Plans to bring child welfare services together under the umbrellas of
trusts seem to forget that children don't live in isolation from the
rest of us.
Trust and bound
Improving the way professionals share information and dovetail their
services has been the holy grail of child welfare reform for decades. In
1968, the division between adult and children's social work was seen as
the problem, so social services departments were created to offer a
joined-up service for the whole family.
Now the fault line is located between the different professions
dealing with children. The government's solution: children's trusts,
uniting children's social services with education and some aspects of
health. Children's trusts are expected, by their proposers at least, to
improve accountability for child welfare, providing more accurate and
earlier assessment of children's problems, and more effective
intervention.
But is it realistic to expect so much from structural change? Past
experience offers little hope. In the last 30 years, reorganisation has
been the prescription for all problems, but with little impact on
practice.
The green paper, which preceded the children's bill announced in this
week's Queen speech, does not analyse why the family-centred approach of
social services over the past three decades has failed. Nor does it
explain how the new division of children's and adult services will be
more effective. Will accountability be clearer in the new system? The new post of
director of children's services will be responsible for delivering the
government's five key outcomes for every child in England: enjoying and
achieving in life and education; being protected from harm; good
physical and mental health; making a positive contribution to society;
and not being disadvantaged by poverty.
However, it is doubtful that the new directors will have the power to
deliver these outcomes. The government wants to end child poverty, which
affects 3-4 million children, harms their development and limits their
opportunities. Yet its child poverty strategy is not integrated into
children's services, nor is there any mention of the need to include
welfare rights workers or money advice agencies in efforts to support
families.
It would make more sense if the line of accountability for ensuring
children are not disadvantaged by poverty led to the chancellor, Gordon
Brown, rather than the directors of local children's services. Reorganisation will not lead to better assessments and more effective
help, either. The government mistakenly sees the main flaw in child
protection as poor communication among professionals and agencies.
But the case of Victoria Climbié was blighted by failures of
understanding rather than communication. The professionals who saw
Victoria did not think “here are clear signs of abuse and I shall ignore
them”. Either they saw the signs and wrongly found a benign explanation
for them, and subsequently saw no need to tell others about them; or
they did inform others who failed to understand their significance.
For suspected cases of child abuse, there is an excellent,
well-established system of different agencies working together which
does not need to be changed. Improving assessments of children's needs
depends on raising competence through better education and ongoing
training.
The other key goal is to offer children earlier and more effective
help. The green paper's approach may achieve this where problems only
affect children. But most of the major difficulties affecting children
stem from problems their parents have.
Children are poor because their parents are poor. Domestic violence,
mental illness, and alcohol and substance misuse are dominant features
of families referred to social services because of concerns about child
abuse and neglect. Children's trusts will create a new barrier between
child and adult services, which may hamper efforts to provide effective
help.
In 1968, the Seebohm report, which led to the creation of generic
social services departments, recognised that children live in families
and communities, so services needed to reflect this. Current proposals
appear to be forgetting this valuable lesson.
By Eileen Munro (a reader in social policy at the London School of
Economics.)
Friday November 28, 2003
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/queensspeech2003/comment/0,13994,1094798,00.html
home
|