Youth justice may eventually be brought within the remit of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), children’s minister Margaret Hodge has indicated. In her first speech since her appointment, at a Local Government Association conference last week, Hodge was asked about young offenders being separated off from mainstream children’s services.
She said this was not the intention. “Many of the services offered by the Home Office are working well and in the short term it would have been unhelpful to move them,” Hodge said.
“It may well be that over time we go further, but this is a huge chunk we’ve bitten off. Let’s get this right and make sure you are on the ground able to deliver integrated services.”
Hodge is heading a new directorate in the DfES which includes Sure Start and early years, the Children and Young People’s Unit and Children’s Fund, Connexions and youth work, the careers services, child protection and children in care, parent support services, family law, Cafcass and the court welfare service, homelessness and social exclusion among young people and extended schools.
One objective of the new unit was the mainstreaming into all services of the lessons of targeted programmes such as Sure Start.
Hodge said: “The opportunities we are developing for some children must be available for all children. That is partly about resources but it is also about all of us changing the way we work and changing the way we use existing resources. The cultural changes demanded of professionals to work in these new ways are difficult and challenging. So we must provide proper and continuous support and training to embed the new ways of working in the culture of the workplace. We must value the different strengths of different professional backgrounds, but recognise the importance of multi-agency delivery.”
Hodge said the Green Paper would include proposals to give a direct voice to children in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already established a children’s commissioner.
She apologised for the disappointment caused by the delay to the green paper until after the parliamentary summer recess but said the fact that the prime minister wanted to be personally involved in its launch was “a very good thing”.
