UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 75-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Education and Skills COMMITTEE

 

Ministerial Annual Review

 

Monday 15 December 2003

RT HON MARGARGET HODGE MP,

Evidence heard in Public Questions 101 - 213

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 15 December 2003

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, Chairman

Valerie Davey

Jeff Ennis

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Mr Andrew Turner

________________

Witness: RT HON MARGARET HODGE MP, a Member of the House of Commons, Minister of State of Children, Young People and Families, Department for Education and Skills, examined

Q101 Chairman: Minister, can I welcome you to our deliberations. You are our oldest friend, in one sense, in the sense that since I have been Chair of the Committee I think you are the sold surviving Minister in those three years. You have changed jobs three times in that time, but you are still in the Department, so we are happy to see you again for the first time in your new role.

Margaret Hodge: Thank you.

Q102 Chairman: Of course, it is an entirely new role, so we are very interested to learn just how it is going to be organised, how you see it running and what it is going to be delivering. If you would like to open up with a few remarks about you see the challenge of this new role, we would be grateful.

Margaret Hodge: Thank you for the welcome, Chairman:. I recognise I think I am probably the longest serving DFES Minister for a long, long time because I have been in the same Department, although in three jobs, which is wonderful because it is the Department where I like to be. I think the opportunity that I have got from the new role is to do a number of things. It is to bring together a whole range of disparate services around Government and to try and reconfigure them to put the interests of the child and the young person at the heart of everything that we do and then build the services around the needs of the child and young person. And that to me as well, Chairman:, is at the heart of what the Labour Government's public service reform agenda is about as well. So it is sort of shifting from the traditional professional silos, the producer-led approach to public service, to a user citizen, in this instance child and young person-led way of configuring services. That is the sort of big picture that I feel we have got. It is probably one of the toughest challenges because people always feel most comfortable and safe in their professional structures, as we all do, and trying to say that we value all the different expertise, underpinning knowledge, experience that comes whether you are a teacher, a social care worker, a youth worker, actually a health worker in the border field for what we are doing. Value that all, but that if you work across the professions the whole of which you can deliver is more than the sum of its parts. Translating that theory into practice is going to be very difficult and we have got a number radical ways in which we are going to do it and I will pick out three or four. One is through the Children's Centres programme and I do share the vision now expressed by both the Prime Minister, I think, and the Chancellor that what we should be aiming towards is a Children's Centre in every community over the longer term, whilst we target in the early those who are most disadvantaged and who would gain the most out of it. So one is the Children's Centre, the other is the legislation which will bring about a Director of Children's Services in every local authority, which will be a vehicle for promoting the integration of education and social care services. The other is the development of the Extended Schools Programme and there again I have a vision, Chairman:, where I do think that schools are the most under-used capital asset in all our local communities. They are closed for so much of the day and shut and locked for so much of the year. If we can open them up, not just to provide the services that you may have talked about in this Committee in the past like breakfast club, after school club, sports facilities and study support, those sort of services, but beyond that to perhaps have individual children and adolescent mental health services on the site, the social worker on site, the GP on site, the pregnancy and sex and relationships advisors on site. All those sort of people on site. I think you can really begin to construct the services around where children are at and where they feel safe in a non-stigmatised environment. So that is the third one. So we have talked about Children's Centres, Directors of Children's Services and extended schools and the fourth thing is the Children's Trusts which we have talked about in the Green Paper. And there, what we envisage is a drawing together, in the first instance, education, children's social care and health to jointly plan and commission and, in my view, pool resources so you then really decide how best to respond to a particular child's needs and aspirations and build the services around that. So to take the classic example, a wheelchair, which you will have dealt with in the Committee before, health may give a young child a wheelchair if that is important to a disabled child, it comes out of the health budget. It then shifts to the school's budget when the child moves into school. It then shifts back to health and arguments between health, social care and education over the child's life. A child may be assessed by up 18 different people in a similar assessment and we want to get rid of that. And then the final thing and then I will stop is to say the vision of Children's Trusts is not just to bring together education, social care and health, but also increasing the Connexions services, I think, would be part of that joint planning commissioning budgets. Much of the voluntary sector capacity have got to be good strong players at the table and jointly planning the commission. And then finally, youth offending teams who we will not legislate to bring within the family, but I cannot see youth offending teams acting effectively if they are not incorporated into the Children's Trust. So that is a bit of the vision and within that we have real priorities like, for example, raising the educational attainment level of children who are look after, children where abysmally fail them. Only 8 per cent of the 60,000 children who are in the care of the State, and who are the most vulnerable, and where we take the most direct role, get 5 GCSEs A to C at present. So we really fail them in the most dreadful way. Also doing things like trying to get CAFCASS, which provides the court welfare service to children, both in public and private law, back on track so that it is responding quickly to a child's needs, so we do not have the current system where, for example, in London you can be waiting even six to eight weeks to even get allocated a court welfare officer in a public law case. So there is a huge agenda, really exciting.

Q103 Chairman: It sounds huge, Minister, what would you say to the critics that say this is another gimmick from the Labour Government, there is a Minister for Women, there is a Minister that some people would argue has been downgraded, there is a Minister for Disability, there is a Minister for Manufacturing, one minute you see that and the next minute you do not, this is another Minister for Children and your critics say you have not even decided he is going to have a budget. It sounds enormously expensive what you have just given the parameters of, yet where is the budget for it?

Margaret Hodge: I am the first Minister for Children and we added to what I call myself "Children, Young People and Families" because a lot of all the other people see themselves as children and children grow up in families, so I think the three together is quite important. I think that is a very important statement of the priority importance that this Government is giving to the wellbeing of our future; our children and the young people. I think you only have to look, Chairman:, at what we have done around child care, what we have done around nursery education, what we have done around the Adoption Act, what we have done around establishing CAFCASS as an integrated court support service, all endless examples that we really promoting the interests of children and young people. I do not think that it is at all a gimmick. I think the challenge of developing the much more integrated service approach with the child at the centre is enormous. I just think it is the cultural challenge that that involves is difficult and I enjoy those sorts of challenges and did a bit of that when we were doing the early years where I have given evidence to you before where we were trying to bring services together. We do have a budget. We currently spend £45 billion generally on children's services. I see as one of my tasks eking out every penny of value in that expenditure.

Q104 Chairman: Minister, that is already budgeted. That is money for services already provided, is it not?

Q105 Margaret Hodge: Yes, but there are two things; I will certainly be requesting more in the spending review settlement and indeed the PBR last week brought very welcome news from the Chancellor about his commitment to Children's Centres and increasing the number of Children's Centre being delivered by 2008 before we have had the spending review settlement, plus his intentions around child poverty, which is closely linked. Let me give you two examples, Chairman:, of where we have already identified where, I think, in the new way we will deliver services we can eke out greater value. One is we want to develop a common assessment framework for children in all local authorities. Now, that is not an idea dreamt up among the plants in Sanctuary Building, it is actually an idea which has been developed in local government. So North Lincolnshire has a common assessment form now that they use for all the people that come in contact with children and young people. They have found that that is cut referrals to social services by two thirds. That is a pretty big saving. Let me just take you to another area where I have not done the work yet but where I see some opportunity for work. In the 13 to 19 year old cohort, this Government actually has created a lot of new services that support young people during those years; the Connexions service, we have added investment to the Youth Service, we have brought in learning mentors, there still are social workers who work with children with difficulties there, we have introduced the Youth Offending Teams, we have the Educational Welfare Officers, we have the Drug Action Teams, we have the Teenage Pregnancy Advisory. There is a huge array of units, spending, investment often to meet the needs of the same group of children. I am sure that there are opportunities there to reconfigure how we spend that money which will get better value and better outcomes for those children and young people than is currently organised. Now, it is going to take me some time. That is not going to be a sort of day one job, but it is going to take me some time, but I would hope by 05/06 we will begin to see the fruits of that sort of bringing together.

