughout the time i’ve been writing this blog are the things that I have not written about. I’ve got lived experience of social work, specifically child protection. I’m an expert by experience and i’ve used that.

One of the things I found most frustrating was that Essex Children’s Social Care are just totally uninterested about any learning they could gain from our lived experience. Trust me, I have a lot to offer in that regard.

I am incredibly easy going, I never lose my temper, I am a confident speaker and I speak clearly and from the heart and share my lived experience in a way that is easy to understand what happened, and easy to see the huge emotional, mental, physical, and financial impact what happened has had on my family.

If anyone thinks i’m a shouty mess, that couldn’t be further from the truth, i’d even be polite to anyone i’ve mentioned in this blog, shouting and being rude doesn’t get you listened to.

People listen to me, organisations listen to me. SWE have a national advisory forum for instance, they act as a critical friend, people working in social care and those with lived experience. Well they had one person who had lived experience, the rest were professionals. I wasn’t impressed with that and told them, a few days later they were advertising for more people with lived experience to join.

I thought i’d give it a go. I got through to the last 12 I think it was, where you go through interviews, it should have been in person in Sheffield, but for obvious reasons it was virtual. A whole days worth of things. It was brilliant. Clearly I didn’t get picked for the forum, that would be even clearer if you’d seen those who did get picked. The feedback I got as to why I didn’t get picked was spot on. After the day of interviews it was clear to me that I should not get picked, my reasons were because others were way more suited. The feedback detailed why I wasn’t picked which obviously didn’t mention that others were better, but said what my strengths were, one of them was that I was clearly passionate about social work, and why they didn’t pick me. They totally nailed it. I still feel incredibly smug about the whole thing if i’m being honest.

They listened to every single thing I said like I was some kind of expert in the subject, which I guess I am,

There were some other things I said they needed to change, they listened to me. There are a few things which have my mark all over them.

I have spoken to other organisations, i’ve said things about my lived experience and they have listened intently.

I’ve been approached by a lot of service users, to be expected when you write a blog like this. The only thing I have never done, and never will do, is give advice to someone who asks what they can do if social care are actively involved. That would be dangerous. Also i’ve never posted information regarding anything i’ve been told by a service user.

Firstly, it’s to protect myself, everything i’ve written is the truth, in a defamation case my defense would be that it’s the truth, I cannot be publishing hearsay as the truth when I have not witnessed it myself.

What people tell me is the truth, no doubt about that, but I have to protect myself, and also them. Not splashing someone elses business on these pages when it could cause serious damage to them.

I’m the ideal type of person who should be sharing their lived experience, i’m a good speaker, i’m not afraid of speaking out, even in a room full of people, i’m well spoken, i’m very calm and never get angry.

I’m intelligent, hang on a minute, just had a message from Messrs. Dunning and Kruger about some kind of effect? Not sure what that is about. Though they also want to talk to a lot of people from west essex social care regarding some of the things they purported to be experts about. Seriously though, I am intelligent enough to talk about our lived experience and answer questions, and do all of that.

One of the things I want to do is to be a part of SWE’s social work week by delivering a talk and question and answer session or whatever. The learning that can be had from our lived experience is priceless, all of it is so valuable to anyone with an interest in social work to learn from. I am passionate about social work, and I do have the experience to help others increase their knowledge. That way it helps everyone, LA’s, social workers, service users, and anyone else.

I’ve already done so through other things i’ve done. I would have to change things up, not say names, or even name the local authority. I would absolutely love to have a session during social work week. It won’t be next year however. You have to submit in a couple of weeks, which would mean putting my lived experience into an outline so they can make a decision on if it’s worthy. I’d also need to know how long it would be, and also let them know how it would be delivered, it would have to be online, and how people could register for my event.

I’ve got no idea about all of that, even better would be if I could find an organisation or a professional who would partner with me.

I just want to be able to tell as many people as possible what happened, and the extremely simple things that would have prevented it, and/or prevented it from escalation. Go in depth as to what should happen when things go wrong. Why it should be treated by the local authority as a very valuable learning experience and not a terribly bad thing that needs covering up. Also showing them what happens when you push to cover things up and attempt to take away a service users voice when harm has happened, it just makes you want to shout louder and fight. Nobody wins that way, especially the children. They shout just as loudly as I do.

