There is a particular kind of institutional decay that is very difficult to name from the inside, because naming it requires the institution to acknowledge that its priorities have drifted so far from its founding purpose that the people it was built to serve are now, in practice, its primary obstacle.

We have arrived there. Not everywhere. Not in every school, every courtroom, every social work team. But in enough of them that the pattern is no longer deniable. The child has been marginalised by the systems designed to protect the child. The majority have been sidelined by an apparatus of inclusion that, in practice, serves the lowest common denominator and calls it equity. Common sense has been buried under bureaucracy and technocracy until it is no longer recognisable. Values have been replaced by compliance frameworks. Leadership driven by fear has displaced leadership driven by purpose.

Virtual signalling has taken priority over the child in the room. Perfectly healthy mothers are assessed as biohazards. Competence is treated as a threat. When a mother is literate enough to read the harms reports, to reference the professional literature, to identify the gap between what the system claims to be doing and what it is actually doing, that literacy does not produce gratitude from the professionals involved. It produces suspicion. The person who can see the failing is reframed as the failing. The reaction to abuse and incompetence is medicalised or criminalised, while the abuse and incompetence that produced it go unnamed.

This is fear-based leadership. It has one primary function: the protection of the institution from accountability. It is not neutral. It has a cost, and the cost is paid by children and by the mother who refuses to stop fighting for her child.

The psychology of success has been lost. We have built systems so focused on managing risk and distributing blame that they have forgotten what they are trying to produce. Not compliance. Not the absence of incident. Not a family who has stopped asking questions. A child who knows they are loved, who has been heard, who carries forward into their adult life the experience of having mattered to the people who were responsible for them.

That is not a complicated ambition. It has been made complicated by systems that placed their own continuity above it. Reclaiming it requires the thing that fear-based institutions resist most: the willingness to be honest about what has gone wrong, and to let that honesty change what comes next.