Q106 Chairman: Can we look at the mechanics of that then? In terms of all these disparate departments you now have a relationship with and have power over, what is your new team in the Department for Education and Skills look like? Have you brought in people from a range of departments? Are they all located with you?

Margaret Hodge: At the official's level?

Q107 Chairman: Yes.

Margaret Hodge: Yes, we are in the process of creating a new Children and Families Directorate. I hope we have kept you informed of that.

Q108 Chairman: Where are they going to be?

Margaret Hodge: Where are they going to be located?

Q109 Chairman: Yes.

Margaret Hodge: We are increasingly bringing them in to be integrated. They are not all there yet, but they are going to be integrated within the DFES family.

Q110 Chairman: Your management team running all these children's services, the management is the people that really make the decisions at senior level, they are going to be located with you in Sanctuary House?

Margaret Hodge: Oh, yes. And increasing, for example, the staff that are responsible for CAFCASS, we thought it was very important to bring them into Sanctuary Buildings at an early stage. We are now looking at how we bring more of the staff that work around traditional children's social services who were located in the Department of Health, bringing them in. The Family Policy Unit ...

Q111 Chairman: Who will they be working for, Minister? Will they be working for you ...

Margaret Hodge: To us.

Q112 Chairman: To you. Salaries paid for, careers in, your Department? They will all be Department of Educations and Skills now?

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

Q113 Chairman: So the chain of command then goes out of your Department into the Departments they came from?

Margaret Hodge: No.

Q114 Chairman: Everything is moving across to your Department?

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

Q115 Chairman: Everything?

Margaret Hodge: Well, everything. In terms of the officials who are coming across to us (and I will look for some help if I have left something out) a lot of officials from now DSA, Constitutional Affairs, the old LCD, who are responsible for running CAFCASS, responsible for running a lot of the family policy issues around family law. The Family Policy Team from the Home Office is now us. The Teenage Pregnancy Unit is us. All the children's social services in Health are us. I think I have got the lot. The voluntary organisations - for example, let me give you an instance which I am just in the process of sorting out; the funding of an organisation like Home Start, which you will have come across before, was funded partly from Health, partly from the Home Office, partly I think even from LCD, partly from us. All that funding for that organisation will now come under us directly.

Q116 Chairman: The funding will automatically transfer from those Departments to your Department?

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

Q117 Chairman: But you will still, when you consolidate, have to go and make your call on budget, will you not?

Margaret Hodge: No, the budget will come to us.

Q118 Chairman: It will come to us, but in successive years you will have to argue your corner for children's services across the block, will you not?

Margaret Hodge: I will have to argue with the Chancellor for increased investment in children's services, having inherited the budget lines to cover those issues.

Q119 Chairman: Fine, okay. And you are bringing people in to the Department at the same time as the Secretary of State is getting, if we believe the Sunday papers, a thousand civil servants in the Department. You are not going to be losing any at the same time, are you, Minister?

Margaret Hodge: We are creating new structures. As we are creating new structures, we are also working to the Secretary of State's and the Government's determination to ensure that the money we spend on bureaucracy and civil servants at the centre is kept to a minimum. But actually creating a new structure gives you a very good opportunity to make sure that you do rationalise your resources to best effect and to purpose so that you are really clear about what you are trying to achieve with those resources and that they are fit for purpose. So will we, at the end of this consolidation period, end up with the same number of civil servants as if you had totted it up across Government, the answer will probably be no, we will end up with fewer. But we will end up with an organisation that is fit for purpose and that is fit to meet the objectives we have for children.

Q120 Chairman: Ministers always say that. Ministers always say it will be leaner and leaner and fit for purpose.

Margaret Hodge: Well, I will do it.

Q121 Chairman: What you are saying is there are going to be less people, less budget, doing the same job.

Margaret Hodge: It is not less budget at the moment. It will be directed at ensuring that they can carry out what is an enormous agenda set partly by the Green Paper, but not only by the Green Paper, also set by our ambitions, for example, through the Sure Start programme and also our ambitions on things like special educational needs which all come under part of us and the work we have done around behaviour. So it will be fit for purpose and I am arguing quite vigorously, as you can imagine, both ...

Q122 Chairman: Unlike the other three examples we gave you, it is a proper Department, properly staffed at senior level with a proper budget?

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

Q123 Chairman: It is not going to be like women or disability?

Margaret Hodge: Oh, no.

Q124 Chairman: So they are all awful, but yours is going to be good?

Margaret Hodge: Well, I think the difference is that we are completely responsible for delivering lots of mainstream services to children and young people.

Q125 Chairman: And that is the way that that sort of specialist ministry should go, do you think?

Margaret Hodge: Do you mean should a Women's Minister and Disability Minister likewise be the same thing? I think you can argue that both sides. I see this as a very different job. This is about reconfiguring children's services. It is not just about campaigning on behalf of children's rights. Indeed, a lot of that work will be carried out by the Children's Commissioner that we propose to bring in, although I see myself as a champion for children and whenever I do any meetings I make sure that I set some time aside to talk to children and young people.

Chairman: Can we come back to the Children's Commissioner again because I know Val Davey has been waiting to join me in the questioning.

Q126 Valerie Davey: Quite specifically a bit more about how you see your role alongside the Children's Commissioner?

Margaret Hodge: I think that is quite easy actually. I am there, first of all, to deliver services for children and young people and, secondly, to promote the interests of children, young people and families across Government. So I do take an interest, for example, in the current debate over advertising in relation to children's foods, healthy foods. That is something, although it is not within my direct control, I take an interest in it. So I act as a member of Government promoting the interests within Government and ensuring that I deliver the services. The Children's Commissioner will be independent of Government. So there are two clear distinctions; one, she or he will be able to comment on whether or not I and the rest of Government are delivering to meet children's aspirations and needs; two, they will have a wider remit to go beyond actually the public service and the public sector to look at, for example, the media or indeed business and to look there at children's interest in particular. The third very clear distinctive feature that we will have for this Children's Commissioner we will propose as we put the Bill through Parliament is that they will be there to make sure that the voice of children, and particularly those most disadvantaged and least likely to be heard, is heard as we develop and deliver and frame services for children and young people.

Q127 Valerie Davey: You lead on very naturally to the concern that I think many of us have that is when will you have time, when will the Commissioner have time, give the array of jobs you have already set yourself today, to do what you did hint at, you did just mention, before I came in to question you, of your time spent listening to children. This is child-centred, how are children's voices going to be heard either by you and/or the Commissioner?

