Tag: DFES

Look on my works ye mighty and despair

Strange feeling reading the papers since the election result, as though the whole of my working life for the past few years has been written up on a giant etch-a-sketch  and is now being slowly erased.  I have, over the past few years, worked in different capacities on or alongside Every Child Matters, Building Schools for the Future  and the QCA amongst other things for the DfES;  on support for victims of sexual violence (Home Office ) and on equalities legislation ( GEO )  All of it now seems potentially to be threatened,  gone or going.  I am the Typhoid Mary of government communications.

I suppose this is the inevitable result of working with the civil service – as someone once explained it to me we’re the chauffeurs, Ministers chose the destination, we just get them there the best way we can.  The destination on my stuff has evidently changed, so mirror, signal, manoeuvre and off we go again – even if  lots of good stuff seems to be being jettisoned along the way.  How much weirder it must be to have been one of the Ministers and now watch the whole thing being dismantled as you are plunged into irrelevance and obscurity.

A Department by any other name?

Intrigued by Michael Gove’s instant decision to change the name of the Dept for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to the Dept for Education before he’d opened his first red box.

I was at DfES when it took responsibility for children’s issues, and led some of the early work on communicating the Every Child Matters programme.  It took a LONG time for the Department to get out of its  “education, education, education” mindset and start to think about children’s services as  an equal part of what it was about.  I remember an excruciating planning meeting looking at the  strategy for the whole Department, which focused so exclusively on schools’ standards that those of us working on children’s policy complained of feeling like the mad relatives locked in the attic that no-one wanted to talk about.  Eventually things changed –  some might argue it went too far the other way (though not, I’d guess,  thousands of children in care who still have much worse chances in life than their more fortunate peers).

So, does this symbolic name change mean that children’s services are being shoved back in the Departmental attic?  A quick google to find things Gove has said about children’s services reveals much complaining about Baby Peter but not many policy clues, and a rather worrying willingness to dismantle what’s been put in place.

There’s another blog post (or possibly a rather dull book) to be written about what worked and what didn’t on Every Child Matters, and I agree that there are levels of bureaucracy now in place that might well stand in the way of positive action.  I’d be happier if I could see some more definite thinking about what the Tories want to do in this area – and some recognition that children’s policy isn’t just about supporting families through the tax system.