Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-212)
RT HON
MARGARET HODGE,
MP
15 DECEMBER 2003
Q200 Chairman: The health visitor is
there early in terms of visits to the home, can see the environment
in which the child is being brought up and all those things and
can be much more effective but very often struggles to convince
the social work team that something is wrong. Very often I have
been communicated with by a health visitor that really leads to
cutting out the dreadful tragedies that can occur. Where does
the health visitor fit in to your pattern?
Margaret Hodge: Very, very important.
The health visitor has a key role in Sure Start, in all our early
years intervention, as the universal non-stigmatised service that,
again, touches almost every child, not a 100% but almost every
child. Indeed, the Chief Nursing Officer is currently undertaking
a review of this under the Department of Health of the health
visitor role and I am engaged in that. The best of health visitors
do a fantastic job in the round. What we need to think through
is how we can encourage more to come into the health visiting
service and to pay a much broader role, not just making sure that
the child gets the inoculations he or she needs, but moving beyond
that to making an assessment around early identification and notification.
Q201 Chairman: Perhaps that is something
to do with the enormous training budget of the health service
that we will be looking at. But can I refer back to a point I
made earlier? When I was pushing you on it is a complex problem,
but if we are going to learn from the dreadful circumstances of
the death of Victoria Climbié, she was not registered because
she was born abroad and that is so important. There are a lot
of children in our country today who were born abroad and there
is a lot of children who will end up abroad. That is the difficult
end of the question. It is easy to do the easy bits, but the Victoria
Climbié case shows how difficult it is when you have got
a difficult one, someone not even living with their parents, born
abroad. And what I am pointing out to you, and this Committee
is pointing out, is a lot of children are born in this country
and then leave this country.
Margaret Hodge: Let me just say
on Victoria Climbié, the real tragedy of her death was
that she was actually seen on 12 different occasions by professionals.
Q202 Chairman: We know this.
Margaret Hodge: So although she
may have been born abroad, she was in contact with different services
at different levels on 12 separate occasions in 10 short months
and if just one had gone in a different way . . .
Q203 Chairman: Absolutely. We are just
trying to understand the difficulty of some of these cases.
Margaret Hodge: Yes. The other
thing to say to you is that children that go abroad, clearly I
have had some discussions about children born abroad who come
here, I have also begun to have discussions with my colleagues
in the MoD about Forces children who are abroad and how we can
ensure in what we do for children's services in the UK we also
look after their interest and what we have proposed in the Green
Paper is that our databases include all children, not just those
that are currently living within the local authority, all those
born there. So there will be a record of them. These things, can
we get better? I am sure we can. All we can do is keep beavering
away to improve information sharing, professionalism, joint working
across boundaries and clear accountabilities.
Q204 Jeff Ennis: Turning to the issue,
Minister, of training and recruitment and retention of children's
workers, I understand it is the intention to establish a new children's
workforce within your Department and the Sector Skills Council.
I wonder if you would just say about how these two agencies are
going to operate and if they will have a sort of inter-relationship
between the two?
Margaret Hodge: The Children's
Workforce Unit we are in the process of establishing now and their
task will be, first of all, to map where we are at. We know we
have problems around early years workforce and actually there
is quite a lot of work being done there to recruit, but there
is the problem the Chairman talked about which is quality there.
Then there are huge problems around children's social workers,
around recruitment and retention which we need to address. So
we need to map it. We then want to look at recruitment and retention
policies. We want to look at new routes in. We want to learn a
little bit actually from some of the things we have done in schools.
For example, I am quite attracted by the advanced skills teacher
role and see whether we cannot translate that into the social
care role so that we keep some of our most effective and committed
children's social workers at the front line, rather than going
up the management structure. We want to see whether, again, we
cannot learn from teaching about graduate entry and work-based
training routes into social care. So that is all that. The Sector
Skills Council, the Children's Sector Skills Council, will, I
hope, bring together most of the child care workforce, but it
is going to be incredibly complicated. So we are going to have
to think about the relationship between this and other existing
workforces. Let me give you some examples; the schools workforce,
and the school, under the TTA, is looking at a huge restructuring
including the training of teachers' assistants and making sure
they get better and have stronger competence to be able to work
in the classroom. What we want to see is how can we ensure that
those teaching assistants also have routes through perhaps into
other areas of children's services. So there will have to be relationships
between our Children's Sector Skills Council and what happens
there. The Youth Offending Teams, many of the people who work
in the Youth Offending Teams have come under one of the Criminal
Justice Sector Skills Councils. Many of them have the sort of
skills and competences and underpinning knowledge which is relevant
right across the children's workforce. Again, how can we get the
footprint for the Children's Sector Skills Council which can read
across or in some link in to people working in other sectors but
with very similar skills where we want to see much stronger movement
across the sectors.