Margaret Hodge: I cannot do my job if I do not reflect children and young people's interests. I just cannot do it and I am absolutely clear about that. If I am serious about reconfiguring services around the needs of children and young people, it is their voice that has to help and form those services. How do we do it? I think we are still learning. We are getting better and better, but we are still on a learning curve as to how to do it. In my day to day work I spend a lot of time specifically with groups of children and young people who are organised in various ways. When I have done conferences on the Green Paper, I have tried to make sure that I always have a session with children and young people. On the Green Paper consultation itself I think we have run well over 50 separate sessions with children and young people moderated not by us but by voluntary organisations, so it is an easier environment for them. We have had something like 2,500 responses to the Green Paper document, the majority of which have come from children and young people. So as we analyse and listen to those I hope that will help us to configure that. I will tell you something just interesting; I spent a bit of today talking to the Commissioner from Wales, the Welsh Children's Commissioner, I have met the Norwegian one, I have now met the Welsh one. I wait to see the two people from Northern Ireland and Scotland. Northern Ireland is about to start. The Scottish one they are about to appoint. I said to him "What are the issues that come out to you most when you talk to children and young people?" because I am clear what I get, I get bullying as the number one issue and then I get a lot about how society perceives particularly young people, the sort of fury about the "Shop a Yob" campaign by the Sun as instance, whereas we have done a survey that shows that out of 13 to 19 year olds nine out of ten get involved in some sort of voluntary activity in their community. And what is his name on Eastenders? The young lad who is always in trouble. It will come in a minute. Anyway, it is that image. So that is what they talk to me about. Talk to the Welsh Commissioner and he says the biggest issue which he has had to address in his first two and a half years in Government is school lavatories.

Q128 Chairman: Minister, we are worried about accountability here, both how we hold you to account for this new broad range of responsibilities, but if OFSTED comes up with a report, as it has done recently, saying education up to the age of 11 is really not as good as we hoped it would be and not improving fast enough and a lot of primary schools are under-performing, who do we call in front of this Committee? Do we call the Minister for Schools? Do we call you? Do we call the Commissioner?

Margaret Hodge: For that you would call the Minister for Schools. In the same way that just because I have the over-arching responsibility of the children's interests, it does not mean that I have responsibility for running all the services that impact on children's lives, schools being one of them. On the other hand, it is the beginning of an interesting change, I do now have very, very regular and increasing number of conversations with David Miliband over a whole range of issues. But on that issue, OFSTED, under the legislation we propose to put through the House in the session, will also be taking the lead in an integrated inspection of children's services and that is all the services that impact on a child's life. Maybe the easiest way of doing it is the classroom ...

Q129 Chairman: You are getting rid of a thousand civil servants in the Department of Education and Skills and shipping them off to OFSTED?

Margaret Hodge: No, we are not because, Chairman:, everything is currently inspected, we are just going to inspect it in new ways. It will bring together the inspection that is carried out by the old SSI, developing to CSCI, the old social services inspection which is now the Commission for Social Care Inspection, and it will bring together CHI and it will bring together OFSTED. So you will bring those three together into an integrated framework which will look at children's services. So take your Children's Centre, which is ...

Q130 Chairman: So not only do we get a bite in the Schools Minister and you and the Children's Commissioner, now OFSTED has this even greater role. It is going to be even bigger bureaucracy. It is 3,000 people now, Minister.

Margaret Hodge: No, it is not, Chairman:. If I can say to you, take your Children's Centres, which is something this Committee is familiar with, at present Children's Centres, Early Excellence Centres, all those settings, get inspected by OFSTED, maybe under the inspection of three and four year olds, and then it will get inspected by SSI for the child care aspects. Now, if there is a health visitor on site, or a bit of children's mental health services, or a paediatrician, the health service inspectorate, the new CHI, will be - so there will be three different organisations coming in to inspect. My analogy for this FE. If you think of when we have ever looked at FE in the past, we have always said "What a nightmare". They get hundreds and hundreds of inspectors coming in. What we are trying to create an integrated inspection and in that integrated inspection you will have them coming in at one time in the same framework inspecting together and inspecting as to how they work together. So it will be quite a good sort of integrated inspection way.

Q131 Chairman: I am getting mixed messages. Is OFSTED now going to be in charge of the whole shebang or not?

Margaret Hodge: OFSTED will sort of "leading among equals" is what I put it at. Leading among equals. So you have got CSCI, which has just established by the Government. You have got CHI, which has just been established by Government. But what we will want is they are just currently working together, the three organisations, to create an integrated framework for inspection, so that when you are running a Children's Centre or a Children's Trust or you have got extended activities taking place in your school site, when the inspection comes in it will be within the same framework, it will be people coming from different skills, so you may get a social services skill, you may get a health skill, you may get an education skill, but they will come in within different frameworks but they will do the one integrated inspection.

Q132 Chairman: It does not sound simpler to me, Minister.

Margaret Hodge: It does not sound simple?

Q133 Chairman: Simpler.

Margaret Hodge: It is less. It should be less and indeed it is a complicated bit of work.

Q134 Chairman: I know.

Margaret Hodge: It is a very complicated bit of work to get it right, but I think once it beds down it will make sense in the sense that we are trying to deliver services around the needs of children.

Q135 Valerie Davey: I think at one level you can almost say it is the Government's conscience after the Lowry Report, after the appalling Victoria Climbié tragedy, these are reactions in terms of Government re-organisation. I would like to take you back to Bristol, to a little group called YIP. It stands for Young Important People and it is a brilliant group of teenagers who just do not want to be into drugs, violence, knives or whatever. They are associated with a youth club and they would like to make their voices felt and heard. Now, they have done it through me at one level, but where do they make their voices heard? To whom do they say "This is us and this is who we are and we are important and we want to say what we want"? Where do they go to? Do they go to the Children's Director of Services locally? Or do they go to the Commissioner? Or do they come to you? How do they say "We have got some good ideas, we would like to share them"?

Margaret Hodge: It depends whether you mean in the current structure or in the future structure. In the current structure there are a number of ways of ...

Q136 Valerie Davey: Take us on to the future. How is it going to be easier? How will they be more confident that their views, their ideas will be heard under the new structure?

Margaret Hodge: With the Commissioner, the Commissioner will have to establish mechanisms for ensuring that she or he speaks regularly and listens regularly to children. I cannot pre-empt that because they will be independent of Government. In fact, one of the interesting discussions we had today with the Welsh Commissioner was how he actually did that himself. With us, we now consult on both the 14 to 19 year old paper, for example, there was a huge effort made to reach - I do not know whether your YIP in Bristol got engaged in that consultation - but we certainly, as a Department, tried to reach out in the consultation processes that we have so that we heard them. We have got the Youth Parliament up and running now. We have an advisory committee to us, which is taken out of children and young people that advised the Children and Young Person's Unit and is now coming over into the bigger Department. We do polling to make sure that we hear children's views in that way. OFSTED now, when it does inspections of schools will talk to students in the schools to get their view of what happens. So we are growing it. I would not say there is one mechanism, but in the way in which we deliver services we will attempt always to ensure that part of that process is listening to the consumers of those services and the users of the service.

Q137 Mr Turner: You told Martha Kearney of Women's Hour that when you were appointed you had had thousands of letters welcoming your appointment. How many thousands?

Margaret Hodge: Oh, golly. Probably you will have to allow me a little bit of licence in that, but I have not totted them up. I probably have not kept them all. But I think it was one of the most welcome appointments in Government, the creation of the post.

Q138 Mr Turner: The creation of the post?

Margaret Hodge: And my appointment.

Q139 Mr Turner: Two different things. You also told her "I have learnt from my failure to understand the dangers of child abuse in children's homes". Why did you then describe Demetrious Panton as an extremely disturbed person?

Margaret Hodge: I have already made clear on that in public that I have apologised for those words that I used and I have settled on that, both in court, in public and in private, an apology to him and I am now getting on with the job. I hope that you, as every other Member of the Committee, will hold me to account on my delivery of the job.

