Kinder frher frdern 3rd Forum on Childhood and Youth

1, 2, 3 Gone? Fair Educational Opportunities for Children

24. / 25. October 2006

Estrel Convention Center, Berlin

Professor Peter Moss

Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education University of London

Lecture, 25. October 2006

Every Child Matters: Current Policy Developments in England

Since 2003, the government in England has been engaged in one of the most ambitious policy programmes ever proposed for children and families Every Child Matters: Change for Children. The Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda is intended to develop a new approach to the well-being of children and young people from birth to age 19. The Government's aim is for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, to have the support they need to: be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution; and achieve economic well-being. The goals are both universal and targeted. The five outcomes are universal ambitions for every child and young person, but it is also important to narrow the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers and to focus on improving outcomes for looked-after children and children with special educational needs and disabilities. These five common outcomes are to be achieved through a huge exercise in integrated working involving all services for children, young people and families, and their staff. The Every Child Matters programme was launched in 2003, but it is the culmination of a number of initiatives since the Labour Government took power in 1997. The government has shown a commitment to children in a number of ways: the priority given to education and childcare; investment in early intervention programmes, such as

Sure Start; and the Prime Ministers pledge to abolish child poverty by 2020, having inherited one of the highest levels in Europe. Some have seen in this an example of the emergence of a social investment welfare state, ready to channel public funds to address what have been termed new social risks.

At the same time as these policy commitments, the government has emphasised the need for more joined up policy, expressed for example in multi-agency initiatives such as Sure Start and Early Excellence Centres. The final catalyst for ECM was the report of the Victoria Climbi enquiry in 2003, the latest in a sequence of enquiries into children who have died at the hands of their carers and as a result of failings in the child protection system, including inadequate inter-agency collaboration. The Every Child Matters Green Paper, which launched the new childrens agenda, was the governments response to this report.

It is important to understand the breadth and ambition of the ECM programme. It covers all services for children, including schools and envisages whole system change, all focused on the attainment of the five central and common outcomes. Whole system change covers:

1. Inter-agency governance Responsibility for all non-health services has been integrated in the national Department for Education, mainly within a Children, Young Persons and Families Directorate, one of four policy directorates (the others are Schools; Higher Education; Lifelong Learning); Other government departments are committed to ECM, e.g. Department of Health responsible for child and maternal health; Responsibility at a local level has been integrated: each local authority must have a Director of Childrens Services and a lead member (politician) responsible for childrens services; Children's Trusts must be established by 2008, bringing together all services for children and young people in an area, to plan and commission with pooled resources; local partners to be flexible and innovative in creating solutions to integrate children's services.

2. Integrated strategy Five common child outcomes;

New legislation (Children Act 2004; Childcare Act 2006) which includes: a Childrens Commissioner for England; duty on local authorities to promote cooperation, to improve outcomes of young children and to reduce inequalities; and local Children and Young Peoples Plans, a single, strategic, overarching plan for all services affecting children and young people [to] support more integrated and effective services to secure the outcomes for children It will identify where children and young people need outcomes to be improved, and how and when these improvements will be achieved.

Childrens Workforce Strategy, including a Common Core of Skills and Knowledge needed by people whose work brings them into regular contact with children, young people and families, covering six areas: effective communication and engagement with children, young people and families; child and young person development; safeguarding and promoting the welfare of the child; supporting transitions; multiagency working; and sharing information. In the future, the Common Core will form part of qualifications for working with children, young people and families.

3. Integrated Processes Integrated inspection of all services, with a national Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills; annual performance assessment; and 3 yearly joint area reviews that will judge the outcomes for children and young people growing up in the area and evaluates how local services work together to contribute to their achievements, progress and well-being. The services being reviewed will include council services, health services, police and probation services, and publicly funded services provided by voluntary bodies. Common Assessment Framework, A standardised approach to conducting an assessment of a child's additional needs and deciding how those needs should be met. It can be used by practitioners across children's services.

4. Integrated Delivery Childrens Centres: multi-purpose services where children under 5 years old and their families can receive seamless holistic integrated services and information, and where they can access help from multi-disciplinary teams of professionals. Centres take a variety of forms and the aim is to have one in every community by 2010 (3500) Extended schools: schools open 8 am 6 pm offering all children under 14 access to a range of services, including: wraparound childcare; a varied menu of

activities e.g. homework clubs, study support, music/dance/drama/arts; parenting support including information sessions and parenting programmes; swift and easy referral to a wide range of specialist support services; and wider community access to ICT, sports and arts facilities. All schools to be extended schools by 2010, with current position 1 in 8.

ECM is ambitious and potentially beneficial to children and families. However, it raises a number of questions: 1. Is it too much, too quickly? The aims are very large and ambitious, to completely reshape the structure and thinking of childrens services and workers. It is very centrally driven and prescribed, the project of a highly centralised nation state, with a blizzard of paper blowing out of central government in Whitehall. There is a risk of initiative fatigue, with agencies, services and staff overloaded by change directives over the last decade. The speed and managerial style of working also risks superficiality, the triumph of form over content with a lack of strong underlying concepts (e.g. pedagogy, education in its broadest sense). Last but not least, although ECM has widespread support among those working in and with childrens services, as an overall programme of change it has a low political, media and public profile. For all these reasons, can it be sustained over time?

2. Are there major policy contradictions? For example, ECMs commitment to a holistic approach can seem at odds with the narrow academic goals of the high profile school standards agenda, with the school divided between two Department of Education Directorates. While the holistic, inclusive, community-based approach implied by Childrens Centres (CCs), can seem at odds with an emphasis on markets and parental choice in childcare and schools. This contradiction is reflected in policy, which envisages two types of CC. In poor areas, CCs are expected to provide a wide range of services including good quality early learning combined with full day care provision for children; while elsewhere, CCs offer a far narrower range of services, not including early learning and day care, which are left to the market to provide (childcare in England being conceptualised by government as a private commodity for parents to buy on the market, except in the case of market failure).

3. Will England pay the cost? Some reduction of child poverty has been achieved through redistribution, but further reductions will be far harder and more costly to achieve. While so far there has been a reluctance to tackle the issue of a poorly

qualified and badly paid workforce in early childhood education and care: low targets have been set for qualifications and the pay issue has been avoided to date.

4. A better life for children or more control? How might ECM become a democratic, participatory and critical project? Or will it be another project to control children and, in the words of Nikolas Rose, govern the soul? As Alan Prout observes: In a world seen as increasingly shifting, complex and uncertain, children, precisely because they are seen as especially unfinished, appear as a good target for controlling the future. Concerns here are fuelled by the governments unquestioning adoption of a positivistic/modernistic paradigm which is instrumental in rationality, technical in practice, averse to critical questions and inscribed with the values of certainty, universality and objectivity.