Q205 Jeff Ennis: The analogy you have
used of teachers' assistants possibly going into that field, would
that also extend to, say for example, health visitors to become
social workers?
Margaret Hodge: Yes, absolutely.
And I did a lot of this work when we did the "climbing frame"
for early years work. We started making those footprints available
there and I want to build really on the work we did there about
competences and accountability. The other thing is we do see right
across the children's workforce people having common competences,
which is around getting common training modules around particular
issues.
Q206 Jeff Ennis: Obviously in my experience
as being a former councillor and what have you, I think children's
social workers have always, in my opinion, had a very hard job
to do and to some extent many of the problems that are being thrown
up to do with social services emanate from the children's social
services route and it must be very demoralising at times, when
you are a children's social worker and you read about some of
these cases in the papers. What can we do, as a Government, to
actually try to get potential children's social workers to put
those sort of issues to one side and say "This is still a
very rewarding job that you can enter into and you can actually
make a difference to those children's lives"?
Margaret Hodge: I think the opportunity
that we have got, with the new directorate and the new settlement
in local areas, is to raise the value and esteem of children's
social services. That is what I need to grasp and that is what
I want to grasp. I remember when you and I left university, going
into social work was actually an option that many of our contemporaries
took. Nowadays, as people leave university I think far fewer of
them will see social work as a career opportunity that they will
want to grasp. We have got to change that. And it is partly about
what we do about value and esteem, it is partly about making the
new world an exciting world for them to live in, it is partly
about recruitment, it is partly about retention. It will be about
all of these things. It is partly about how we can reconfigure
pay in a better way and promotion prospects. All those issues
are ones that we need to grapple with, but it is a big, big challenge
and I think, more than anybody, you are damned if you do and you
are damned if you do not in children's social services at the
moment and we just need to turn that round for the confidence
that people have in children's social workers. Interestingly enough,
I also had a meeting the other day with the Institute of Paediatricians,
who are also now finding it more and more difficult to recruit
paediatricians who are willing to do child protection work, again
because they feel damned if they do, damned if they do not.
Q207 Chairman: Minister, one of the things
that this Committee has learnt, I am sure, from their experience
in their constituencies again, is that sometimes in these difficult
jobs many people come into them and it is the training and the
way in which their careers are planned, very often when I have
talked to social workers what they need is actually a planned
career structure. It is a very hard job dealing with difficult
families and children in great stress. It is a very stressful
job. What I so often feel, when I look at these people doing such
a good job, they actually need to be taken out, given a different
role and brought in. The career has to be managed better. To dump
someone in the tough end for all their career does not work and
I think that just as in the way that we have got some more enlightened
policies for teaching careers, we need to apply those to social
work careers as well, especially dealing with children.
Margaret Hodge: I agree entirely
and already there were initiatives taken before I started. One
was the introduction of the new social work degree which has increased
recruitment, I think I am right, by about 6 or 7%. The other is
we have done a big recruitment campaign for social workers which
has encouraged more applications. So I feel positive that we can
do it, but I agree that it is partly about career progression
and it is also about status and esteem and that, I have to say,
comes as much from what we say about social workers here as elsewhere.
Q208 Paul Holmes: Just to return to the
funding issue that we touched on earlier. The Green Paper, there
is no cost breakdown of the Green Paper reforms in the Green Paper
and the Green Paper suggests that money can be saved by combining
services and rationalising funding streams. There was a conference
on 25 September, the Director of Social Services for Portsmouth
told the conference that 72% of social services departments are
spending more on children's services than the Government allows
them or provides. Similarly this year with schools, Charles Clarke
tried to say that the funding crisis this year was because LEAs
were not passing money across, but in fact in evidence that came
to this Committee the majority of LEAs are actually spending far
more on education than the Government provides for. So if two
of the major players in this Green Paper rationalisation are already
spending much more money than they are being provided with on
these services, how can you really save by rationalising services
in order to pay for the expansion of services that is talked about
in the Green Paper.