Q140 Mr Turner: So you had no evidence for what you said?

Margaret Hodge: I am not prepared to go any further and I now consider that we should move on to you holding me to account for the job.

Q141 Mr Turner: I am holding you, I hope, to account as to whether you are suitable for the job.

Margaret Hodge: I hope that in holding me to account as to whether I am suitable for the job, I do not know whether you were a Member of the Committee when I had responsibility for these issues some years ago and I think did deliver extremely well in relation to Sure Start, development of the child care strategy, which the previous Government had completely failed to do anything about, and in establishing a structure for nursery education, something on which we are confident we will deliver six months before our target date, so every three and four year old will have access to nursery education.

Q142 Mr Turner: You wrote to Mr Panton explaining why, but he did not publish the letter because of your views.

Margaret Hodge: I am not prepared, at the Committee today, to talk about a settlement.

Q143 Chairman: This is not a confirmation hearing. The Minister is in job. She has been appointed by the Prime Minister to do that job. These issues have been pretty publicly aired and the Minister has indicated that she does not want to answer questions about ...

Margaret Hodge: I make it absolutely clear to you, you can carry on asking me questions for a long time, I am not prepared to re-open a matter which was, in my view, settled both from my apology to him privately and through the public apology, and I am just not prepared to answer.

Q144 Mr Turner: Okay, we will move on to what happened after that then. You told BBC's question time on 4 December that everyone in the children's world had expressed confidence in you.

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

Q145 Mr Turner: Did that include Liz Davis, David Cofie or Ian White?

Margaret Hodge: Well, I do not - I mean - you know ...

Q146 Mr Turner: Everyone?

Margaret Hodge: Well, for heaven's sake. I mean I think that is just absurd. I honestly do think that is an absurd question.

Q147 Chairman: Andrew, honestly even the Chair of this Committee and some Members are not quite sure of your line of questioning. We would support you if we knew where you are trying to go. As I said, this is not a confirmation hearing, it is really asking the Minister about her job, her responsibilities.

Margaret Hodge: What I would say to you is just every single one of your constituents - I mean when I talked about everyone, you are being incredibly pedantic, what I have had is enormous support from all those organisations with whom I have to work to deliver the Government's agenda for children, young people and families. Now, what is really interesting, and what I would say to you as I would say to every Conservative MP, it would really make a change if any of you showed any interest whatsoever in what we were attempting to deliver for children, young people and families instead of always trying to focus on other issues. And that is what to date, reflected at last time's education questions, if I may say so, Chairman:, there was not a single question, a single question, put down on these extremely important issues that I am trying to tackle on behalf of the Government and which I hope I am putting huge energy and commitment into. Perhaps you would like to ask me just one question on the issues.

Q148 Mr Turner: Well, the purpose of my asking was to establish whether we should take the Minister literally. We have expressed our desire, in the past, that Government policy be based on evidence ...

Margaret Hodge: What are you trying to allege? What are you trying to allege?

Q149 Mr Turner: I am trying to establish the extent to which the Minister takes evidence and advice ...

Margaret Hodge: What are you trying to allege.

Chairman: Let us move on. I do not want a dialogue between you two, please. You must speak through the Chair, both of you. I am really getting to the end of my patience in this. One more question and let us move on.

Q150 Mr Turner: Do you think it is appropriate for someone who receives an allegation of child abuse to abuse the whistle blower?

Margaret Hodge: I think the question that you are asking is a misplaced question.

Mr Turner: All right.

Chairman: Andrew, you have finished on that? You do not want to make any point on the substance?

Mr Turner: No.

Chairman: You hold your fire. Okay. Jeff, you wanted to talk about the new responsibilities of the DFES?

Q151 Jeff Ennis: Yes, going back to the business in hand, Chairman:, of the new responsibilities of the Minister. I regarded, when we came to Parliament in 1977, the appointment of the first ever Public Health Minister as what I would call a "landmark appointment" as far as our Government is concerned. Do you regard the appointment of the Minister for Children as a similar landmark appointment?

Margaret Hodge: Yes, completely.

Q152 Jeff Ennis: For what reasons?

Margaret Hodge: Because I think it gives us the ability, as I said before, to reconfigure services round the needs of children, young people and families. I think, if I may say so, going back to party political conferences over the years, some of us that have sort of campaigned passionately on these issues for a long time, it was rare to get anybody talking about children's services at party political conferences. This year round, if you noticed, certainly on the Government's side, I think there was not a leading Government spokesperson that did not mention children, child poverty, children's services in some way during their contributions. I think that is a complete change in the environment. I think children have come far more to the centre of the political arena than they have ever been in the past. It is landmark. It is landmark and risen up the political agenda in a way that it just was not in the past.

Q153 Jeff Ennis: We have already touched on the point that we are drawing a lot of experience and a lot of professional expertise from a number of different Government departments and that sort of co-ordination is going to be crucial in delivering for children's services. How effective has the co-ordination been so far between the departments in actually delivering?

Margaret Hodge: I spend a huge amount of my time talking to Ministers in other departments to try and make sure that we really do get proper co-ordinated services. Let me use some examples where I think things are going really well. For example, the National Service Framework that has been developed by the Department of Health, which had started its life before the creation of my job and my appointment, is now going to be jointly owned by Stephen Ladyman, the responsible Minister in Health, and myself. So we meet frequently to make sure that the standards that come out of that National Service Framework are ones that we can share. On the development of Children's Trusts, likewise. I have got to work very, very closely with the Department of Health to make sure that we can actually get the joint commissioning, the joint planning and the pooling of budgets so that services can be delivered locally. I spend quite a lot of my time talking to Home Office Ministers around a huge range of issues where there is joint interest, everything from unaccompanied asylum seeking children through to what we are doing about drug education through to a lot of other issues where there is Home Office in. I talk to colleagues in the Department for Constitutional Affairs about things like delays in the public law system to try and make sure that we can speed that up. I talk to colleagues in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport about how we can use things like the Youth Fund and other facilities to best pursue our common interest across Government. So there is a lot of work across Government that one has to do to ensure that we can really deliver on our agenda.

Q154 Jeff Ennis: Okay. Continuing along the same line of questioning, in a speech you made to the LGA in July you said "This is a genuine determination to break down unhelpful professional boundaries to create a better integrated service which values each and every individual professional contribution" and then later on in your speech you went on to say "We will still have boundaries across which we will need to work", what are the outstanding boundaries that you still need to work on? Can you identify some of the problem areas you have still got?

Margaret Hodge: You break down some boundaries and you inevitably have to watch you do not create new ones. Let me give you one example of that; if, in a sense, we are going to create children's social services capacity integrated with education capacity, there is a danger there that you go back to the pre-C-bone [?] days and divide children's social services from adult social services and children grow up in families so, to some extent, you have got to make sure that the services for adults as parents and for the children and their families are appropriate. That is one example of where, by creating new relationships, there is a danger of creating boundaries. The other boundaries, one which is frequently raised with me around the youth criminal justice system, just to make sure that what is happening there through the YOTS team and through the youth criminal justice policy that fits in with all that we are trying to do to ensure that every child is given the opportunity to develop their full potential and that no child falls through the net. So there are boundaries there where we have to do a lot of talking across Government just to make sure that we have got community of interest.

Q155 Jeff Ennis: Are there any boundaries that we should not try and break down that need to be maintained in order to make sure that we deliver effective children's services?

Margaret Hodge: Oh, dear, that is a difficult one.

