The setting of targets is a notoriously bad way to assess performance in complex systems, especially when it is difficult to work out which response actually makes a positive change.
Lets see if I can illustrate this,
Imagine any child growing up in society, that child is subject to myriad influences which cannot necessarily be determined to be good or bad, that’s because of context, one action at a certain time is good, the same one at another time might be disastrous, and you can add in a lot of luck or complete chaos theory of you want to call it that way.
Some children,- maybe most - will grow up and be well balanced individuals, or perhaps be socially functional though not perfect. A few will not, they will fail at school, and become difficult - ending up in special measures attracting social worker intervention. Yet somehow many of those will still turn out fine - the social worker may take credit, but perhaps it was a simply inspiration at sport that did it, or maybe they suddenly became interested in gardening, or whatever. It could even be more nebulous than that.
The local social services will certainly report that their intervention had the desired effect and chalk one up to their targets, however its almost certain that they had nothing at all to so with it, and in any event they had no effective means whatsoever of influence or control. Any good department would find a way to divide this particular case into small parts and count it as several successes, whereas with a less successful outcome, we may find that suddenly this case did not meet the criteria for social intervention after all.
The tendency will be for organisations to game the system, they look at the things they can directly influence and control - threshold criteria are often used, and individual managers who can utilise this effectively find their careers on an upward trajectory.
You will find large numbers of management consultant nonsense that spout how to deploy ‘Key Performance Indicators’ but these are exclusively based upon management systems with simply and predictable loops with feedback loops for learning and evaluation.
The sorts of work that safeguarding agencies deal with simply cannot fall into such simplistic management models, the external and internal influences are not known, the outcomes unpredictable, so it is no real surprise that he officials in those agencies decide to interpret the rules for themselves in order to be evaluated by politicians as high performing.
Given the option of doing something effective but hard work without a predictable outcome, we find that these officials are lazy, and greedy - they seek the rewards whilst not delivering anything other than some charts and numbers that they have largely fabricated.
A public enquiry is needed, not just into the agencies or the staff, but in the way we set targets and interpret the so-called data that is deemed to be effectively measuring performance.
For these abused children and their parents, it will be very hard to remember which official they spoke to and what they were told, and very much harder to prove it.