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What do the proposals in the green paper on children 'Every Child Matters' mean for the professionals who will be charged with putting them into practice? Our team of experts assess the likely impact.

 

PAUL ENNALS
Chief executive,
National Children’s Bureau

The green paper, 'Every Child Matters', contains a great deal to be welcomed. The structural changes which it proposes should provide
a solid foundation for developing future services. Particularly encouraging is the emphasis on joining up services, including police and health, to share information and increase accountability.

Measures for protecting children acknowledge the vital role of preventive work and early intervention. And nobody who cares about children can fail to be heartened by plans to create an independent children’s commissioner for England - a move recommended earlier this year by the parliamentary joint committee on human rights.

As ever, though, the challenge lies in moving from rhetoric to reality. Although the government has played the long game with its commitment to initiatives such as Sure Start and the teenage pregnancy strategy, the lure of the quick fix is ever present. How tempting will it be to shift energy and resources from wider preventive work, whose results may not be seen for some years, to dealing with children in crisis?

The government may apparently have given up spin, but it has not ceased to care about media headlines - especially negative headlines about children. 

There is also the fact that the green paper has not addressed the growing tension within government between youth justice and children’s services.

The National Children’s Bureau has concerns that many services focus on crime prevention, rather than on the wider aim of supporting children and families in need. There is a danger here that if children are categorised as antisocial or at risk of offending, they may miss out on services to address the root causes of their behaviour, which may include mental health problems, difficulties at home or disaffection in school.

In short, then, while the green paper provides a good start in restructuring services, it does not yet demonstrate the government’s ability to deliver. We are still waiting for the radical and ambitious vision which would transform children’s lives and put them at the heart of our communities.

JENNIFER BERNARD
Director of children’s services at the NSPCC

The green paper starts where it should - with the interests of every child uppermost. All of us working with children need to remember that every child has the right to be healthy and safe, to make a contribution, to enjoy life and to be free of want. Education and training must start with a coherent philosophy and this one is properly aspirational.

The factual content of the green paper on training and education is generally well known. It talks about the advance in professional training to degree level, with a balance between academic input and practice learning, and different routes to qualification including workplace learning. It supports the need for child care worker to undergo continuous development and to base practice on evidence and reflective learning, supported by the General Social Care Council and the Social Care Institute for Excellence.

The basis for training outlined in the green paper is not rocket science either - although like rocket science it is not that easy to achieve successful take-off. To serve children well, staff from different agencies and professions need to communicate effectively and understand each other’s practice.

Every Child Matters “encourages” in a pretty directive way multi-disciplinary teams, multi-agency integration in children’s trusts and single assessment processes with a lead professional co-ordinating plans.

To achieve these we must all work harder than ever on those elusive qualities of trust and mutual respect, linked with a deep commitment to joint working. And shared training and common learning can be a big help provided that managers make multi-disciplinary approaches a priority.

Overall then, Every Child Matters provides a welcome reminder of what is good practice for those of us who care about children and their welfare. It may not be new but it supports positive change. It reinforces the responsibility of us all to practice in the best interests of children whatever our professional role or agency remit through putting the child at the centre and managing our shared contributions in a coherent reflective way.

OWEN DAVIES
Senior national officer Unison

It’s great to hear ministers standing up for social workers. Stephen Ladyman started the trend in his article in 'The Times', and now education secretary Charles Clarke and children’s minister Margaret Hodge have used the launch of the green paper to say what we have wanted to hear for a long time. Social workers are expected to do a hugely difficult job for low wages in understaffed teams without adequate training and yet, when things go wrong, they are pilloried in the media.

So there is much in the green paper that Unison members are likely to welcome. The focus on the needs of children as the heart of the process for planning and delivering services, the emphasis on building multi-disciplinary teams, the recognition that effective partnership working has to grow out of local experience, the establishment of the new statutory “safeguarding children” boards - these are all proposals that the union is likely to support.

But this is a green paper so Unison will be ensuring a wide debate among frontline staff so we can submit their views by 1 December. And any debate is likely to focus on the controversial areas.

