The Child Minder

The promise from the new chief inspector of schools for a greater focus during inspections on the educational attainment of children in care is all well and good, but only if it leads to real change.

We are already only too aware of the poor level of education many children in care receive. The latest official statistics show that only 7 per cent of these children achieve five or more GCSEs at grade C or above. More than half leave school without a single GCSE or GNVQ to their name.

New research from the Department for Education and Skills on the activities and experiences of 18-year-olds reveals that, for those who leave school empty-handed, there is a 30 per cent chance that two years later they will not be in education, training or employment. This is the legacy of the 50 per cent of schools who the chief inspector says are failing to support looked-after pupils well enough.

A few days ago, the Home Office published the new Offender Management Bill. Clause 25 proposes that young offenders given a Detention and Training Order could spend the custodial element of their order in a children's home.

But, while the idea of young offenders living in a more nurturing setting is a welcome one - particularly given that it is coming from the Home Office - there are some fundamental problems with the detail.

Firstly, children's homes are the homes of children in care. To make them also the place of detention for young offenders would unfairly stigmatise looked after children and potentially place them at increased risk.

The Conservative MP for South West Devon has made me think kind thoughts about Tories, something which does not come easy to me.

Gary Streeter, who was drawn fourth in last week's parliamentary ballot for Private Members' Bills, has answered the call of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign and agreed to take forward their Disabled Children's Short Breaks Bill.

As I mentioned last week, the bill aims to secure families with disabled children the right to a break from caring. Co-sponsored by Liberal Democrat MPs, it is now guaranteed parliamentary time and will be debated in January.

We already know that the economic secretary Ed Balls thinks this is a worthwhile cause. Perhaps the long-standing friend and adviser to Gordon Brown will now assert his influence once more over the Chancellor (and hot favourite to become Prime Minister) to ensure the admirable aims of Streeter's bill are delivered, not just debated.

The news that the education secretary has lost his chief adviser on children's services to the Cabinet Office has its up side and its down side.

Making Naomi Eisenstadt director of the social exclusion task force should help ensure that children's needs are central to the group's efforts, and help raise awareness outside the DfES of the whole Every Child Matters agenda.

But, for the DfES, the future is less encouraging. As yet, there are no concrete plans to appoint a new chief adviser on children's services. The department would commit only to "considering further future professional adviser arrangements in the directorate". However, there are no signs of the department's chief adviser on school standards going anywhere fast.

Given the relatively recently widened remit of the DfES to cover children's social care as well as education, it is essential that those with knowledge of non-education matters are given an equal voice. Eisenstadt's expertise, particularly around Sure Start and the Every Child Matters agenda, must be replaced to ensure the education secretary and his department stay on top of the wider issues affecting children and families, not just those around educational attainment.

The patchy and inadequate support that disabled children and their families receive is now well documented. So it is essential that the Disabled Children's Short Break Bill, drawn up and published by a coalition of charities, is adopted by whichever MP triumphs in the private member bill ballot on Thursday to ensure the issue gets a proper airing in the House of Commons.

Ultimately, though, it is the Chancellor's support that is key here. The Treasury has promised to consider the needs of disabled children in its wider review of services for children and young people that will feed into the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review.

If it does its homework properly, the Treasury will find evidence of the financial hardship and physical and mental exhaustion experienced by many of these families and documented so clearly by Mencap. And it will appreciate how these problems are being exacerbated up and down the country by rising eligibility criteria for support as budgets are cut.

If it does it's homework properly, the Chancellor will have no choice but to announce more resources for disabled children and their families. For these families, next summer's Comprehensive Spending Review cannot come soon enough.

Terry Grange's comments at the weekend have created a stir. Should everyone and anyone who has sex with a child under the age of 16 automatically be labelled a paedophile or not?

For many, including children's charity Kidscape, the situation is black and white. But I agree with the Association of Chief Police Officers' spokesman on child protection and sex offenders that, in fact, the area is very grey. A 17-year-old boy who has consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend is not the same as a 40-year-old man who has sex with a 13-year-old child, and I defy anyone to suggest otherwise.

As Grange suggests, the label paedophile should be reserved for men who target prepubescent children. It should not be used in relation to teenagers who experiment with consensual sex with other teenagers.

Instead of labelling these young people, we should be ensuring that they receive the sex and relationships education they need to be in a position to have respectful relationships and safe sex. And for that, we return to the long-running - but so far unsuccessful - campaign to make personal, social and health education lessons obligatory in schools.

Since at least 1999, we as a society have known that one in 10 children in England, Scotland and Wales aged 5 to 15 has a clinically recognisable mental disorder. Yet more then half of the 250 GPs questioned in a survey for Norwich Union Healthcare recently claim their local NHS mental health services are still poor or very poor, and nearly all of them believe not enough is being done by the NHS to help teenagers with mental health problems.

So what is going wrong? The latest official figures show a 19 per cent rise in spending on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services between 2004/5 and 2005/6, and an 11 per cent increase in staffing levels. However, this is a slower rate of growth than in the previous year, and must be seen in the context of a relatively low starting point. The result is that, last year, we set aside just £46 per child for their mental health needs. That is less than I spend on my gym membership each month.

Tony Blair has let young offenders down. In what was undoubtedly his last opportunity to place youth justice reform on the legislative agenda, he has opted instead for yet more bills bringing in powers and duties to tackle antisocial behaviour and ignored a two-year-old promise of legislation to overhaul the youth justice system.

