Murdered schoolgirl social worker 'was overworked'
It has been claimed the social worker in charge of murdered schoolgirl Anna Climbie's case was insufficiently supervised.
A Unison spokeswoman says Lisa Arthurworrey was also overwhlemed with work with 18 cases on her books, instead of her target of 12.
The union official adds Ms Arthurworrey had been told by senior colleagues to close Anna's case to cut her workload.
Colleagues are said to be concerned that Ms Arthurworrey, a relatively inexperienced social worker, was being made a scapegoat for what happened to Anna, instead of failures at an organisational level.
Pauline Bradley, a Unison shop steward in Haringey and a colleague of Ms Arthurworrey, says the social worker had been working under an excessive workload.
Ms Bradley has told the BBC: "It is really important that people realise that Lisa was working in a system where it was impossible for her to do her job well and properly, and it is not her fault that this child died.
"She had 18 cases when she should have only had 12 cases. The system that she was working in was very chaotic, it was managed in a crisis way, really.
"All the decisions that were made on the case, she did not make on her own, she made with her managers. There were conversations with two separate managers about closing the case.
"As far as I understand it there was a decision made in supervision twice to close the case. In the frontline teams, there's a lot of cases coming in, and there's a real pressure to get the cases through the system, to do the work quickly, get the cases through the system, and then close them".
Asked whether she believed children could be protected by the system, she said: "I think it is touch and go, I think people try, people work with good faith, people work very, very hard, but I think it's touch and go whether children are protected absolutely".
