No.
That is the short answer, and it is on the front of the book. You are owed a longer one, because it is a fair question, and because the people who ask it are often frightened when they do.
Who decides
A social worker cannot take a child from their parents. I can’t. My manager can’t. The director of children’s services can’t either, whatever the letterhead says.
In England, only three things can separate a child from a parent who has not agreed to it.
A court order. A judge or magistrates decide, after reading the evidence and hearing both sides. The parents have their own lawyers. The child has their own lawyer too, and a Children’s Guardian whose only job is to say what is best for that child.
An emergency protection order. Still a court, still a judge or magistrate, but quick, for when waiting would be dangerous. It lasts up to eight days.
Police protection. A police officer can move a child to a safe place for up to seventy-two hours. The police have that power. Social workers do not.
There is one other way a child comes into care, which is that their parents agree. That agreement has to be real, and a parent can change their mind.
What the court has to find
The test is called the threshold. The court has to be satisfied that a child is suffering significant harm, or is likely to, and that the harm comes from the care they are getting.
Being poor is not the threshold. Having a messy house is not the threshold. Shouting at a social worker on your doorstep is not the threshold, which is just as well.
Even when the threshold is met, the court has to ask whether an order is needed at all, and whether something less would do. The law starts from the position that children belong with their families.
What social workers do all day
Mostly, we try to keep children at home.
That is the part nobody films. For every child in care there are several more with a social worker who are living with their own family, and the work is about keeping it that way: a nursery place, a parenting course, a debt adviser, a lift to the contact centre, somebody to ring.
When it works, nothing happens. No court. No headline. A child grows up at home and never knows how close it came. It is very hard to take credit for nothing happening.
Why people believe it anyway
Because sometimes a child is removed, and to the parent it feels exactly like theft. I would feel the same.
Because the system gets it wrong. It is made of tired people and thin budgets, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Courts have overturned decisions. Children have been left where they were not safe and taken from where they might have been. Both happen. Both are unforgivable when they do.
Because the file is written by us and about you, and that is a great deal of power to hold over somebody.
And because most people meet a social worker on the worst day of their life. Nobody thinks well of the person who was standing there.
If it is happening to you
Get advice early, from somebody who is not the council.
If you are the child’s parent and you have had a letter saying the council is thinking about going to court, you are entitled to a solicitor, free, whatever you earn. Take the letter to one who does family law.
Family Rights Group run a free advice line for parents and relatives in England: 0808 801 0366. They are independent. They are good.
Keep talking to your social worker if you can bear to. I know how that sounds. But the ones I have known would much rather be proved wrong about a family than right.
So
I say this so often that it ended up on the first page of the book.
The court makes orders. We bring the evidence.
And the snacks. Always the snacks.
This is a general explanation of the law in England, and it is not legal advice. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own systems.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: Things people say at parties