Review: Panorama- The child protectors

Only a few weeks ago the president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, Kim Bromley-Derry, said social care needed a "police, camera, action" style programme.

Obligingly the BBC gave us a taste of what that might look like last night when Panorama went "on the frontline" with Coventry's child protection team.

Bromley-Derry is right- it really did help demystify what social workers do.

We sat in on the calls, genuine and hoax; the daily decisions on whether to split families up or try to keep them together; the stress on social worker faces from the juggling act of too many cases, all of them urgent, and the exhaustion as they left the office each day.

We saw Sarb, a newly qualified social worker checking out an anonymous tip-off of child neglect. As she pulls up outside the door she sees something ominously like excrement smeared on the windows. What follows is a harrowing example of the sort of cases social workers on the frontline have to witness every day. Eventually the police have to be called in and the children removed.

Perhaps these kind of high-shock value incidents could be expected. But what was impressive was the fact the programme also showed the more subtle and sometimes far more difficult decisions social workers are faced with.

A single father who struggled with alcohol problems after his partner left him has had his four children taken into care. We see him trying so hard to get his life back on track- cooking for his children, making their beds and tidying the house. We see Lucy, another newly qualified social worker, talking to his eldest daughter, trying to work out if things have really improved and if it is safe to let the children return to their father permanently. As she points out, the stakes are high- the children have already been in care twice. She needs to be sure it won't happen again, for their sake.

But perhaps the most striking element of the programme was Sarah, with two years experience, trying to juggle 39 cases, three times the recommended amount. She is visibly upset that she can't give any of them 100%. When she is asked about baby P and Victoria Climbie the fear is etched on her face. "I just keep thinking, that could be me. That could be any of us".

Well done Panorama for a well-balanced and well researched piece that will hopefully go some way to improving the public image of child protection workers. It is desperately needed.