Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
9 JUNE 2004
RT HON
MARGARET HODGE
MBE MP
Q40 Helen Jones: I think that is an interesting
idea, but I am not sure how you can expect local authorities to
move towards creating children's trusts if you do not first get
their own departments to link up properly. If the Government believes
this is the right way forward, why not say so in the Bill?
Margaret Hodge: Because I think
you should ask . . . When I talk to local authorities—I
have not got the figures in front of me, but I will send them
to the Committee because I think they will be of interest to you,[1]
but local authorities are choosing to reorganise themselves and
there are an increasing number of local authorities that now have
directors of children's services, that are bringing together,
in a variety of ways, education and children's social services.
It is happening and some of them are doing it with leisure services;
they are looking across the piste. As an old localist, I would
feel wrong if I told them they have got to do it in this way.
I think the other thing to say is it will be different, but it
depends. A big county council may have to deal with lots of different
PCTs—remember we are trying to integrate children's health
services as well—and Kent would be an example of that. For
us to say there is one organisational structure that meets Kent
in the same way as it meets Rutland as it meets Manchester as
it meets Southampton I think just would be inappropriate. It is
just inappropriate.
Q41 Helen Jones: I hear what you say,
Minister, although I think it is very like something we heard
about the protection of looked after children in admissions where
it has been left to local determination and it is not often enforced.
But can I ask you about these directors of children's services:
because while I think many of us would support creating such a
post, it does raise particular problems of organisation with training,
does it not, because if you have director of education taking
on the post it may well be that that director's expertise is not
where he lives. It may be the same for a director of social services.
That raises massive training and development requirements. Have
you done any assessment of what those requirements are and how
much they are going to cost; and where is the money going to come
from to fund the extra training that will be needed not just for
the people at the top but throughout the system?
Margaret Hodge: We set aside .
. . We have found £20 million in the 2004-05 budget.
Q42 Chairman: You have been robbing other
people!
Margaret Hodge: No; we have been
using money very efficiently. We have found £20 million to
start what we call our "Change for Children" programme,
and one of the key elements in that programme has been to develop
some training not just around, you are quite right, leadership
training, which I think will require new skills and new competences,
but also the service manager types, the under leadership, the
ones who will be running the children's trusts, the extended schools,
the children's centres, all these sorts of environments. We are
literally in the process, we have got that money set aside, we
are developing the programs now, and, as we decide how to use
the very generous settlement we got from the Chancellor for the
O5/08 CSR, we will give that priority. When I look at the workforce—the
Chairman talked a bit earlier about social workers and the importance
of recruiting and keeping social workers—I think my priority
issues, because again there is a huge agenda there, would be for
competences, getting these competences up and running, the six
we are running, the leadership and the management, social workers,
recruiting keeping more social workers, foster carers, getting
more foster carers in, and doing more work on the Early Years
Workforce. So those are the priorities we would set ourselves
in the workforce arena. You could go on and say, "Why have
you not done x, y or z?", but we have had to choose priorities.
Q43 Helen Jones: For a director of children's
services—I understand what you say about the other staff—is
training going to be compulsory before or after appointment, bearing
in mind that these are the people with whom the buck stops for
children? They are the accountable people?
Margaret Hodge: They are not accountable
to me, they are accountable to their local authority, and it will
be down to the local authority. What we will do is provide that
leadership, we will develop the sort of competences, we will develop
some leadership programmes, we will provide facilities, but it
is down to local authorities to make sure that the people they
put in the jobs have the competences and the capacity to fulfil
them, not us.
Q44 Helen Jones: Can I ask you about
the rest of the staff then? When this integration comes about,
which you think it will, how will it be different for your average
social worker or Early Years worker? How will their day-to-day
jobs be different and operate differently from what they are now?
Margaret Hodge: They may find
themselves sitting next to people with different professional
backgrounds and underpinning knowledge and experience; they may
find they have to go to fewer case conferences because there will
be a lead official in charge of each child—so you will not
get my McDonalds story hopefully; they will find communication
and information sharing is much better between the professionals
so that they know who else is working with the child and they
can have instant conversations with them rather than worrying
about other areas; they will hopefully find that they are intervening
at an earlier stage to prevent things going wrong in that child's
life. That is the way I think it would be different.
Q45 Helen Jones: That is interesting,
but for that to happen that requires services to be located together,
or at least close to one another, so that the professionals working
in them will not only get their basic training but are able to
learn from one another on a day-to-day basis, rather like they
do in children's centres. What assessment have you made of the
costs of doing this? Will that not require a lot of capital investment?
Do we have the buildings to allow to us do that at present on
the ground?
