The problems

Having worked in social services for more than 25 years, 10 of those at CYF, I would make the following observation of Minister Tolleys’ view that CYF is failing too many kids and needs to be overhauled.

CYF does many things very well and in particular, the investigation and assessment of alleged child abuse.

What it does not do so well is support foster parents, get into the psyche of the kids it places into state care, and connect with the abusive families.

I believe there are many reasons for the ‘‘in care’’ failures but the three main causes are:

Social workers doing more than half their time on computer work.

CYF isolates its staff by forcing all and sundry to connect via the national call centre.

Most importantly, its work force is mainly university educated, middle class, white, social work registered females.

It has always been my belief, that long-term care work and foster parent support should be in a separate structure, away from the urgency of the investigation work and its high priorities.

That separated work could then look for a different type of social worker.

I would look for Maori males and females to make up half the workforce, to reflect that half the kids in care are Maori.

The staff would be community workers as opposed to Social Workers (with their university degrees) and would have life skills like the school of hard knocks, having brought up a difficult child, worked in other caring areas etc.

Unfortunately, based on the recommendations of an elite review panel, I’m picking further failures and reviews. I read your lame excuse for not publishing the daily sharemarket report. This item of widespread interest is published in other dailies, a number of which are sister publications to The Southland Times.

When you did provide this information it was often too small to read and you’ve never provided any market commentary as do your sister organisations. It seems to me that you place way more importance on horse racing which suggests that you consider gambling a better option than informed investments.

While on the case can I also say that I find Chicane’s cartoons contain very little to amuse and are an embarrassment to Southland. Our sister publications have also discontinued the table for the time being, although, as we said, we are trying to source another supplier of the sharemarket information – Editor.