There is a line in the book that I keep coming back to.
The file doesn’t know Billy. The file knows what happened to him. It’s not the same thing.
I did not set out to write about recording. Nobody does. But it is what the book turned out to be about: the distance between what happened in the room and what went on the system afterwards.
Why we write the way we do
Case notes are written in the third person, in the past tense, in a voice that belongs to nobody. “Home visit completed. Child seen alone. No concerns noted.”
There are good reasons. A note might be read by a judge. It has to be fair to a parent who will dispute it. It has to separate what you saw from what you think, and that is a discipline worth having.
In the book, Heather takes the word “seemed” out of one of Maisie’s notes. “That’s your assessment, not an observation.” Every manager I have had has said some version of it. They were right, and I was cross for a week each time.
What gets lost
But something goes missing in the translation.
“Child presented as guarded” is accurate. It does not tell you that he sat by the door with his coat on for forty minutes, and took it off when the toast came.
“Mother was hostile” is accurate. It does not tell you that she had been told, by three workers before you, that somebody would ring her back.
“Placement is stable.” For whom? Who said so? Did anybody ask the child?
The file records events. It is not good at people.
Who is going to read it
Here is the thing I did not understand for years.
The judge is not the most important reader. Nor is the manager who audits it, or the inspector, or the next worker.
The most important reader is the child, at twenty-five, or forty, sitting at a table with a box of paper, trying to find out what happened to them and why.
Adults who grew up in care can ask to see their records. Many do. For some of them it is the only account of their childhood that exists. There are no baby photographs. There is no aunt who remembers. There is a file, written by us.
What do they find? Too often, a list of their worst days, in the language of risk, by strangers who spelled their name wrong.
Writing for that reader
I am not saying drop the discipline. Keep it. Observation first, opinion labelled, everything dated.
But you can be accurate and still be writing about a person.
Put in what they liked. What they were good at. What made them laugh. The name of the dog.
Put in what they said, in the words they used.
Put in why. What was tried first. Who fought for what. That it was nobody’s first choice.
Put in that somebody was glad to see them.
Some people now write their notes to the child. “Today I came to see you at your foster carer’s house. You showed me your room. You had chosen the colour yourself.” I was suspicious of it at first. I have come round. It is very hard to write something careless when you are writing it to their face.
What I ask myself now
I picture the child the note is about, grown up, reading it aloud at a table.
Would they recognise themselves?
Would they know that anybody liked them?
It takes about two more sentences, and for years I did not write them, and I cannot go back and put them in.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: How to love a social worker