Margaret Hodge: Co-location is
a powerful tool; it is not the only tool. Co-location will be
appropriate in some instances; it is not the only way in which
you can get joint working and multi-agency working. Is there a
capital cost? Yes, there is: hence our investment in children's
centres and extended schools in particular, because that is where
we see a lot of these. If you are going to build services around
the child it is going to be in those areas, and we are talking
beyond that, the Lift programme, for example, to be brought in,
the Building Schools for the Future programme to be brought in.
One of the things we are saying in the Building Schools for the
Future programme is that every new school you build should be
extended to have facilities to provide extended school facilities—those
sorts of things. It will not necessarily always lead to massive
additional capital expenditure; it depends where you are. In some
areas where population demography is such that there is a population
decline, there is a huge enthusiasm, for example, for extended
schools because they have empty classroom that they can use for
other purposes. In other areas where there is population growth,
the pressure is different: you probably need more capital investment.
Q46 Helen Jones: Yes, that is exactly
right. I think the Committee would agree with you about the value
of children's centres, but we are only at the beginning of that
programme. You are also right in what you say that there will
be space in areas where the population is declining, but the pressures
on these departments are in areas where the population is increasing.
Do I take it from what you said that there has not been an assessment
of the capital cost of doing all this? I am not suggesting that
anyone can wave a magic wand and do all this immediately, but
what I am asking you is has there been any assessment of the overall
capital costs we are looking at to really make this work on the
ground?
Margaret Hodge: No, and not because
we are frightened of it, but because that is not way we are doing
the programme. The programme is a bottom-up response, and I would
not want us to sit here and do a best "guestimate",
as we do, for example, on the cost of children's centres, but
how they get configured on the ground depends on the asset base
that exists on the ground. This is a local solution, it is a very
much driven local solution, and, as I go round saying, this is
one of the best bits of news local government has had for a long
time. We are putting them in the driving seat to create these
new structures and environments, and we have got to leave it to
them to decide. That does not mean that over time we do not recognise
there will have to be capital expenditure. That is why we have
got capital monies aside for things like Extended Schools and
Children's Centres, Building Schools for the future, Lift programme,
New Deal for Communities—all that—there is a huge
amount of capital money going in from government. What we have
to do is make sure it gets built around the child, not just around
the bureaucracy. I am not into building new social services departments.
Q47 Jeff Ennis: A follow-on question
about the structures most local authorities will adopt. Is not
the truth of the matter that most local authorities will integrate
education and social services departments and that will become
the common model?
Margaret Hodge: I think that is
probably right.
Q48 Jeff Ennis: I am trying to think
which question I want to ask first. The effective provision of
free school education research demonstrates better developmental
outcomes in children attending integrated services with trained
teachers on the staff. Will children's services have sufficient
educational input from trained teachers? What are the plans to
develop the workforce to make this possible, not only for teachers,
but also for childcare staff?
Margaret Hodge: In the Early Years
settings?
Q49 Jeff Ennis: Yes?
Margaret Hodge: I go around and
visit and many of you ask me to open lots of the new settings
that we have successfully created from our very generous capital
investment, and I have absolutely no doubt that the quality of
what happens in those settings is utterly dependent on the quality
of the staff that work in those settings, completely and utterly.
So we are going to get this right. It is a huge, long job and
requires a lot of money, and there are tensions in it: because
the more you raise the qualifications and the quality of the staff
the more they cost, the higher the contribution either from the
state or the individual, because people pay for their childcare
and a lot of their early years services. So we have to work carefully
to grow good quality, and part of that is the benefit that educational
qualifications can bring in, but it goes beyond that. A well qualified
graduate with a good understanding of child development can provide
equally high value to the children in that setting as can a qualified
teacher, and some qualified teachers do not necessarily provide
the best early years, do not necessarily have that understanding
of child development that is essential to giving children the
best start; but you are absolutely right in saying that it is
the quality of the staff that will make the difference.
Q50 Jeff Ennis: So you will be monitoring
how that develops in terms of the—
Margaret Hodge: 100%. It is really
important. It is very difficult. It is not easy, but it is important.
Q51 Jeff Ennis: One of the main vehicles
for driving this agenda forward which I am very excited about
is the Yorkshire Children's Centres, which we have touched on
previously, and I am pleased to say that in Barnsley we will shortly
be opening the first children's centre in my constituency in Grimethorpe;
in fact my whole village.
Margaret Hodge: Good.
Q52 Jeff Ennis: I am very excited about
that, but are we giving the steer now through this paper where
we need to be locating children's centres. For example, should
they be near the nearest school, or should they be attached to
a school, or should they be attached to a clinic, should they
be stand-alone? Where is the perfect location for a children's
centre?