Q156 Jeff Ennis: That is why I have asked it.

Margaret Hodge: Because I think more about which boundaries I have to break down, I have not thought of the ones that I should not break down. I think off the top of my head I cannot think of any, but I am being given one. This is true; there is no way that we - well, I am not even sure about this one. The clinical issues that arise out of children's health; now, clearly you want to maintain that clinical expertise for children who go into hospital for some reason or another. But equally, you want to make sure that the approach that the doctors have to those children is child-sensitive.

Q157 Chairman: I think that is not a bad point, I think it is a very good point that Jeff made regarding whether people suddenly find themselves floating around in this amorphous children's section with you with about three or four different masters or mistresses and, at the same, find that their rootedness in clear line of responsibility in the Department of Justice or whatever is unsettling for people. They lose their sense of ...

Margaret Hodge: Do you mean officials?

Q158 Chairman: Yes, actually doing the job on the ground.

Margaret Hodge: I think change is difficult. I think of course there is always an element of truth, you have got to make sure that you have re-organised ...

Q159 Chairman: You are not the most effective Department, is it?

Margaret Hodge: The DFES? I think it is the most wonderful Department in Government, Chairman:. As Chairman: of the Select Committee I am really surprised.

Q160 Chairman: At a recent meeting I said I thought that Sanctuary House looked more like the Eden Project than anything where work was going on. It might, but you have been coming before this Committee for a long time, it has not got an outstanding reputation for being the most effective department in Whitehall, has it?

Margaret Hodge: I think we have not got a bad reputation across Whitehall.

Q161 Chairman: Individual learning accounts? I think that ...

Margaret Hodge: Nursery education before the due date, you know. You can find things, but individual learning ...

Q162 Chairman: School funding recently. That was a problem.

Margaret Hodge: Let me think of a ...

Q163 Chairman: Perhaps you should do a poll of what your officials who join the Department think about having to join the Department of Education and Skills.

Margaret Hodge: I think some people do not like change, Chairman:, and I am sure you will always find it is back to that old argument that people feel very comfortable in the organisations in which they find themselves and change can be challenging. Equally, let us take one instance, CAFCASS ...

Q164 Chairman: Change can be inefficient.

Margaret Hodge: Change can be inefficient if it is not to a purpose. There is a purpose underlying why we are changing here, which must better for children and if we take CAFCASS as an instance, I think there, for example, there has been a huge welcome for the fact that there is going to be a renewed capacity for us to make sure the service does meet what it wants.

Q165 Chairman: One of your colleagues comes before this Committee and boasts that there has been no new initiatives under his ministry as Schools Minister since he became Minister and he obviously accepts that too many initiatives, to much change, destabilises services and can lead to inefficiency and confusion.

Margaret Hodge: That is because, as you well know, we have been through a period of substantial reform in improving standards in schools. Now, we need to go through, I think, a period of probably substantial reform to ensure that we improve the quality of services for the children. When we have done it, we will have a bit of stability. I am told here, just for your information, and I am sure we will let you share it, that there is a staff survey in November to get their opinions and I am sure that we would be happy to share with you when we get the results of that survey, if you would like to see it.

Chairman: We will look forward to that.

Q166 Paul Holmes: The Green Paper sets out some sort of very commendable aims and in your introductory comments today you talked about, for example, pulling together and pooling resources of education, health and social care. I just wonder if we could explore in a little bit more detail some of the possible pitfalls in doing that. For example, you have got a health trust here and social services there and they cannot even talk to each other about how they pool their resources to stop bed blocking with elderly people. You then add in a school with LMS, almost total control of its own budget, and you say to the three different bodies "You are going to pool financial resources and base things on the school site", how do you get these three bodies to actually work together in that way?

Margaret Hodge: Let us be clear that we are talking primarily in education and funding about the resources that are kept at local authority level, primarily. It is not the resources that go to schools level to pay for teachers and teaching assistants and those elements of the school. You pull them together through the Children's Trusts and one of the propositions that we have, for example, will it work? We are experimenting and we will have to learn as we go along. We have set up 35 Pathfinder Children's Trusts and as we develop the others we will learn the lessons. We are evaluating those. As we develop the others we will learn the lessons of what works and what does not work. I do not think we are pretending we have got a complete understanding of every detail because this is pretty radical territory. We will have the joint commissioning and planning and the other thought we have at present to get some pull on it, the Director of Children's Services will also be able comment on the PCT budget. It will be the first time we will have a mechanism in place to try and ensure that sufficient resources from PCT go to children's services. There is the experience, particularly over the past decade or so, because there has been such an emphasis on things like bed blocking, that quite often children's services have been sacrificed out of the PCT budget to pursuing adult services agendas. So Children's Trusts, I think, will be the key mechanism that we have in place.

Q167 Paul Holmes: In terms of the hard cash involved in re-balancing the way resources are used, for example, when I was a Head of Year in school I always said it would be great to have a social worker based in school. My wife is a social worker, so I was always telling her she ought to be based in school because a lot of my time as a teacher was spent not on education but on social service issues. Would every secondary school or every school, junior schools as well, have a social worker based there or a half time one shared between two junior schools? But that is a lot of social workers, are they going to be taken away from their existing social work teams and just re-distributed to other locations? Or are they going to be extra on top of existing social work teams?

Margaret Hodge: It will be down to the Children's Trust locally to decide how best to deploy its resources and its workforce to better meet the needs of children. So we are not going to prescribe and clearly people will have to work within the resources envelope that is available to them. But I think social workers in schools is one way we see of re-configuring how we deliver children's services. That does not mean that we will prescribe in a school, half in a school or whatever. It will be down to them to deliver. If you think about it at the moment, this is what I keep coming back to, if there is a child that has particular needs or challenges, just think of the agencies; the EWO, the child is probably not at school all the time, so there is probably an EWO; the child might have special educational needs, so there is probably some money going in through SEN; the child may well have a mentor because again problems; probably a social worker if there is an issue around that; may well have been in contact with the criminal justice system, so have some sort of service there; Connexions might well be having an in. There is a huge range of professionals that will impinge on that child's life and I am sure you feel that as a headteacher from your school there is better sense we can make of that world to better meet the needs of the children. I am just convinced that we can break our way through that.

Q168 Paul Holmes: But some of the headline initiatives then, like a social worker in school, that is an aspiration that may be very, very patchy across the country then?

Margaret Hodge: No, I think it sounds to us like a perfectly sensible way of delivering Children's Trusts and extended services in schools. That is how it appears to us. Will we prescribe it? No. But if it seems sensible to us and it has felt sensible to you, what we are now doing is facilitating its delivery.

Q169 Paul Holmes: How would you overcome the problems of, for example, boundaries of different organisations that are not co-terminus? So you might have health services connections, local education authority boundaries which do not match up with each. So how will the Children's Trust overcome that?

Margaret Hodge: Again, this may seem like an opt out to you, but we are not going to prescribe that from the centre. The Director of Children's Services will be the accountable person for the Children's Trusts and it will be down to them to determine the boundaries of how the Children's Trusts work locally. So in some they are co-terminus, in others, in some of the big counties, there are a whole range of PCTs, there are many, many PCTs, so how you organise your Children's Trust within that and take Kent or one of the big counties, they will have a lot of PCTs, Essex is another one that has something like 12 or so PCTs. What we do have is 90 per cent of PCTs are co-terminus with local education authority boundaries. LEAs and social services will be co-terminus. But there are undoubtedly then YOTS and Connexions, we have got to really think how we make Connexions ...

