JUST four little words, but with huge significance. When a child has been killed or seriously injured at home, they are the answer to one of the first questions asked. “Known to social work,” the reports say. Well, there you have it.

Except, of course, you don’t. You don’t have an explanation. Those four words tell you almost nothing about the circumstances leading up to this terrible outcome.

After the fact, suddenly everyone’s a child protection expert. Every armchair social worker has the insight to determine which children are at greatest risk of harm, which adults are lying and which ones are telling the truth.

From reading newspaper articles, or the reports from public inquiries, it’s apparently always glaringly obvious that this child should have been removed from his or her home. What were the professionals thinking? Heads must roll!

Yet somehow, on the other hand, the very professionals tasked with looking out for Scotland’s children have been successfully framed as public enemy number one, “snoopers” intent on invading the privacy of nice, normal families and sharing information among themselves like gossiping fishwives.

Reader Douglas Turner wryly observed in yesterday’s letters pages that the people the Scottish Government seeks to designate as Named Persons – social workers, teachers and health visitors – are “not particularly appropriate MI5 material”, but it’s important not to underestimate the skill and experience required to identify risk factors in a home.

READ MORE: Call for Scottish Government to rebrand Named Persons scheme

Is it “snooping” when a health visitor picks up signs of an isolated single mother having post-natal depression, and schedules extra home visits? Is it “snooping” when a teacher notices a change in a child’s behaviour at school, and asks if everything is OK at home? Is it “snooping” when a social worker quizzes a mother about whether she is still in a relationship with a dangerous man? What if that worker, unsatisfied with the answer, asks to see a bedroom, or look inside a wardrobe? What if he or she concludes that a violent man is living in the home? Or a convicted paedophile? And, once this conclusion is reached, who needs to know about it?

The urgent need to answer these vital questions has been forgotten amid heated arguments about the intentions and operation of the Named Person scheme, and in the meantime confusion about who is allowed to disclose what is having real-world consequences.

The Sunday Times reported in June that Police Scotland officers are scared to share information at multi-agency risk assessment conferences for fear of breaching GDPR rules. Women’s aid groups compared notes and found wide variation across the country in terms of what details were being disclosed about the women, men and children at risk from the most serious harm. If these vital discussions are being hindered by confusion around information-sharing, what confidence can we have about cases in which the full picture can only be seen by piecing together clues, such as children becoming withdrawn, acting out or acquiring minor injuries?

These are the difficult questions with which over-stretched professionals must grapple every day. It might appear from tabloid coverage that there’s a clear line between “respectable” families and those in which children are abused – and that limited resources should be targeted accordingly – but we know this simply isn’t the case. And we also know that inadequate information-sharing has been highlighted as a key factor in inquiry after inquiry since the 1970s.

In his recently published memoir, retired social worker Alistair Findlay recalls his reaction to the death in 1974 of Perth three-year-old Richard Clark, whose social worker he had trained alongside. “We were all stunned,” he writes, “and I knew within myself this could have happened to any or all of us.” An inquiry into the child’s death found there was poor communication among numerous agencies involved with the family, and, as Findlay recalls it, “assumptions made that others were ‘doing something’ when they were not”. Publishing the inquiry in 1975, William Ross MP said the death “could have been prevented at several points by the action of any one of a number of people” and announced the beginning of urgent consultations.

Fast-forward more than 40 years, and the expert panel established to produce a workable code of practice for the Named Person scheme has thrown its hands up in defeat. Meanwhile, academic Tracy Kirk has called for the policy to be given a “rebranding” rather than scrapped for good.

With every fresh tragedy, critics of the policy are quick to shout that a Named Person would have made no difference, as if playing their political trump card is more important than grieving the loss

of a child. Perhaps now is the time for them to step forward with their own proposals for keeping children safe, and ensuring that any cry for help – in however small a voice – is answered.

I won’t hold my breath.