If the structural changes heralded in Every Child Matters and the Children Bill are to add up to more than just another administrative reorganisation, they have to be mirrored by changes in the way staff work across professional boundaries.

Hence alongside the development of children’s trusts, civil servants in a new unit in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) are developing a new pay and workforce strategy embracing everyone from teachers and Connexions personal advisers to health visitors and youth offending teams. The central idea is to bring together the many disparate professions working with children by establishing a common core of occupational standards and training.

Paul Ennals, chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau, believes there are big potential gains for children in developing a new children’s profession. "Many of the scandals of the past 20 years can be attributed, at least in part, to the lack of a common understanding of children’s needs," he says. "Some professionals have been trained to talk to children and to understand the complexity of children’s lives. Others haven’t. When staff from different backgrounds work together, the outcomes for children will be much better."

Skills sector council
Ennals has been appointed by the government as shadow chair of a new skills sector council for the children’s workforce, covering professions not already covered by a skills sector council, including children’s social workers, educational welfare staff, Connexions, early years workers and foster carers. As well as establishing the new skills council, his remit is to work closely with existing skills councils for health workers, playworkers, teachers (the Teacher Training Agency) and youth justice workers to prepare the ground for a transformation of training for professionals working with children.

Ennals is emphatic that what is being proposed is not some kind of generic new profession and that the distinctive skills and knowledge of different professionals will be preserved. "What we’re talking about is a generic core and some sense that everyone is part of a children’s profession, but with a high degree of specialism beyond that." He draws an analogy with medicine, where doctors share a common ethos and approach to patients but may also have a very high level of specialist training and knowledge.

Foundations vital
The skills council proper is to be set up from April 2005, when Ennals will hand over the reins to a new chief executive and a chair who will almost certainly be an employers’ representative. He is doing the shadow chair job because he believes that getting the foundations right is critical and because the government wanted someone who can represent the interests of children, young people and families. Other members of the shadow board include representatives from local government and other employers in the sector.

Owen Davies, national officer at the trade union Unison, is the TUC representative on the shadow board. His perspective on workforce reform is coloured by his unhappiness about the way in which the government transferred responsibility for children’s social care from the Department of Health to the DfES earlier this year without consultation. "There are a lot of people who feel anxious about working out of a schools-dominated education department," he says. "They feel they have a set of skills and competences which people in education don’t value or understand."

But the change is now a fait accompli and Davies recognises there are significant benefits for staff in being part of a universal profession. "We’re very keen that people should have qualifications that recognise that skills learned in one area can be transferred to another. He also hopes the workforce reform process can be a vehicle for improving training. "We want to see front-line staff getting a better deal with training. You can’t provide better services without improved pay and training."

Low pay must be addressed
Rita Sutton, regional executive officer at the Pre-School Learning Alliance which represents some 15,000 pre-schools as well as running 30 neighbourhood nurseries, welcomes the move towards recognising child care as a profession but believes it will be meaningless unless the problem of low pay is addressed. "We want staff to have as many training and career development opportunities as possible," she says, "but there has been a feeling that we’ve trained people up and then they move into better paid jobs in other sectors, for example as teaching assistants."

Sutton points out that the projected 180,000 shortfall in child care staff cannot possibly be met without improving pay. "The fact that there is a new unit [in the DfES] looking at pay and training is encouraging. At the moment every setting has its own pay scales. Staff often don’t get paid if they take a day off work to attend training."

Although the teaching profession might be one of the main beneficiaries of reforms making it easier for staff to move upwards and sideways, the teachers’ union the NUT can see no merit in plans that might also make it easier for people to leave teaching. A spokesperson says: "Our role is to encourage people to become teachers. There’s a shortage and we can’t afford to lose any more."

Views from the professionals...

Sarah Lacey, a teacher with 18 years’ experience in the classroom, welcomes the idea of making it easier to change between professions. "A few years ago I really felt I needed a change," she says. "My first choice was to go into social work, but I would have had to retrain and I couldn’t afford to take a year out of paid employment."

Lacey believes it would be valuable for teachers to be trained to take a broader view of children’s needs. "To teach effectively you need to understand a child’s interests and what motivates them. We have children with terrible social problems who aren’t being dealt with. You are put under so much pressure to get results but school and education doesn’t mean anything for them. It would be good to put the child-centred approach back into education but it’s hard to see it happening."

Sandy Shears, a Sure Start programme manager, can see many benefits of joint training for different professionals. She says: "One of the first things I did as programme manager was to arrange shared training for everyone. People have a lot of assumptions about how to work with families and children based on the professional background they come from. People also fear that somehow there is a diminution of their skills."

She adds: "The government’s endorsement of shared training acknowledges that we need a different approach to working with families. We have to get away from the notion of hierarchy and recognise what different professions have to offer."

Bonamy Dame worked as a nursery nurse and play specialist in a children’s hospital for 13 years before deciding to retrain as a children’s nurse. Part of the reason for switching was that she had reached a ceiling in her profession: "I couldn’t progress any further. The only option would have been for me to have become a manager based in an office, which wasn’t what I wanted. Even as a manager the top salary is only about £16,000."

Dame says many early years workers would transfer into other children’s professions if they didn’t have to start again from scratch. "My experience didn’t count. I even had to spend six weeks in a nursery. It was very frustrating."