Q170 Chairman: These acronyms, Minister, we are conscious that a small number of the British population do see the televised versions of this and some of the acronyms we have used today have been pretty dense to outsiders, let alone some Members of this Committee.

Margaret Hodge: I know. Primary Care Trusts.

Q171 Chairman: YOTS, I think it was.

Margaret Hodge: Youth Offending Teams.

Q172 Paul Holmes: If you are not going to be prescriptive about the structure and it has got to be done within existing funding envelopes, ie no extra cash, if you are working, for example, through Sure Start initiatives, which are excellent, a bit slow to be set up in some places like Derbyshire, but excellent when they arrive, but 30 per cent of the children who would benefit from Sure Start, in terms of the socio-economic background they are from, do not benefit because their parents do not live in a ward that has got a dense enough concentration. So are we going to continue to have a very good initiative that is actually very patchy and partially developed because there is no extra money so it cannot be expanded anyway?

Margaret Hodge: There are two challenges there. One is you have got to support - I shall certainly be struggling hard to extend what has been an incredibly effective, I think, intervention mechanism, Sure Start. I just want to say two things about it; recently, Chairman:, I have been to two Sure Starts, one in Leicestershire which has been up and running for about three years where they said to me that their referrals, since they have had Sure Start up and running their referrals to social services have been cut 30 per cent, and another one in Northamptonshire, which has been going for longer, where they think that the number of children who go into school with a special educational need has been cut by 10 per cent. So we are beginning, we are just beginning to see an impact from that. So part of it will be to have more Sure Starts or Children's Centres, as they will become know, part of it also is to mainstream the practices of an emerging Sure Start, which is again the integration of health, community health services, education and social care around the needs of children. And there is no reason why you cannot mainstream those around extended schools and Children's Trusts and these other mechanisms that we are putting into place.

Q173 Paul Holmes: A final question from me on this one; is there not some problem that your Government's policy on education are pushing things in one direction and yet this initiative is perhaps looking in another. What I mean there, for example, is the suggestion of putting GPs into schools. I can see the point of that if it is a community school that is drawing people from a local catchment area, the parent comes along, they have got a 14 year old in school, they have got a nine and a ten year old as well that are at different schools, but it is within a fairly compact geographic area that serves the community. I can see the point of that. But more and more schools have now been created in the last six years which are taking children from a much wider area; faith schools, CTCs, City Academies, some of the specialist schools that are selecting and taking people further afield, the existing grammar schools. We visited one or two of these in Birmingham when we went there as a Committee for a week and we had local parents saying to us "Well, this school is great here, but none of our kids go to it, they have to travel miles to get to a school that will let them in". How can you have the school becoming more of a community based centre for things like social services and health, the GPs, when more and more schools are serving much wider geographic communities and it just would not work physically?

Margaret Hodge: I am not sure I would entirely accept your premise about the massive increase in travel of children to school, but even if you accept that there is some of that, and I do accept that there is some of that, again I think this is why I think it would be wrong for us to prescribe centrally where it would be most appropriate to develop the extended school concept and where it is most appropriate to locate your services. We increasingly get work based medical services now, more and more in the workplace, and that seems to work well for those who are employed in the particular workplace. I do not see why we cannot learn from that and transfer that across to where children are, which is at school for the day. So again, we are not going to prescribe this centrally and people have got to make sense of it locally as to where is the most appropriate location for those services. But we think we will find lots of them using the school. I would see every school being an extended school over time. Now, what actually is delivered in that school will vary from school to school depending on the nature of the population, the distance they travel, but I do not see why every school should not be open all day and all year.

Q174 Helen Jones: Can I follow that up, Minister, on how exactly these Children's Trusts will work? You see, you referred, for instance, to the right of the Director of Children's Trusts to comment on a PCT budget, first of all does that go any further than commenting on it and, secondly, what do you do about children's mental health services which in many cases do not come under PCTs? In my area, for instance, they come under a mental health trust which covers five boroughs. Now, how are they going to be co-ordinated into the system? And secondly, a lot seems to be reliant on extended schools, which is a concept which I agree with which is a very worthy concept, but do you not agree that that has knock on implications for the school's budget in terms of staffing, for instance, how will you cope with having school open extended hours, you need caretaking staff and so on on site and in terms of building? If we are going to have all these services in schools, does it not also have capital implications or they only go to areas which already have spare capacity in the buildings rather than those that most need them?

Margaret Hodge: Going back to the first question, which was around Children's Trusts, children and adolescent mental health services are a key component of Children's Trusts. It is one of the figures that rather shook me when I first got this portfolio, that one in ten children in 0 to 19, in the border sense, at some point or other will require mental health services. That is a huge, higher figure than I had imagined before I took this on. So they are a key component. Again, I know it is not very helpful of me to say so, but those things will have to be negotiated locally in the first instance. This is why I see it as an evolving agenda. If building it up from the bottom up does not work over time, we will have to revisit it. We will have to come back to it three, four, five years time, but I think it is far better that people should decide locally what makes sense to them locally than we try and prescribe it from the centre. That is the view that we have taken at the moment. We will open up the ability to pool budgets, we will create those sort of powers in the legislation that we will put before Parliament, but for us to say more than that at this stage I think is unhelpful. We have made quite an important step forward in saying that the Director of Children's Services will be able to comment on the proportion of the PCT budget that is directed towards children's services. That is quite a move at a time when we have also decentralised quite a lot to the PCT level and I think if we had gone further said he or she would have had the right to decide the slice of the cake that could go to children's services, I think we would have undermined our other policy on decentralisation on health. And again, if that does not work, it means the two bodies have got to talk to each other. They have got to try and reach an agreement. If that does not work in practice on the ground at the time, we will have to revisit it, but it is a pretty dramatic step forward to say that the Director of Children's Services can have a say. That is a pretty big change that we have managed so far. Moving on, I do not see extended schools as the only answer. I just see these as a huge opportunity and I think I have just genuinely felt for a long, long time schools are an incredibly wasted resource and we just should make better use of them. Are there capital implications of this? There could well be and in my discussions with David Miliband on the capital programme for schools, we are thinking that through to ensure that, as we develop new schools and the schools rehabilitate themselves, we look at the possibilities of extended schools as part of the envelope in which the capital money is spent. Are there staffing implications? I would go back, these are all about new ways of working. If we get it right, we ought to be saving staff in schools a lot of time by ensuring that the appropriate person with the appropriate skills is there to respond to the child's need much more immediately than is currently the position. Now, on the fully extended schools we have also said, and I think we recognise that, that running the services that are outside the traditional pedagogy that a headteacher has responsibility for will probably require the services of a bursar. And again, we have not dreamt this concept out of thin air. This concept comes from what a lot of schools have been doing in practice on the ground, developing their services, and you would find in most of them that there is a bursar who is responsible for trying to bring together all the other services. We have also provided, just this final part, funding in this spending review period to ensure that we have got 240 what we call "full service" extended schools (We are looking for a new name for this because I do not think it is an appropriate name) up an running by 2006. So we provide the additional funding to have the staff so that they can bring together the services and we are providing money to every LEA so that they can do some work with schools in their locality to develop extended services.

Q175 Helen Jones: Are you saying, Minister, that a small primary school which may well have a bursar, perhaps part time, if it starts taking on extended services, will have the funding available for that post to take as many hours are required to fund those services?

