EVERY so often the Department of Community Services goes through a horror stretch, in which one terrible case of child neglect or abuse quickly follows another. This is one of those times. The case of Dean Shillingsworth, found dead in a suitcase floating in a western Sydney pond last month, raised questions about the adequacy of the department's response to a family known to have problems.

Now similar questions have arisen about seven-year-old Shellay Ward, the autistic girl who was found last Saturday dead of malnutrition and dehydration in a filthy house. She had not been attending school, and the department was alerted to her plight by neighbours on several occasions. Yet it appears neither DOCS nor the Education Department was moved to act.

Yesterday another case came to light which involved fresh injuries to a 14-month-old boy who was also known to DOCS. It has been added to the list. The Minister for Community Services, Kevin Greene, has struggled to explain how exactly these cases managed to slip through the cracks. It has not helped his cause that he has had to deny he was asleep in Parliament on Tuesday. Whether he was or not, it looks an apt metaphor for the management of his department.

DOCS, it is true, has a fearsomely difficult task in detecting and managing cases of neglect. Intervention in families which are failing to cope requires sensitivity and emotional stamina given to few. Before it decides where to intervene, the department must sift through 240,000 or so reports of neglect to find those which most need attention.

The rapid rise in the number of reports - up 50 per cent in the past five years - has been generated by rules that require possible instances of abuse or neglect to be reported when they come to the notice of doctors, teachers, police and other authorities. Some have suggested that mandatory reporting overloads the department. Yet it is an important early warning of child abuse cases: to abandon it would be to admit defeat.

The department may not lack resources - it received a boost in funding in 2002 of $1.2 billion - but it is short of case workers. The Herald has reported that positions in regional offices of the department have remained unfilled for months. The economic boom apparently is giving suitable personnel the opportunity to seek work elsewhere. To add to the difficulty of its task, the department's performance is always judged in hindsight, when the whole world can know better what should have been done.

That said, however, if in NSW in the 21st century a disabled child known to DOCS - whose sister, in fact, was removed from the family - can die of starvation in her own filth, it is more than a slip-up or a bureaucratic oversight. It suggests some deeper problem with the department and the way it is organised, and with the broader bureaucracy within which it works.

Mr Greene has now set up a ministerial commission to see if services can be improved and case workers freed from other tasks. It will look at how DOCS works with other agencies, at its recruitment practices and ways to streamline court processes. Those are important issues, and they are worth examining. The commission may distract the department from its work, but given the well-grounded public concern, that is justified.

But why is the Iemma Government hesitating to make inquiry hearings public? Closed hearings simply invite suspicion that it knows there is something to hide. There is already little reason to have confidence in this Minister for Community Services, but he is only the latest in an undistinguished line. His handling of the issues in recent days has suggested that his top priority is the Government's and the department's image, rather than good management of a sensitive portfolio.

The Opposition has pointed out that the Government's record includes ignoring four successive Ombudsman's reports. The doubt about an open inquiry only heightens that impression. The people of NSW need to know the resources directed to protecting society's most vulnerable are adequate, being spent properly, and that the bureaucracy they fund is well directed, not least at the political level. After 11 years and a string of scandals, they have no reason for confidence.

Press the button to obtain your degree

The Worm is turning up everywhere. University students are using Worm-related technology which ensures they stay awake in lectures. This may dismay older readers with fond memories of sleeping off the previous night's excesses in the back row of a maths lecture. But these traditional learning methods, however hallowed, must make way for progress. Now, equipped with keypads, students will get to punch in answers to multiple choice questions. The great advantage is that students who can't understand English can participate. They may have only the haziest notion of what is going on (let us be honest - what is new about that?) but they have one chance in five of getting the right answer, earning a degree and becoming qualified professionals. This commendable development, so necessary at a time of skills shortages, also offers a concrete answer to that age-old question: what do universities teach students these days? Answer: A) Nothing. B) Nothing much. C) Can you repeat that? D) Don't know. E) All of the above.