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Main points from Children Bill

Special report on reaction to the Children Bill

Background information on the Children Bill

Community Care news editor Lauren Revans interviewed children's minister Margaret Hodge about the new Children Bill. This is a full transcript of the interview:

Lauren Revans: You have said there will be some flexibility around children’s trusts. Do you just mean in relation to deadlines?

Margaret Hodge

Margaret Hodge: We’re not legislating around children’s trusts. We’re legislating around duties to co-operate and we’re legislating around enabling different bodies to pool their budgets. But I think we would expect most local authorities to have a children’s trust by 2006, and all by 2008.

I have a vision of what I think a children’s trust would be. But equally I recognise that this is at the cutting edge of new developments, and we need to learn what works and we need to learn from what works. So I think our policy on this will evolve and change over time. You’ll find different solutions in rural areas and in urban areas, and in areas that have got a unitary authority and areas where you’ve got a two-tier authority. And we do want some models to emerge.

The vision is that the key stakeholders that impact on children’s lives jointly commission the services for children in their area, bringing in not just those who hold budgets but importantly the voluntary and community sector too. And I would encompass in that all the education services that remain with the LEA, the children’s social services budgets, the children’s health budgets, and then I think all the work that’s done around youth justice and the work that Connexions partnerships do. All of that ought to be encompassed in a children’s trust. That’s my vision.

Now, what I accept is that there’s different local needs, aspirations, structures, environments, populations.

We’re absolutely clear that our agenda for children’s services is inextricably tied to the school standards agenda. I think they’re two sides of the same coin. You’ll only get high standards if every child achieves, and you’ll only get real inclusion if children achieve well in education.

So I’d quite like to see a model where a school, or cluster of schools, becomes maybe a mini children’s trust and commissions services for the population within that cluster of schools or within that school itself. That’s the sort of model we’d like to see tried.

We’re not prescribing. We’re not saying there’s one thing. We’ll evaluate as we go along, we’ll learn from what works, and then we’ll reflect on that as we develop the joint commissioning capacity.

LR: Some people are concerned that too much power could be going to schools.

MH: The director of children’s services will have responsibility for a merged education and social services budget. So you’re talking about a new world. And that distrust between the schools’ world and the social care world is one of the areas of distrust that we are trying to break down. This is a coming together – not a takeover – with the interests of children at the heart of everything we do.

LR: But the most vulnerable children are the very ones most likely to be outside the school system in the first place, either through exclusion or truancy. How will these children be helped by schools taking the leading role?

MH: That’s a legitimate issue. Those who don’t fall within the school family, you’ve got to ensure that the children’s trust provides for them specifically because they may well be among the most vulnerable. Of course I accept that. And that’s why
we’ve also said you’ve also got to have multi-agency services being delivered from a GP surgery, from a youth centre, from a children’s centre. It doesn’t have to be a school.

However, we want to build confidence in schools. I know some parents have had a bad experience of schools and don’t find school a welcoming place or a positive experience. We want to break that down. That’s part of what this is all about. And that’s one of the challenges we’ve got to work through over the coming period.

Schools are the most valuable asset that we waste. Good buildings, wonderful equipment, terrific facilities - they should be used for the wider community. And, if our vision is right, they can become a focus for enabling the strength of a community to be built.

So I think there are a lot of agendas that can come together there. But, equally, we’re not being dogmatic and it may well be that some children’s trusts will emerge in different environments, and services will be delivered as multi-agency services in different places. It may well be in youth centres, it could be in doctors surgeries - all sorts of places where people feel safe and comfortable coming, and also non-stigmatised.

LR: Many of the current children’s trusts pilots are very specific, often tailored to one small group of children, such as those with mental health needs or those with disabilities. That is very different to a children’s trust that covers, at the bare minimum, education, social services and health for all local children. What lessons do you think you will able to take from the pilots that will be of any use?

MH: Don’t ask me yet. They are very different. They were started probably a little bit before we’d completely developed our thinking around the green paper. But we’ll build on that. We’ll learn. We are building in a strong learning and evaluation stream into everything we are doing.

LR: Do you think everyone is ready to go for the children’s trust model? Those carrying out the narrower focus pilots obviously thought that was the way forward, but now they are being asked to do something quite different.

MH: It’s an evolvement….

LR: …well, it’s a bit more than that, if you’ve only started with one tiny aspect of children’s services. And some councils – such as Manchester – have also told us they are not going to go down the children’s trust route and don’t seem to have grasped that it is going to be obligatory.

MH: I had heard that. All I would say is that this is a journey on which we have to walk together, with every stakeholder. In the end, one of the very important pieces of work I’m now doing is developing a very simplified set of targets for local authorities that will inform the CPA and also standards for the Children’s National Service Framework. So we are developing, right through all children’s services, a common interlocking set of simplified outcomes/standards which will relate to the five outcomes which children have said matter to them.

Children’s services will be inspected in a joint inspection framework which Ofsted is developing with the other inspectorates against those standards, which are based on those outcomes.

So all authorities will be expected to deliver not just the outcomes for children which we believe will come through joined up services, but they will be inspected as well as to how well their services work together.

I think that’s what will drive a lot of the change. And if Manchester is confident it can meet the outcomes we want and demonstrate the joint working and the working together across professions in another way then, as long as they achieve those outcomes, that’s what’s crucial. In my view, that will require co-operation across authorities and joint commissioning. I don’t think they can do it without.

LR: You have said there will be extra flexibility around the director of children’s services post too. Can you explain what you mean by that?