There also needs to be something that covers multi agency working. Two separate professionals who were at our meetings have no been subjected to regulatory action. One has been suspended, the other is under a conditions of practice, not sure if the final hearing has taken place. The conditions are so severe that she will not work with those in place. With one of those, the local authority knew they had been put on admin only duties, not allowed to see patients, while an investigation was ongoing, and still let her have input. Despite the fact she hadn’t see my children in over five years, while refusing to contact those who had seen them in the last year and had actually examined and tested them. So that is two different regulators. With the one I wasn’t involved with when I found out the regulator was involved I was going to contact them with our experience, but it would be useless without the help of ECC being open and honest about what happened, which they never will be.

It’s why, sooner or later, probably sooner, children’s services will implode, because they are not open and honest about anything. That they could not stop me writing this blog shows that, all the evidence proves what i’m saying is true, they have seen it, they know it’s true, they just refused to be open and honest and apologise. Most importantly, they refused to learn, to stop it happening again, to improve multi agency working, which is absolutely dire, it’s terrible.

They don’t need things to go right, they just need to tick all the boxes and boost their ego by everyone telling them they are great.

I’ll write another post about why ego can be a problem in social work. I have actually given a talk about that before. You can gain a lot of insight into what you read. Community Care Live was last week. It’s basically two days of full on learning and educating others. I found it fascinating that those from ECC spoke only about how awesome they are, how many people came to learn from them as their stuff is brilliant, it was all about how they must be great because everyone wanted to learn from them. Absolutely nothing regarding anything they had learned from others, not from anyone who was there from Essex. I looked at so many Tweets, and everyone else was all about the learning, while Essex was all about the ego, and how great they were that people wanted to learn from them because they are at the top and everyone else is beneath them.

This is a recurring theme throughout everything to do with Essex Children’s Social Care, they want praise, they want to be told repeatedly how awesome they are and state that to each other constantly. The working environment is full of toxic positivity.

I’ve been told that favouritism and nepotism is rife. It’s more about what someone can do for the local authority than what someone can do for the service users.

Their participation in the Social Work Awards and the £20,000 they have paid this year to be a part of that shows it’s all about ego. It’s not about the social workers who are finalists or win awards. They have those who are finalists attend, and about 30 other people attend as well. The rest of those at the top. They use those who are finalists and win awards to promote themselves on social media. They post photographs of the top people on the night, and do not concentrate on the actual finalists, they are secondary to what they are using the event for. It’s solely for self promotion.

So i’m now having to make choices, what I want to do with the blog as opposed to what I needed to do while writing most of it. I have to choose what I want to do with my new found strength.

For now i’m keeping the blog intact, everything i’ve written will stay because I want it to stay. This may change at some point, but for now I want it up.

It shows my journey, it shows the effects of what happened on my mental health, yes this blog deals with our experience but we are not the only family to have gone through this. I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to come out the other side even stronger than before.

Listening to those with lived experience of social work is vital to social work. This includes when things go wrong, in fact a lot can be learned from when things go wrong. I’ve learnt so many things by listening to those with lived experience, i’ve learnt a lot from listening to social workers. The focus should be on making things better for service users.

I’ve had experiences where what I have to say is treated as more important than what social workers have to say.

I am passionate about social work, and I do want to be a part of making it the best it can be by sharing my lived experience. There is so much learning to be had regarding what happened to us. There is learning to be had regarding why this blog is here. I’m pretty sure that ECC don’t like my blog and would love to see me take it down. It would be in their interests to do so, and it would have been so easy for them to have gotten me to take it down by just investigating my complaint, the moment they said they would my plan was always to immediately take everything down and clear the internet of any mention of this blog including google search. There is nothing stopping them investigating my complaint even now, apart from their refusal to ever admit they should have done something they didn’t do.

That is an incredible valuable part of my lived experience, despite it having almost broken me, and the cause of a complete very public mental health breakdown, I now find it rather amusing in a way. Everything I have done has been the direct result of the refusal to investigate my complaint. Everything I continue to do from this point will be a direct result of the refusal to investigate my complaint. All we needed was an apology.

Now i’m working on exposing The Social Work Awards for the complete load of corporate rubbish they are, as well as working towards setting up a petition to attempt to stop ECC spending tens of thousands of pounds of public money each year on corporate awards which is all just for vanity, as well as contributing to social work week by talking about how badly Essex Children’s Social Care failed us.