The only reference to young offenders in this week's Queen's Speech was the introduction of a "generic communty sentence" to deal with them. However, it is not yet clear what this will mean in practice. Any attempt to impose a blunt one-size-fits-all response would clearly be totally inappropriate.

If anyone wasn't worried about John Reid being mentioned as a possible contenter for the job of Prime Minister before, they should be now.

Two stories coming out of his department this week clearly demonstrate his hardline approach to social policy. First, we have the decision to deport a seven-year-old child trafficked into the country from Kenya despite the potenital opportunity to reunite her in the UK with her mother. Secondly, there is the news that the long-awaited consultation on proposed reforms to services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will leave them worse off than other children in care.

Jamail Newton was excluded from school at 11, dealing drugs at 14, and shot dead at 19, the Observer reported yesterday.

He was supported by London charity Kids Company after being excluded from his special school aged 11, where he was sent when his mainstream school couldn’t cope. His disabled mother was unable to look after him.

The Education and Inspections Bill received Royal Assent today, ushering in a range of changes around the way schools and local authorities interact, the way parents are made to take responsibility for their children's behaviour in school, and the way schools look after their pupils.

Anyone working in educaton who will be affected by the Act's duty on schools to promote pupils' well-being might be interested in a new document from Bristol on emotional well-being and mental health support for children and young people in schools. It was produced in response to growing concerns about pupils' mental health problems and the impact of these on behaviour in the classroom. For more details email David Goodban, CAMHS regional development worker for the South West.

At the Daycare Trust's annual conference today I met a lady who recently learned that her job as sector lead for childcare for London will cease to be come March. She was flanked by NHS childcare co-ordinators from various London NHS trusts who all told me the same story: without this post there would be no sharing of good practice between NHS childcare co-ordinators, no way of feeding back to or influencing policy makers, and no-one with a strategic overview. They also reported a gradual culling of NHS childcare co-ordinator posts across the country as primary care trusts grapple with budgets.

The irony of stumbling across this story at a childcare conference entitled 'Putting the passion into policy' was not lost on any of us. The education secretary Alan Johnson wanted us to believe it was "incomprehensible" that any political party would put the campaign for better childcare "into reverse". Yet his government's decision to merge strategic health authorities has resulted in the loss of at least one key strategic childcare post, while PCT deficits have resulted in the loss or adaptation of frontline NHS childcare co-ordinator roles. Both these developments are undermining the NHS childcare strategy.

I had assumed that the new campaign launched by Barnardo's today to raise awareness about the number of young people caring for a parent or sibling at home was largely about raising public understanding and support for this group of children.

But the survey of teachers commissioned to support the research suggests there is still a long way to go with them first! Although nine out of 10 teachers express concern that young carers might be falling through the net, half have no idea whether the young carers they teach are known to other teachers or the wider management team. And a quarter don't know if they have been identified by social services.

What does this say about joint-working and information-sharing in the real world? If teachers are concerned, why aren't they involving the school counsellor or nurse, or speaking to the child's family about getting help from social services?

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has angered disability rights campaigners by suggesting that it is sometimes wrong to initiate intensive neonatal care in very premature or seriously ill babies.

The college urged the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which has been looking at the issue for the past two years and is due to publish its report later this month, to "think more radically about non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, the best-interests test and active euthanasia" in relation to the sickest newborn babies.

But organisations like the British Council of Disabled People insist it is "completely wrong" for medical professionals - or anyone else for that matter - to determine whether someone else's quality of life will be good enough.

The moral dilemmas that surround cases like these were illustrated recently by the case of Charlotte Wyatt.

Junior health minister Ivan Lewis has announced that 35 children's hospices in England will receive a slice of the £27m promised for the sector over the next three years.

The government promised the emergency cash injection after a delegation from the Association of Children's Hospices met the prime minister to flag up an impending financial crisis once Big Lottery funding ends this year.

The consultation stage of an independent review of the long term funding of children's hospices and other palliative care services in England started in October and the review is expected to be completed by the spring.

Click here to email the review team with your contribution.

Antisocial behaviour orders need a rethink. That is the unsurprising conclusion of the latest research into the controversial orders, introduced six years ago to stop people repeatedly engaging in activities deemed to be antisocial.

The Youth Justice Board-commisisoned research finds that, despite professionals being clear about the importance of making asbos targeted and realistic, in reality they are often so prescriptive they actually make non-compliance likely. The result: more young people with criminal records and a greater chance of them ending up in custody.

Most people agree that asbos have a role to play. However, if we want to ensure that they are used appropriately, it is fundamental for youth offending teams to be integral to the decision-making processes about when and how to impose them. Yet, in many areas, this is still not happening.

It is no coincidence that the research finds that greater Yot involvement in decision-making tends to be associated with lower asbo use.

The Local Government Association and other campaigners have finally achieved what they have been trying to achieve ever since the Every Child Matters green paper was published in 2003: they have persuaded the government to apply pressure on schools to focus on pupils' general well-being rather than just their educational success.

During the final stages of the Education and Inspections Bill's journey through the House of Lords before it returns to the House of Commons for rubber-stamping, the government gave into demands to place a duty on school governing bodies to promote pupils' well-being. This means schools will have to help improve pupils' emotional, mental, physical and social well-being, protect them from harm and abuse, and encourage them to make a positive contribution to society as well as helping them to learn and achieve.

The only detraction from this positive development is that the new duty will only apply to maintained schools, thereby excluding Academies and City Technology Colleges.
The Department for Education and Skills insists that conditions underpinning the funding agreements between these new-style schools and the education secretary will guarantee the same outcomes.

I remain to be convinced. And I am not alone.