MH: The flexibility is firstly about timing. We have said again most should have a director of children’s services by 2006, all by 2008.

The other flexibility is how they organise the post. So, the level at which they pitch it within the local authority is down to them, and how they organise the services underneath the director of children’s services will be down to them.

LR: But is it realistic to say there is flexibility in who can fill the post? I can’t imagine anyone other than a director of education, director of social services, or chief executive…..

MH: ….or somebody from health, or somebody coming out of the youth justice system.

One of the early things we are doing is, with some of the £20m change programme we announced to facilitate all these very complicated changes, developing a leadership programme, because how you lead this culture transformation is going to be really, really important.

Also, underneath that, how you organise yourself will be very different according to again whether you are urban, rural, unitary, two-tier, the strength of individuals who happen to be in place, PCT boundaries. There could be all sorts of things which will change the way they decide to do things. And I don’t want to prescribe.

LR: But there will definitely be one person – the director of children’s services – in every local authority responsible for all local education and social services?

MH: The buck will stop there. They will be accountable.

They will probably also be the director of the local children’s trust – although we haven’t said they necessarily will be.

If, for example, there is an inspection report, it’s got to land on somebody’s desk and somebody’s got to be responsible for doing the action plan. And that will be the director of children’s services. The person who will have to account for the well-being and safety of children is the director of children’s services and her or his staff.

LR: Apart from the £20m you mentioned earlier, will there be any other extra money to implement the bill?

MH: Money matters. But our reform agenda is about a much, much wider transformation than simply things that money will buy. It’s about the way people work, it’s how they work together, it’s the environment in which they work, whether it’s an extended school, children’s centre, children’s trust, whatever. Part of it’s about money, part of it is about much, much more than money. That’s the first thing

The second thing to say is that I want to eke value out of every penny we spend. For example, in North-East Lincolnshire, by introducing a common-assessment form, they reduced referrals to social services by 40 per cent.

If you looked at all the spending programmes we’ve got for children in the teen years – Connexions, drug action teams, teenage pregnancy teams, youth offending teams – we’ve got a whole plethora of professionals and I’m sure they spend more time than one would like in case conferences and less time than one would like working with children and young people. And, if we move to the lead professional, I’m sure we can eke better value.

And the third thing to say is that next year’s budget is a 9 per cent increase in funding for children’s social services. I hope that gives a demonstration to local authorities that we really do want to support a transformation in their services.

The final thing to say is that we are preparing our plans for the spending review, and that’s why we’ve said we’ll produce another document. We are going to produce a doument, probably in the late autumn, after the spending review outcome in the summer.

This is a journey. It is not an overnight sudden change. A lot of it is about culture.

LR: Obviously there are still a lot of vacancies in certain professions working with children. Do you think any of the plans set out in the bill will work without greater success in the recruitment and retention of staff, and particularly children’s social workers?

MH: No. One of the other threads of the work that we are doing is a pay and workforce strategy. That’s right across the children’s workforce, but clearly it’s focusing as well on children’s social workers. We have got to find better ways of recruiting, keeping and supporting – through training and other ways – talented people to come into children’s social care.

We’re doing better. The number of people coming in to train since we introduced the social work degree is up. And we’re looking at a whole range of levers: how you come into the profession, whether we can borrow some of the ideas that have been developed to keep the best teachers at the frontline (advanced skills teachers, advanced skills social workers), what we can do to value the work in child protection that children’s social workers do. So we are looking at a range of ways in which we can get more.

But I think there’s a much bigger problem in social work around the feeling that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. We have to raise the valuing of people who are carrying out such a demanding and tough job on our behalf. And that’s part of my raison d’etre, to talk up the value of working with children, and particularly children’s social services.

LR: You are planning to establish the development of multi-agency databases at both a local and national level. But the idenfication, referral and tracking trailblazers have come across a lot of problems around data protection and confidentiality issues. How do you intend to resolve these?

MH: What we are doing is ensuring that, in the context of the bill, there are no legislative barriers which prevent professionals from sharing information, What we’ve then got to do is the much more difficult task of trying to find the right balance between the privacy and rights of individuals and their families and the need to ensure children are safe and protected. And that’s a difficult debate.

How we organise that, and how we ensure not so much that information is shared but that the sharing of information becomes the means by which professionals can talk to each other and work together, we’ve got to do a lot more work on. Part of the work we’re doing is trying to learn from the trailblazers. But also, we’re doing a number of feasibility studies.

There are a lot of complicated areas, but this is one of the more complex areas. But, equally, if we do get it right, in terms of supporting the culture change that is our mission, I think it could play a very, very key role.

For example, a baby who is born with a low birth weight, you don’t need to have that fact on her record. What you have is the GP having a flag up there saying I have a concern about this baby. She then goes to a nursery and she’s a bit withdrawn so the teacher puts up a flag. She then goes to her reception school and she arrives with a bruise, so her primary school teacher flags up a concern. So what happens is that the system doesn’t hold that information but enables, because she has three flags up, those three professional to have a sensible conversation sharing the knowledge and information they have, so they can take an informed decision about what to do.

LR: So no details of the concerns raised will be held on the database?

MH: As I see it, all that will be on the database is name, address, name of GP, school attended, that sort of basic data, and then flags if there’s a professional concern.

The trick is ensuring that we have systems in place that do alert professionals at the appropriate time so they can talk to each other.

But it will always be professional judgement - you will never, never get away from that. In the end, we are asking a lot of these people to make difficult professional judgements, because if you make the wrong one you get a lot of blame.