Margaret Hodge: Again, I would
hate to dictate from the centre, but, and this is the only but
I put in there, if we want these to be permanent features on the
landscape of our communities, schools are a pretty permanent feature
on those landscapes already. Children do not stop at five, and
we now have this rather exciting opportunity to develop this,
as the Prime Minister said, to claw back the frontiers of the
Welfare State into the early years and develop this early years
phase; but I think it can make sense to locate them in schools,
and the reason for that is that it provides that continuity, it
provides, I think, greater permanence and where there is space
it is cheaper. Having said that, we want to maintain what we have
got in the UK, which is one of our strengths, which is the diversity
with private and voluntary providers as well. We have got to be
very careful in using schools that we ensure that this does not
become a public sector takeover and I am thinking hard about how
we do that as we build those Children's Centres.
Jeff Ennis: I am glad you said that because
the one in Grimethorpe is being developed on the Milefield Primary
School campus, so we are conforming to that.
Chairman: Has there been any collusion?
Q53 Jeff Ennis: No, definitely not.
Margaret Hodge: I think I was
going to try and come and open Grimethorpe but you are doing it
instead.
Q54 Jeff Ennis: Going off at a tangent
somewhat, Minister, just taking this opportunity, I am sure you
read in the press recently about the school crossing patrol lady
who was suspended for actually telling a small child to pick a
piece of paper up and her parents reported her to the school.
Margaret Hodge: I did not read
about it.
Q55 Jeff Ennis: She was suspended by
the LEA, or by the school, for telling the child to pick a piece
of paper up. I just wondered if you have got any comments on that
particular case.
Margaret Hodge: I have to be absolutely
honest, I have not picked that up. I do not know whether it missed
my press cuttings.
Q56 Jonathan Shaw: You did not pick up
a piece of paper.
Margaret Hodge: I am completely
hopeless, am I?
Jonathan Shaw: You are fired, yes.
Chairman: Can we have a bit of order
here.
Q57 Jeff Ennis: I just wondered if you
have got any views on that because I have certainly got views
on it.
Margaret Hodge: I am going to
have to think about it. I genuinely have not picked that up. It
depends on which papers we read, does it not?
Q58 Jeff Ennis: I think it is a national
disgrace actually.
Margaret Hodge: When did this
happen?
Jeff Ennis: Recently.
Q59 Chairman: I know that one of the
mental boxes that I tick as I go to a school is just how much
litter the management of the school allows to be around and when
I see it ankle deep I do not think very much of the management
and leadership of that school, but that is by the bye. To finish
that bit of evidence, one of the things that worried me in response
to something Helen said was I thought you came over as rather
complacent. You have got better experience than most Members of
Parliament of local government but in my experience it is all
very well, the beacon authorities will leap to do new things,
they will engage in a new project and a new set of ideas and start
to develop new cultures, but the people you are after are the
people most likely to be recalcitrant, to be slow to do things.
Whatever you do and whatever this legislation does, whatever we
do, there will be another dreadful, horrible case of child neglect
and abuse. There will be, it is statistically absolutely the case.
In a sense, are you not setting yourself up? Here is the Children's
Act, and this has been sold in too many places as the end of child
abuse, that it will work, but very soon if there is another case
when this is in operation people will say that you introduced
all this stuff, it has cost all this money, there have been all
these changes, and you have not actually eradicated this dreadful
kind of child abuse. Are you not setting yourself up for a fall?
Margaret Hodge: No. I have always
been incredibly careful in talking about the reform agenda to
say that this will not stop children being killed and children
dying. One of the rather depressing features of safeguarding children
is the steady figure over time, it really has not shifted very
much, about 80 children a year for a long, long time who die at
the hands of their carers. I have never said that and I do not
pretend. What I do hope this will do is a number of things. I
hope it will finally tackle those issues which come up time and
time and time again in every long inquiry report we have on a
child death, which is the issue of nobody accepting the buck stops
with them, people failing to work together and share information
properly together. I hope we can tackle the issue that you raised
at the beginning of recruiting and keeping frontline workers.
I hope that we tackle the issue that Helen raised about training
of supervisory staff. Those are the four issues that come up time
and time again. Will that stop children dying? No. Children themselves
set the outcomes that they want from their childhood and we have
placed them on the face of the Bill. In a sense you could argue
they are motherhood and apple pie, but as we define them down
you can make them pretty specific. If we can achieve better outcomes
for those children, and over a 10-year period—we are not
looking at a 5-year period—if this even half works then
I think it will be vindicated, but nobody has ever pretended it
will stop a child death.
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