Margaret Hodge: Not necessarily. They may go for a network. You may find a network of schools working together, as they currently do over child care, for example. There are a number of after school club facilities where primary schools combine together to use one after school club for all the children from three or four primary schools.

Q176 Helen Jones: Yes, that is fine if you have got a group of primary schools within very close distance of each other, but in many areas you have not and what I am trying to tease out of you is how it will work on the ground. If we have a headteacher and the Children's Trust comes along and says "We need to expand services", the first question any head would ask, and I would ask, is "Who is going to pay for it? Is it going to come out my budget? Or is it going to come from the Children's Trust?"

Margaret Hodge: No, it will not come out of the school's budget. The delegated schools budget remains a delegated schools budget for the head. These are monies that we are bringing together from many of the services provided by the LEA. Think of the money we put into BEST teams, all those sort of things, at the moment. All those sort of services that are provided directly through us, plus the children's social services, plus the community children's health services. It will not be schools budget money.

Q177 Valerie Davey: I would like to just move the discussion sideways to Connexions. I had the Chair and Chief Executive of my West of England Connexions Team in this morning and they are very appreciative of very much in the Green Paper. They have been in existence now, along with others, for about two years. They are finding their feet. They are doing some good work. They realise that their boundaries will include at least four Children's Trusts. I think I am a little concerned that they are going to be dragged back again into four units as opposed to servicing in their 13 to 19 age range some excellent provision, especially as many of those young people are crossing those boundaries at 16 to go to different colleges or different provision. So a little hesitant about their future. Is this the money that you will be beginning have a sight for to download into the Children's Services Trust?

Margaret Hodge: I think we are thinking about the boundaries for the Connexions service to see whether it makes sense in the post-Green Paper settlement. And we are thinking about how we can make far more effective use not just of the Connexions service budget but all those budgets that come together that I talked about earlier, the needs of that clique of 13 to 19 year olds. But let me just say one advantage of the new settlement is we will not have this current thing that we have got that under fives comes under Sure Start, five to 13 comes out of the Children's Fund, 13 to 19 comes out of Connexions, which I often get lots of letters, I am sure you do, representations from area constituencies, that "I cannot provide this service because the child happens to be over five or just under 13", which is an absurd sort of division that we have created. So that is another boundary we will be able to knock down apart from create. So we are questioning whether or not the current Connexions, on its 47 LSE geographical boundaries, makes sense if we have Children's Trusts. We are looking at that.

Valerie Davey: I would urge you, from my discussions with them this morning, I can only speak for the West of England Connexions, that they have certainly seen the value of having the wider spectrum, particularly when you are looking at 14, 15, 16 year olds who are beginning to move further afield, and they have been hugely effective and I think they are only two years old. And the idea of them changing again is pretty daunting. So I would ask for some stability there and certainly a very close look at the work they are now doing and the delivery to targets which they have been providing.

Q178 Helen Jones: We have been very concerned in this Committee, Minister, at the number of children who are not in school when they should be, who are falling through the net, for various reasons. Now, could you give us some indication of how you think Children's Trusts will be able to provide more effective services for those children who are not currently attending school and what happens to them out of term time? These children who are often at risk for various reasons, at risk of getting into trouble. How will a Children's Trust benefit those? Can you give us some idea?

Margaret Hodge: Firstly, I am very concerned. It is about 10 per cent, I reckon, of that cohort. It is the NEET group, "Not in education, employment or training" just to give you what NEET means. It has a been a problem and, in fact, Chairman, when I was Chairman of the Select Committee it was an issue that Valerie Davey will remember we looked at at the time. We are currently undertaking an audit which will look at how effective our policies to date have been in that regard. So that is really initiatives like the Connexions service which has it as one of its targets to reduce the number of "Not in education, employment or training". So we are currently just examining that. I have just come a little bit early to the Committee, after Christmas I think we will have some clear figures as to whether we are beginning to cut into that figure. Certainly they are getting better at tracking them and the support that they are able to give to individuals, we hope, will lead to an improvement. The BEST teams, I think, are another pretty key initiative that we have had as our learning mentors. As is the release of the 14 to 19 curriculum. There is quite a lot of initiatives that we have taken that ought to be cutting in and we ought to start seeing the impact of those. Within Children's Trusts what I hope is, again, that by bringing together all those expenditure funnels and trying to get them integrated, together with actually the Children's Fund which has been another quite important initiative at the local level and encouraging the development often quite small voluntary organisation interventions to support children who look as if they are going to be disengaged in the five to 13 year old cohort, bringing that all together. We ought to be able to start seeing whether that is making sense. But by bringing together, making sure that you really focus on the child, trying to get to the child at the first point at which there is a problem, so you do not wait until the problem becomes a crisis, but you really intervene at the first sign of things going wrong, I hope that we will achieve better for them. I mean this group are a group that I think is of huge concern to us as we try and not only raise education attainment but get greater equality of outcome for children through the education system.

Chairman: I do not want to cut questions and answers at all, but we are getting to that stage where shorter answers and shorter questions are the order of the day.

Q179 Helen Jones: Can I just ask about another issue? We are talking about making sure that a lot of services are available in schools and I think most of us think it is generally a good thing, but two things arise from that. First of all, how can we then reach out to those children who have a bad experience in school and whose parents have often had a bad experience of the education system as well? And secondly, what training will be provided for staff who are teaching in schools now about these new ways of doing things, about how those services will be integrated?

Margaret Hodge: There are two answers to the first part. One is part of our reform agenda for schools must be to make them welcome places for all the people in the community. So that is one of the challenges. It is not good enough to say people who had a bad experience at school will not go in there because that actually creates the cycle of under-achievement in families over time. So we are not accepting that as a premise. The second is to say that for some we recognise, I think, that schools on the whole are non-stigmatised safe places where people will go. There will be some for whom that is not the case and we need to look at other ways of providing services to them. We are clear about that. Staff training is very important. One of the big thrusts of our policy is to do with a whole analysis of workforce needs and if we are serious about creating the more integrated workforce, there will be some common components that we would expect anybody working with children to undertake and that might be around things like child development, child protection, those sort of issues where I think a common understanding across all the disciplines would help. So there is a lot of work that has got to go into training, creating in the same way, Chairman, as we created the climbing frame of qualification in early years, taking that forward now in the whole of the 0 to 19 agenda and overseeing that, not only the workforce unit within the Department, but with a new sector skills council for children.

Q180 Chairman: You know what we say to you, Minister, and you know this as well as we do, that there is a terrible tendency that the younger age group that people work with, the lower they get paid. We pointed that out at the time of our Early Years Inquiry that Helen Jones was part of. We made a very strong recommendation. This terrible tendency to go for low paid less skilled people in the care of our youngest children and we want to see that change. I am sure you do, but what is the Government doing about that at a time when even in terms of the criticism that was made experts that advise this Committee that when Children's Centres were set up it did seem, at one stage, that there was not going to be a qualified teacher on the premises. Whereas all the research shows that for the Children's Centre to be effective it should have a qualified teacher on those premises as part of that too.

Margaret Hodge: This is not an easy short term overnight solution, but clearly, as a nation, we have a distorted pattern of expenditure ...

Q181 Chairman: No, higher education people do not get paid very much either. Both are your responsibilities.

Margaret Hodge: But higher education ...

Q182 Chairman: Both your responsibilities, Minister; poor pay. Now, what are you going to do about it?

Margaret Hodge: Higher education, what I was going to say was that top up fees may be one of the answers, over time, to releasing more money down the system so that we can be less ...