We are happy to back the proposal to split social services for children away from services for adults - and to merge them with education. This is an experiment that has already been tried in a few local authorities, and has not yet been evaluated. Is there a danger that, in pursuing the laudable aim of joining up social services for children and education, we will damage the link between those protecting children and those helping parents and carers with mental health problems.

Unison backs the children’s trusts experiment and we are working with the civil servants who are steering the project to get the workforce arrangements right.

But now - before the pathfinder trusts have been properly set up, let alone evaluated - ministers decide that they want to see trusts established everywhere. And is Ofsted the right body to take on co-ordinating inspection arrangements? Our experience of the way it treated staff when it took over “early years” inspection is not encouraging. We have doubts that they understand the nature of the social care workforce.

The big question is funding. No number of bright ideas will transform services on their own. It is the social care workforce, current and future, that must be won over to support and implement the changes. That will require a real injection of new money - to increase staffing, to boost salaries and to offer improved training opportunities.

If necessary Unison will ask the awkward questions about funding so that all the good ideas really do transform the lives of our children.

ROGER BULLOCK
Chairperson, Centre for Social Policy, Dartington

If the comprehensive service for children and families proposed in the green paper is to come about, a complementary relationship between prevention, early intervention, treatment and subsequent social prevention will be necessary. This will have to be underpinned by a robust and extensive research base.

Effective prevention is not easy to achieve. Social and medical reforms are littered with examples of unintended disasters. We have to be certain of what we are doing, both ethically and clinically, when we intervene to stop problems that might happen in the future from developing. People will be hurt and public money wasted if the causal processes producing the problem and the associated probabilities of harm are misunderstood.

A tiered service approach also requires validated methods for assessing children’s needs and setting thresholds that define seriousness and justify responses. These are essential to ensure that the right services reach the right people and that there is consistency within and between agencies.

Without an adequate research foundation and a common language to understand what happens to children and why, the resulting services could be whimsical, supply-led and open to undue political and financial constraint.

I believe that four strands of research are needed to inform the intended developments. First, there has to be epidemiological information on the incidence and patterns of need within the general child population. Second, robust evaluations of interventions, based on methods that compare outcomes for different groups, are required.

Third, an accepted method of analysing services has to be in place so that we can make meaningful comparisons of what children and families receive. Fourth, we need to know more about the conditions for successful innovation, implementation and inter-agency work as so many good child care intentions get diluted or come to nothing.

When we are confident about the aims, methods and likely success of the new services, issues of management, training and physical location that support effective service delivery can then be addressed.

JANE TUNSTILL

Professor of social work and head of the Department of Health and Social Care, Royal Holloway, London University

Calculating the potential of new measures to improve the welfare of children usually involves a choice between naive optimism and cynical pessimism - a choice influenced heavily by the political claims made for each new change. Every Child Matters provides a current example of this phenomenon, with politicians convinced, and in some cases convincing, about the magic properties of their new plans.

There is a causal link between individual child tragedies and new structures, whether it is Dennis O’Neill and the Children Act 1948 or Victoria Climbié today. It is in these circumstances that the balance between the promotion of child welfare and the protection of children is itself most at risk. Historically, “new” systems have themselves introduced additional sources of damage to child welfare.

I feel the green paper avoids this pitfall. This is due largely to the refusal of Lord Laming to give into pressure for, in his own words, “an urgent reaction with flashing blue lights”. Instead, he called for “an approach to children that identified their needs at an earlier stage and responded to them”.

The Victoria Climbié Report set the stage for the green paper’s refusal to separate child protection from wider polices to improve children’s lives, and its emphasis on universal services as a prerequisite to more targeted interventions. It has many very positive elements such as the introduction of the five outcomes; the emphasis on early intervention; a determination to support parents and carers; and an acknowledgement of both the need for “workforce reform” as well as the current contribution of child care professionals,  including social workers.

Inevitably, the real challenges lie in the implementation. And of course the key element, as yet unknown, is the sum of money to be allocated - and the method of doing so. What we do already know from evaluations of programmes such as Sure Start is the complexity of setting up new partnerships at the local level, and that co-location is itself no guarantee of a happy ending. Nor, in isolation, is the appointment of a children’s commissioner. The green paper deserves to be properly resourced.