Parents
who no longer teach children “right and wrong” are at the root of the UK’s
biggest problems, according to the man responsible 
for overseeing British
schools.
Sir
Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools and social care, said that
“hollowed out and fragmented families” where parents suffer a “poverty of
accountability” were responsible for a series of problems from addiction to
neglect, the Daily Telegraph reports.
And
the alienation of many children from their fathers only made the problem worse,
he said.
He
made the comments as Ofsted, the official body for monitoring schools in
England, published a national report on the state of social care, which showed
that almost six out of 10 councils are failing to do enough to protect
vulnerable children and revealed that 700,000 youngsters are growing up in
homes blighted by drug or alcohol addiction.
But
Sir Michael said child abuse and neglect was not the fault of local authorities
alone. Such issues were the product of a “social breakdown”, he added.
Problems
such as child abuse ran deeper than social services departments, he said.
“This
is also about society taking a view about where it stands on the social issues
which contribute to family dysfunction and risk to children,” he said.
“Abuse
and neglect do not happen randomly, they are the product of social breakdown.”
He cited figures that showed 100,000 children were being raised by people
addicted to hard drugs.
But
Sir Michael said many children were “alienated” from their natural father and
that this lay at the root of the wider problems.
“Some
people will tell you that social breakdown is the result of material poverty.
It’s more than this,” he added.
“These
children lack more than money: they lack parents who take responsibility for
seeing them raised well. It is this poverty of accountability which costs them.
“These
children suffer because they are not given clear rules or boundaries, have few
secure or safe attachments at home, and little understanding of the difference
between right and wrong behaviour.
“If
we believe that the family is the great educator – and I certainly do believe
that – and the community the great support system, then we as a society should
worry deeply about the hollowing out and fragmentation of both.”
He
continued: “Children [are] abused because their biological parents were long
ago alienated from each other and the new man in the house – often the latest
in a succession of men – is violent and resentful.”
And
he warned that the problems exposed in child abuse scandals were being deepened
by an apparent national obsession with “pussyfooting around” and “making
excuses” for bad parents.
A
series of cases have shown how opportunities were missed to save the lives of
children such as Baby P and Daniel Pelka, who was tortured and starved to death
by his mother and stepfather.
Sir
Michael claimed that, even in cases where children had died, social services
chiefs should not be sacked necessarily because the resulting turmoil was
making matters worse. The report portrayed a child protection system that is
deeply troubled, with one in seven councils judged “unacceptably poor” – a
figure that has grown in the past year – and only four out of 10 meeting the
grade of “good” or higher in inspections.
It
showed that a third of local authorities had lost their head of children’s
services in the past year and a “climate of turbulence” was making it harder to
address problems.
Sir
Michael warned that the social work profession was haemorrhaging expertise,
with morale near an all-time low and a looming “demographic time bomb” as a
large number of staff near retirement. He also said “incompetent and
ineffective” chiefs should be driven out, adding that many child safeguarding
boards that monitor them were “not worth the name”.
Christian
Guy, the director of the Centre for Social Justice, the think tank founded by
Iain Duncan Smith, said: “He [Sir Michael] is absolutely right, if we continue
to fail to recognise the importance of stable families we will continue to use
the state just to pick up the pieces.
“The
political community has overlooked the importance of that stability – we’ve had
family policies, gimmicks and giveaways but nobody has really got to grips with
stability as the root of many of these problems.”