I’ve raised one concern about a social worker which is going through the regulator right now, i’m still planning to raise more, it’s a time thing, I don’t have the time.

While it is the ethos of Essex Children’s Social Care that makes the social workers on the frontline perform badly, the toxic positivity means that nobody is allowed to be seen to make mistakes, so when something is wrong, they will go to the ends of the earth to cover it up because it’s what those above want for reputation purposes. So while the blame is with all those in a position of authority, the social workers themselves should always act in the best interests of the service users even if that means going against the ethos of their workplace. Hence why i’m still going ahead with the concerns.

Those social workers in a position of authority are actually stopping the frontline social workers from doing a good job. They refused to even listen to my children’s lived experiences. Meetings have disappeared from existence, i’m rather positive that should be reported to the regulator, I have been told by a social worker that not recording meetings is against the legal framework that social workers have to work to. The meeting wasn’t recorded because all professionals agreed my children had been failed and things were agreed that would help my children. That meeting does not exist, what was said didn’t happen as they did not record it.

So to sum up, if Essex Children’s Social Care had done what was ethical and investigated my complaints and also my children’s complaints, I would not be doing any of this today. The apology we desperately needed would have helped so much, including preventing my childs suicide attempt, but that all happened and there is nothing that can reverse it.

I like the strength I have now, I like that I have no qualms in standing up and stating when things are ethically dubious, for example the Social Work Awards, and all the other corporate awards ECC waste money on. I wouldn’t have known about any of this if they had done what was in the best interests of my family at the start. If they had just said sorry. I would not have shared our lived experience, I would not be planning an event for social work week solely based on a harmful experience in order to educate social workers on how best to handle things when they go wrong.

I like the person I am now and i’m happy wnith what i’m doing and what I plan to do, I enjoy helping others and i’ve helped a lot of people with lived experience and others with professional experience.

So I am genuinely grateful to every single person mentioned in these pages, including all of those in Essex Children’s Social Care who have brought about the toxic environment that made this possible.

You sat back and watched me burn when I was almost suicidal and you could have stopped that, I even put my phone number on this blog, along with other contact details, plus my other contact details are all on the system.

Even that i’m grateful for now because it made me the lowest i’ve ever been so the only way was up. I begged for help on these pages, absolutely nothing. Noted by others is that they were so nonchalant about a lone parent with four vulnerable children had such significant mental health problems that could have impacted negatively on those children and they did nothing. Rather a few people told me i’d have social workers knocking at my door.

I said, correctly, that i’m safe because they care more about reputation than children and do not want mine or my children’s voices recorded in official paperwork which they would have to be if they had knocked at my door. My children are just as vocal as me about what happened.

I now find that incredibly amusing, also terrifying with regards to putting themselves and not children first.

Not like one of the professionals who helped me the most, a teacher no less. Shouted at me and ripped me a new one she did about my weight. She was not having me starving myself to death while my children were watching and told me all about myself. and just was always there supporting us, going to extremes to do that, just everything and anything to help my children.

I did write a gushing thank you letter to the school, this was solely because it was during the part of covid where a few parents were sending those copy and paste stupid letters to headteachers and the school were weary about them, so I felt a little something to lighten the mood was in order.

She didn’t need a thank you to her boss, she got her reward just by doing her job and seeing how well my children were doing.

She would easily win a teacher of the year award if I nominated her with what I stated to the school. However, if i’d done that, the police would still be trying to find my body.

So i’m incredibly excited as an expert by experience and excited about the impact I have already made, and the impact i’m going to make with my newfound strength and soundness of mind.

I’ve got a wealth of knowledge and i’m eager to share that with absolutely everyone who wants to learn.

Sometimes stupid sayings are true, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I am excited to be sharing everything we’ve been through with those who want to listen and learn, I cannot put into words how much of a warm feeling I get when I think about sharing our experience with a room full of people with a professional interest in social work.

I’ve spent most of the past two years aiming everything at those who are more focused on their own reputation than they are about anything else, even damaged children, those who don’t listen and will never listen. Those who had free reign over investigating our complaints as it was a corporate complaint and they write the rules for that. They just made things up, so they didn’t have to.

I also feel I now have power over it all, i’m choosing to do things, I could choose to do nothing and that would also be fine, i’m now choosing instead of being led by a need.

Looking forward, everything is looking good regarding the path i’m taking and i’m happy with it.