The Child Minder

The Department for Education and Skills has written to Sure Start children's centre managers and practitioners, local authorities and primary care trusts setting out updated guidance and further research showing how services can best be delivered to meet the individual needs of all young children and their parents.

The revised practice guidance on children's centres includes new sections on working with particular groups, including disabled parents, the families of prisoners, parents with substance misuse problems, and families in temporary accommodation. It also raises the importance of ensuring outreach and home visiting services are used to increase the contact with families who are at greatest risk of exclusion, and of developing more effective multi-agency working arrangements.

The updated Planning and Performance Management Guidance, meanwhile, is intended to help children's centres and councils review the centres' performance, and includes suggested key performance indicators to work against.

As if that wasn't enough, the government has also published a discussion paper on the governance and management of extended schools and Sure Start children's centres, research on extended services in primary schools, and a national evaluation of outreach and home visiting services in Sure Start Local Programmes.

That lot should keep us all busy until Christmas! Happy reading...

In recognition of the increased emphasis being placed on parenting support work in all its recent policy publications, the government has published a guide for local authorities and children's trusts on developing parenting support.

The guidance will be relevant to those involved in the development of Children and Young People's Plans and those responsible for commissioning and delivering services for parents.

Publication of the guidance coincides with the launch of a searchable database of proven, effective parenting programmes across England in a bid by the DfES and Parenting UK to help councils stop reinventing the wheel and learn from what already works elsewhere.

On the train on the way into work this morning I read a headline over another commuter's shoulder: "Freed, liar who killed her baby". It was, of course, courtesy of our old friend the Daily Mail.

The story was referring to the case of Danielle Wails, the 22-year-old who was given three years' probation yesterday for starting a fire in her home in which her baby son died while she was suffering from post-natal depression.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of readers' comments posted on the Daily Mail's website in response to this story demand that Wails be locked up for good and the key thrown away.

But the world is not black and white. To simply hold this young mother fully accountable would be to ignore her state of mental health at the time, her previous cries for help, her inability to cope and her repeated attempts to apparently hide this fact from health and social services.