Child protection work and excessive bureaucracy are diverting school nurses from their key role of promoting children's well-being, argues a report. The Children's Commissioner for England says nurses are increasingly having to deal with cases rejected by social workers.
Of 800 nurses surveyed, 40% said they were too often dissatisfied with social workers' responses to referrals.
Council leaders urged ministers to invest more in local services. The nurses questioned said they were finding it harder to successfully refer children at risk to social services because of some councils' increasingly high thresholds for child protection intervention. And this had led to school nurses undertaking some of the early stage child protection work which used to be carried out by social workers, they said.
A fifth of school nurses said they felt their child protection caseload, paperwork and other activities associated with it was limiting their capacity to carry out other duties.
