Tag: Every Child Matters

Come on down for Opportunity Costs!

I’d missed the news that Michael Gove  banned the use of the phrase Every Child Matters at the Dept for Education until this week.   This is what you get if you try to find the old ECM site online.

For the record, ECM was set up after the Laming enquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie.  It tried to integrate children’s services, closing the gaps between services previously offered in isolation by schools,  social services and the NHS.  It included the expansion of Sure Start and major changes to the way that local authority services were provided.  It was, depending on your political tastes, either a hugely bureaucratic, over-engineered response to a problem which needed a simpler approach; or an ambitious attempt to address systemic problems in services which  left  young people at risk.  I applauded the intentions of ECM even as it drove me temporarily insane.

I worked on the comms  strategy at the beginning of the programme, addressing audiences in every branch of the public sector,  trying to change the way thousands of people worked.  Our approach was to try to work in partnership with the people who delivered services.  It made sense to us to have the people who were going to make the policy work in practice help shape it – the “if you want to go fast, travel alone; if you want to go far, travel in a group” philosophy.

The pace of progress at the start drove me nuts.  My old boss likened the endless trail of seminars and discussion documents and presentations to bushtucker trials, in which we had to eat our diet of toasted kangaroo balls and cockroach biscuits in order to win the opportunity to come back and do it all again next week.  Eventually, despondent at the rate of progress, I moved on to other things.  It’s taken me  years to realise that my expectation of a faster pace to such massive change was unrealistic.

All those hours of work,  the cost of making change happen so that services would be better in the long run, are now being written off – and I doubt figure  in the government’s balance sheet of the savings they are claiming from slimmed-down public services.

A GP taking part in PM‘s debate about health service reforms made the same point to Andrew Lansley this week, asking whether the costs of redundancies, retraining  and waste due to the scrapping of systems figured in his costs for NHS reform :  “I’ve been around for a long time and I’ve seen many reorganisations, and one of the problems is that there doesn’t seem to be any publication of the true costs of these reorganisations, which often take a couple of years to take effect…”    Lansley argued, as ministers always do, that this time the reform was for keeps, so the costs would be cancelled out in the long run.  I wonder.

I also wonder about the government’s approach to working with partners.  They give the impression of wanting to go very fast indeed and opting to do it solo.  The last post highlighted the apparent state of relations between DCLG and local government.  DoH seems to be working in the face of opposition from its key stakeholders too (though I’m not inside the Department so don’t know what conversations are taking place.)  As the Observer’s secret civil servant pointed out in today’s paper, this may have far-reaching consequences:

“Doctors have raised the tempo of the debate and, unlike teachers or policemen, they can comfortably play politics as public deference to medical professionals is strong. Government advisers are not alarmed. The coalition can win this fight. It will pass its health bill in the House of Commons and should get it through the Lords. The new health system will get built but the real risk is what happens then. If doctors are alienated and angry and patients worried and confused, the system won’t work. … Ultimately, this mess may even lose the coalition the next election” 

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.

Not a considered response

I worked at the DfES (now DCSF) when the Every Child Matters programme was being put in place so I know the pains that were taken to try to strengthen child protection services in the light of Victoria Climbie’s death.  It is a far from perfect system but the tools are there for local authorities to use and the emphasis on putting children’s interests first now runs through every branch of the child-related public services.  So why is the response to Baby P’s death so predictable and totally enraging?  An enquiry announced, another debate about whether or not we are demonising social workers and (at least as far as I can see) no heads rolling, no-one held accountable, no-one accepting responsibility.  How well-paid, free of bureaucracy, supported by mangement and empowered to act do you have to be in order to realise that this is wrong?  And how on earth can you not resign immediately it becomes clear that it happened on your watch?

Trying to drag this round to being a comms issue; I notice that there is no statement easily findable about this on the front page of the DCSF site – you have to dig about a bit to find this, or the children’s commissioner’s site (although you can find a statement from the Deputy Commissioner welcoming the new enquiry).  Haringey’s statement is a click thorugh from a front page headline “Statement regarding government support for Haringey”, which implies to a casual reader that everyone is rallying round this authority which is having a bit of a bad time at the moment.

So, deep breath, rant almost over, red mist starting to clear… What has to happen before we get to the point where we can say “never again” with some confidence?  Is that possible – or are there some people who are just so wicked that their actions can’t be legislated for?  I really do appreciate how difficult the work of social services is, so what do we as a country have to do to support them to allow them to deliver better services?  Is it just a matter of better funding?  And if the response to disasters is always like this, how do we get people to swallow the tax-increases that might be needed to pay?