Margaret Hodge: If the statement
I now make is wrong, I will write to you, but my view is that
in the past on social services budgets more of it has gone, on
the whole, into adult social services than it has into children's
social services. My discussions that I have had with Directors
of Social Services have been that the emphasis has been towards
the adult end, which is why many of the Directors of Social Services
have welcomed the new reforms that we are putting into place because
they see that as a way of raising the profile of children's social
services. That is the first thing to say. The second thing to
say is that I do think there are opportunities for reconfiguring.
I will not reiterate them now to you, but I have spent some time
suggesting to you a number of areas that we are looking at where
we think we can more effectively use existing resources. The third
thing to say is that this year we gave an extremely generous settlement
to social services. Indeed it was an 8.7% increase on children's
social services this year alone, of which £100 million we
found within our own resources above that that came through the
ODPM. There has been increase in what is called the "ring
fence budgets", of which there are fewer, I hasten to add,
that go into children's social services. The final thing to say
is I shall be continuing to argue the case for appropriate resourcing
of the Green Paper reforms, but I am convinced of this; that I
can go a hugely long way, even within the existing budgets. Just
remember that we do spend £45 billion. That is one heck of
a lot of money and I am sure we can do a lot with that to improve
the lives and outcomes for children.
Q209 Paul Holmes: Two further points
there. One is that it almost seemed there that you were saying
we can raise the profile of children's services by lowering lots
of adult social services and redistributing the money from there,
which I am sure people who work in adult social services will
not be too keen on. Secondly, a lot of the headline initiatives
in the Green Paper, such as the social worker in schools, which,
as I say, as a former Head of Year I would very much have welcomed,
but I was just thinking that in my constituency there are seven
secondary schools, one just outside, so eight secondary schools.
If each one had a social worker, that is two of the teams at Central
Social Services at West Street, Chesterfield wiped out straight
away and that is before you even look at all the junior schools.
There are a lot of cost implications in the Green Paper if you
are really going to deliver on all the promises and the comparison
that strikes me is the Green Paper on valuing people, people with
learning disabilities, when it was brought out everyone was saying
absolutely fantastic, but every disability group said to me, as
Disability Spokesman for my Party, "Where is the money?"
and two years later all the disability groups are still saying
"Where is the money? There is not any money". It seems
to me there is a big danger that this Green Paper, which everybody
welcomes because of the fine words it says, is going to saying
it all down the line and in two or three years' time the great
disappointment "Where is the money?"
Margaret Hodge: We are not wiping
out, we are changing. You said that if they went for a social
worker in your own constituency in every school you would wipe
out. What we are doing is reconfiguring the way people work and
that really is an important message to get about. So it is not
an add on. It is a real cultural shift in the way that we deliver
services to children. That is the first thing to say. The second
thing is to say I am sure that people will always feel there is
not enough money spent, particularly in this area of inclusion,
which is the sort of broad agenda, because we can all of us think
of individuals who have come to our surgeries with special educational
needs or with particular difficulties where you think "My
God, if only they could give them a bit of extra one to one, you
could really make a difference". So we will never be, I think,
satisfied that there is enough, but nevertheless I think by reconfiguring
what we have got, by arguing the case very, very strongly, which
I will do and I know Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State, will
do in the process of the spending review, I think we can go a
long way. I feel deeply optimistic that what we can do will genuinely
make things better. All I can do is enthuse you along with me
and convince you that we will argue for proper resourcing, but
even if we do not get every penny we want, and we are in a tight
public spending environment, we will go one heck of a way to making
things better.
Q210 Chairman: Minister, thank you for
that. I hope you realise we have given you a pretty easy ride
today because it is your first time before the Committee in this
new role.
Margaret Hodge: Thank you.
Q211 Chairman: You will know that I always
find it, I have to say, difficult to give you a pretty tough scrutiny
because we have been a friends a long time. We were at university
together and so I never tend to say nice things to you, but I
did, as Chairman, have communication from several children's
organisations recently, all of which urged me to support you as
the Children's Minister. I will share these with the Committee
because they did come in and I thought that ought to be on the
record.
Margaret Hodge: Thank you very
much indeed and I hope that you will do some inquiries into some
of these new areas that now come within the Committee . . .
Q212 Chairman: Do not worry, Minister,
we are going to be on your tail.
Margaret Hodge: Thank you.
|
