Child Protection

Eileen Munro is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, London, UK. With a background in both philosophy and social work, her work has focused on the reasoning skills needed to provide an effective child protection service. The work was taken up by many child protection services in several countries but, in working with management and practitioners to improve risk assessment and decision making, she realised that the individual decision maker is strongly influenced by organizational and social factors that also need to be understood in order to reduce error. A powerful framework for doing this is provided by the systems approach to investigating error that was developed in aviation and has been adapted to medicine in the US and UK. Professor Munro then worked with the Social Care Institute for Excellence in the UK to adapt this approach to use in child protection services and it is now being adopted widely in England. At the request of the Secretary of State for Education, she undertook a review of child protection in England and published the final report in April 2011, followed by a progress report in May 2012. Her extensive consultancy work with child protection services in higher-income countries as well as her academic work makes her well qualified to pull together an overview of the issues in child protection.