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Should the main aim of services for children be to keep them out of trouble?

For the government the answer is clearly yes. In the past three weeks alone the Home Office has announced pre-crime panels, an expansion of parenting orders, an extension of antisocial behaviour orders, an antisocial behaviour unit, and the removal of child offenders from their families to special foster carers.

In the summer Home Office minister John Denham announced a new regime of identification, referral and tracking (IRT) for young children deemed at risk of either offending, becoming teenage parents or abusing drugs. Now it looks as if a green paper, due to be published in the new year, will explore ways of reorienting all services for children and young people so that they support this agenda of intervening with those assessed as "at risk".

So what does the future look like according to the minister of state for crime reduction, policing, community safety and young people?

Denham says: "We are starting from the recognition that services are frequently not well joined-up at present - that the same young person may be of concern to a number of different agencies but there is no way that the agencies would know of each others' interest, let alone be organised effectively to respond.

"The green paper is to assess where we are at the moment - where we will be in a few years' time if we do nothing because obviously the Connexions service is developing and Sure Start is extending to other areas of the country. We also have behaviour improvement programmes in schools and extended schools so there is quite a lot happening to young people over the next few years - we need to take account of where that is going to take us, then look at how we join services up more effectively."

Identification, referral and tracking is expected to be up and running everywhere by next April. There has been no piloting and no formal consultation with parents or with children and young people, although forthcoming guidance will apparently exhort local authority chief executives to involve children and young people in developing local IRT systems.

Denham dismisses concerns that the impact of labelling and stigmatising young children may outweigh the benefits of any intervention, and says the proposals have met no significant resistance from the agencies or professionals involved.

"The dangers are far greater when services don't work together effectively. It is not the system that prejudices the child, or the fact that they are on a database of shared information. It is the fact that the child is showing through their behaviour, their educational development, self-harm, whatever it may be, real signs of risk. That is what you are identifying and you are identifying it so that you are able to respond properly."

He believes it is important that people use the kind of information that is going to be on a tracking system positively as a way of meeting the needs of those young people. "But I'm confident that the vast majority of professionals will want to do it in that way. If teachers feel they will be able to deal with a child with behavioural problems without having to exclude them they will want to do that.

"I think we are not doing a good job for children at risk by saying that the risk of stigmatisation - and you can't dismiss it entirely - is so great that it is actually better for schools, probation, social services, Connexions, Sure Start projects and so on to all work blindly without any knowledge of what the other is doing".

Denham cites the example of the Scottish reporter system for identifying young people at risk. "I am not aware of evidence that it is regarded as failing because by going to the reporter they have been labelled. In a sense they have been labelled, but the test is are you then better able to meet their needs?"

One of the first questions for the green paper will be how wide to cast the net, he says. "If you cast it too broad you can't respond to all the young people you are picking up. If you cast it too narrowly you will miss some young people who are at significant risk."

Everything will be up for grabs in the green paper - children's trusts, child and adolescent mental health services, education, social services, and criminal justice.


Although the minister is leaving it to local agencies to design their own schemes, he anticipates that there will be a tiered response to individual children with a light touch for those who warrant it.

"If, for example, a school was worried about a child's behaviour and social services were worried about the family, and the police were coming across the same child and perhaps their siblings involved in criminal damage, the ability to identify that common interest might well provoke a common response from those agencies without any formal system of referral. At a more serious level of concern we'll be wanting to look at something like a panel, so you can put a package of measures together for the young person, whether that's care, or a parenting order, or making sure they have a social worker, or the service they need from child and adolescent mental health services."

Denham accepts that many of the children identified as being at risk because of bad behaviour are the same children who under the Children Act 1989 should have been supported as "in need". In practice, local authorities have never used their money to implement the preventive aspects of the Children Act, and social services departments have focused their resources mainly on suspected cases of child abuse. Now the government is expecting mainstream health and education as well as specialist spending to be re-oriented towards children and young people at risk of becoming a public nuisance.

"Those local authorities that have done the most in this area have begun to check whether their services are being delivered to those young people most in need or whether there are other drivers in the system which perhaps distort service provision towards those who perhaps are not so much in need."

So does he envisage that in a few years the assessment framework for children in need will have been incorporated into an assessment of children at risk? And is the government now needlessly re-inventing the Children Act's wheel? Or is it instead redefining the objective from increasing children's individual welfare to reducing unwanted outcomes for the rest of us?

"Whether there would legally be one assessment is a very big question. The way we are approaching the green paper is to look at policy, and the outcomes we want to achieve - and then look at how the law should reflect that. But certainly you don't want a lot of overlapping assessments by different people because that is going to bring the same confusion back into the life of the child and its parents as you can have at the moment.

He stresses that the issue is not purely about crime. "It is not purely about bad outcomes for the rest of society from the way young people behave - it is just as much concerned that they will end up as runaways who get drawn into prostitution or drug abuse, or have unwanted pregnancies. What I do think though is that you cannot say that all young people are equally at risk of ending up with those problems. It is widely recognised that there are some risk factors, some early behavioural symptoms, which indicate a much greater likelihood of running into trouble in the future - and I mean trouble in the broadest sense. And it is that group of young people that we want to pick up."