An Ofsted Inspector Harming a Child

While working as a social worker in Durham, Jan Edwards participated in separating a 6 year old girl from her father. The child was so distressed by the separation that she cried herself to sleep, wet her bed, needed psychotherapy and eventually self-harmed.

The names of the three social workers involved are:

Jan Edwards  SW45941

Margaret Ross  SW59676

Helen Williams  SW71374

Just to be clear about Ms Edwards' role in this separation, she didn't physically take the child away from the father, it was the mother who did that. But Ms Edwards took no action to stop the mother doing it and she made no attempt to reunite the child with her father even when it became clear that the child was suffering significant psychological harm.  At the very least it was negligent - Ms Edwards was employed to protect children not harm them.

But it went further than that. One of Ms Edwards' staff, Margaret Ross, gave the mother lifts to and from the courts during the subsequent private law case, she chatted with the mother before and after the hearings and she even laughed at the father as he tried to speak with the judge. It was quite sick to see a social worker laughing at a father who was only trying to minimise the suffering of his daughter.

Anyone who reads what this child went through can see that she did not consent to being separated from her father.  Everyone acknowledged that the father was not harming her and that the child loved him. The truth is that the father had been protecting the child from an abusive mother, but feminist social workers such as Jan Edwards do not accept that abusive mothers exist. There was even the stark fact that the mother had two children by two separate fathers and had taken both of them away from the fathers. She'd done it twice. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence could see that this was a problem with the mother, not the fathers.

The correct course of action would have been for Ms Edwards to phone the father and tell him where his daughter was.  The father would have been able to comfort his child and end her distress.  But Jan Edwards did nothing. The father even came to see Ms Edwards and spent an hour desperately asking for her help. Ms Edwards' arrogant response was to tell him to 'seek legal advice' and that she would not respond to further correspondence from him. Well, the end result of Ms Edwards' lack of action is that the child is now self-harming.

It is not known why Jan Edwards treated this child so badly.

Jan Edwards is now an Ofsted inspector and in a position to assess the competence of other children’s services departments.  Ofsted should not be employing someone who has a history of harming a child.

The aftermath

Very little is known of the child’s welfare after that initial period of distress.  There are, however, two emails showing that there was continuing distress four years later and the child went through a grieving process due to the loss of her father.

A year later there were signs of parental alienation.

And the most recent information is that she started self-harming.

What you read above is child abuse by a social worker.