Alarm bells should have been ringing when Khyra Ishaq was suddenly withdrawn from school ten weeks ago.

She was one of six children aged between 12 and 4, living in a poor area with her mother and stepfather. That alone is enough to qualify her as a “child in need” – a status that prompts regular visits from social workers.

It is unclear what contact social workers had with Khyra and her family. The local authority has refused to comment.

There should have been contact. Her mother said she was taking her out of school to educate her at home because she was being bullied. The school was obliged to alert the local authority, which in turn would send an expert for a home visit to investigate whether she was up to the job, or had the time, given the size or her family. The family should then have been monitored closely.

This apparent lack of “joined-up thinking” between school and the local authority’s education department and social workers and child-protection experts in this case is precisely what the new system of child protection that came into effect after the death of Victoria Climbié eight years ago was designed to stop. She died because agencies were not talking to one another. Now, by law, all the relevant agencies – the school, youth clubs, the GP and social workers – must communicate. That means individual concerns that are in themselves minor do not go unreported. Taken together, they could build a picture of a child at considerable risk.

However, there have been numerous examples where this multi-agency approach has failed to work. The most serious was the horrendous abuse of “Child B”, a disabled four-year-old girl who was returned to her parents from foster care. Her parents, Kimberly Harte and Samuel Duncan, were given long prison sentences for cruelty, and an inquiry found that social workers had not listened to relatives and foster carers.

The system also suffered from a chronic shortage of trained social workers. It is a profession that, because of the nature of the work, suffers low morale and high burn-out rates. The shortage has not been measured nationwide, but Birmingham, where Khrya lived, has often been highlighted as having particular problems. Last autumn the city council said that 100 of its 430 social worker posts were unfilled after numerous experienced staff quit suddenly. The council even held an inquiry into why so many had left.

In Britain child abuse and neglect are considerable problems. They are closely linked with poverty, and child poverty is high.

But Eileen Munro, an expert on child protection from the London School of Economics, said that it was highly unusual for neglect to end in death. “Neglect is far more commonly associated with long-term, slow, insidious harm that produces an adult with a great many problems functioning in life,” she said. “It is not like physical or sexual abuse, which have dramatic incidents triggering a response. It is more of a slow deterioration.”

But she said social workers operating in very poor areas often missed the signs.

“They get used to seeing low-level parenting. That then starts to look average. They fail to appreciate how much harm it is doing,” she said.

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