Knowledge and skills.
The knowledge and skills needed by social workers in protection work can be defined, taught and trained. I will start with the skills that are most often lacking. The most obvious one is the lack of evidentiary skills. Social workers do not seem to know what evidence is reliable and what is not. They cannot distinguish between factual evidence, eyewitness evidence, expert opinion evidence, hearsay, conjecture, assumption and rumour. Crown counsel should be screening out the weak items in the spectrum of evidence and counselling moderation. This was done in the B. case, but the director ignored this counsel. If the social workers only proceeded on factual and eyewitness evidence, cases could be shortened and of course expert opinion evidence should not be accepted without rigorous process.
