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For Bob Holman, writing his first Perspectives column, the new vogue for merging children's services with other council services is not in the best interests of deprived children

Hertfordshire Council is combining its education and children's social services. Other local authorities have merged child care with housing, leisure and health. Corporate management reigns.

The reforms are made under the banner of modernisation. It is rarely acknowledged that joint services existed before the war - often with dire results. When I was born, the responsibility for deprived children was shifting from the voluntary societies towards statutory bodies like public assistance departments or health services. But the favoured body was education departments with education officials responsible for neglected and delinquent children committed by the courts and for placing them in foster homes and institutions.

During the war, multitudes of children - I was one of them - were evacuated. Separated children came under the national spotlight. The Monckton Report in 1945 investigated the death of a foster child who had been inadequately supervised by education staff. The Curtis and Clyde Reports in 1946 concluded that deprived children could not receive specialist help within services whose main function was to help different client groups.

Their recommendations led to the establishment of children's departments whose sole brief was the care of deprived children. They succeeded in promoting an occupation of social workers skilled in child care but, in the early 1970s, they were absorbed into social services and social work departments. Organisational theory had decided that size was the crucial factor.

So now in the 21st century, ever larger services are the name of the game. Hertfordshire will have a department of 2,200 staff overseeing 250,000 children with the laudable aims of running schools, promoting unified case work, and prevention. It claims that duplication will be lessened. I fear that the outcomes will be detrimental for social work and vulnerable children for two reasons.

First, ever larger organisations will lead to ever more complicated bureaucracies. Bureaucracy can be a useful servant but it is an onerous master. In his forthcoming book, Bill Jordan explains that social services departments have tended towards a "dreary, mechanistic, systematic, technocratic approach."1 Even more so, the new super-dynamism. The making of personal relationships will not thrive.

Second, social work will be marginalised within departments where education, housing or health are the main activities. As in pre-war days, it will be less valued as a distinct activity. Lacking directors with social work qualifications, it is difficult to see the continuance of leaders who have a national influence.

So what is required? I am not calling for a nostalgic return to children's departments. I do propose the creation of family departments responsible for children at risk of abuse and those whose quality of life is far below the rest of the population. This service would embrace child care social work. In addition, it would include youth services and the funding of local community projects both of which are essential for diverting youngsters from trouble and supporting disadvantaged families. The advantages could be as follows:

• A focus on families in need. Clearly, the well-being of such families does require education, health, and housing services. But these are more likely to be reached from a service whose staff give them, and them alone, their time and commitment.
• The development of social workers equipped with family and child care skills. Freed from excessive bureaucracy, they would be able to use the skills to make supportive personal relationships.
• The stimulation of community family support to enable more children to stay with their parents and neighbourhoods.
• The definite identification of social work as a means of helping families, as an occupation which deserves proper funding, and as a reservoir of practitioners whose voices should be listened to and heeded by policy makers.

The prospect of these moderately sized services limited to a specific user group will no doubt provoke the objection that they will duplicate and not communicate properly with other services.

I started as a child care officer by living on the patch. Co-operation with other welfare agencies was not a problem because we met frequently at the grassroots level. Where was this? In Hertfordshire.

1 B Jordan, Social Work and the Third Way, Sage Publications, forthcoming