Q183 Chairman: You had better not be going that way. We had better not go that way at the moment.

Margaret Hodge: We can invest it in children in their early years. But I think this is really an issue which worries me a lot, if I am honest, Chairman, because if we serious about transforming children's life chances, the quality of their experience in their early years is utterly central and I also agree with you that it is extremely important to have, in their early years offer, the experience of the qualified teacher on board and we are trying now to ensure that that occurs in all our Children's Centres. But it does cost money. There is no running away from it, it does cost money. We have got huge challenges on how to translate our vision into a reality. Part of it is we spend, as a nation, 0.4 per cent of GDP on early years services. These are pretty crude figures, so they are probably questionable, but it is about 0.4 per cent compared to the Danes of 2.4 per cent of GDP on early years services. So we are not good at investing there and, in a sense, it is how much you invest will inform how much you can pay, which reflects the qualifications and experience of the staff that you can employ. So it is a difficult one.

Q184 Chairman: One of the things that came out of Helen Jones' questioning also, Minister, is that Professor Pascal, who you will know, of Birmingham University, when this Committee visited Birmingham pointed out research I hope you will look at that indicates the number of lost children that never get on a record at school, at nursery, at all, for very long periods of time is very worrying. The work they have done in Birmingham, they may be children of women who are in refuges, they may be children of refugees who are moved from house to house, and she is very concerned that if the Birmingham research is extrapolated it really adds to what Nacro recently suggested about the number of children just missing and we do not know about them. That must be very worrying to you, as the Children's Minister.

Margaret Hodge: One of another very important element of our reform is what we are doing about information referring and tracking of children. We spend some time in the Green Paper on that and that will be an area which I think will demand considerable investment. The concept here is that every child will have unique identifying number. We are still to think through precisely what that number should be, whether it should be the NHS number or the National Insurance number.

Q185 Chairman: As you know, Minister, if the parent decides to have the child educated at home, you may never have the chance to register them at all.

Margaret Hodge: You will. Under our system, Chairman, that child will be registered at birth.

Q186 Chairman: If the birth is registered.

Margaret Hodge: It will not be a hundred per cent failsafe, but the best way of tracking children is from their birth. Most children are born within the NHS in some way. Most, I accept not all, but most. And then what we have got to do once we have that information on children is make sure that it is shared across professionals. What we still have not done, which is a huge challenge to us, is because we have gone for a local solution around information sharing and tracking, we have to develop very strong protocols for children who move boundaries.

Q187 Chairman: We do hope the tracking process will be taken seriously, Minister, because it is easy to do the easy ones or the average ones, but many Members of Parliament have constituents, especially young girls, that disappear at around about the age of 13. They disappear from the education system and no questions asked. I find that very disturbing both in terms of young children, who I have just described in Professor Pascal's evidence, I also find it very disturbing that we can have young people at a vulnerable age disappear from school and no question is asked about where they have gone or if they are ever coming back. I think most of us are still very concerned about that.

Margaret Hodge: Let me just say two or three things. One is remember that Professor Pascal's data is based on a sort of macro extrapolation of LEA data ...

Q188 Chairman: No, it is not. It is based on original research conducted by her unit in Birmingham.

Margaret Hodge: Right. Well, that is not my understanding.

Q189 Chairman: Working with refugees.

Margaret Hodge: I will look at it. The second thing to say is that our information referral and tracking ought to, over time, help us. It will never be a hundred per cent, but it will be much, much better. The third thing to say is that actually the Connexions service has started its own mechanism for trying to track children through the school system so that they do not get lost in the system. And that is beginning to pay dividends. So we are getting smarter at it, but we have got a long way to go.

Q190 Chairman: We do not want it to be politically threatened, Minister. There should be no sector and no people from any background in this country whose children disappear off the school roll and people say "That is their culture". As Chairman of this Committee, I feel very strongly and I know that other Members of this Committee do too. If a child disappears from school, we should know where that child goes.

Margaret Hodge: We share that with you.

Q191 Valerie Davey: Can I just add to that? I mentioned earlier, in a different context, that every tragedy that hits the press, and we take in very deeply, we have a reaction and we have a concern and we have a commitment. Now, this specific one about tracking came up after the Fred West tragedies in Gloucester and it was identified there that some of those youngsters had been missing off registers. Every local authority agreed to ensure that youngsters were handed on. As a child moved from one authority to another, that name went forward. Now, we have started, therefore, good practice in some areas that we have got to build on. I think I just want to echo what the Chairman said that this is still if a children are on a register, but if they are not, if they slip off the register, that is where we really - and I accept your commitment to it and I recognise the work that you have done, Minister, and I expect some things to change as a result, but I just want to echo what the Chairman is saying, that there are those children who disappear and who do not emerge and we really do have to be responsible in future.

Margaret Hodge: I do not know if you have had a chance to look at our proposition in the Green Paper around this, that is why we think creating a unique identifying number for every child at birth, collecting information on a hub at local authority level, basic information about that child, their name, their address, their GP, school, if they go to one, then ensuring that that unique identifying number is used by every professional with whom that child comes into contact. So whether it is anyone in the health service, whether it is anybody in education, whether it is anybody in social care, whether it is the youth service, whether it is the criminal justice system, they all use that same identifying number. Making sure the hub is managed effectively at local authority level so that if one agency expresses concern, let us say the GP puts up a flag of concern, the child then enters school and the school has a concern, so you have got two flags of concern, you do not share the information, you share a flag. Then ensuring that the hub manager puts the two agencies in contact with each other so that the professionals can discuss their concerns is the beginning of tackling that issue which Valerie Davey alluded to, which is that every single child death and inquiry that you look at on child deaths, and I have looked at many of the 50 that there have been in the last 25 years, says that failure to share information is at the heart of one of the things that goes wrong. What we have not solved, Chairman, and I am completely honest with the Committee on this, is that will make for much better information held at local authority level. We chose to go for a local authority solution and not a national solution because I think we would have been here in 20 years' time still talking about it. But having gone for a local authority solution, whilst we can ensure that all local authorities use the same computer programmes, what we have not resolved is when children change boundaries and that is a big issue. We will develop protocols but, in the end, however good a protocol you develop, you are always dependent on the professional performance of the individual professional people who come into contact with that child and a lot of that is about culture change. It is often not about systems, GPs unwilling to share information is a classic thing. It is a culture change and it is good professional training and competence.

Q192 Chairman: Minister, we hear all you have said. What we are trying to do is just to expand your parameters a little. An abused child, whether it is a British citizen living in England, if that child is abused, whether it is in Ilford or in the Indian sub-continent, that abused child is a responsibility of us and I think that is a very important point to bear in mind.

Margaret Hodge: I agree.

Q193 Mr Turner: Paul frequently draws on his experience, can I draw on a bit of mine as an Education Officer in Southwark just before I came into the House? One of the things which I felt was that there were lots of people from outside, of whom I was one, trying to do things for the people of Southwark and particularly the pupils and parents, a whole range of professionals, but precious little genuine empowerment of those parents going on. I would be anxious if the extended schools became merely a focus of outside professionals. How can you reassure me?

Margaret Hodge: I do not quite understand the question. Are we going to involve parents as well?

Q194 Mr Turner: Are we going to empower parents? Are we going to enable them to do more of what we would perhaps feel that it has hitherto been the job of the professionals, many of them, of course, who do not live in the borough?

Margaret Hodge: I think one of the interesting challenges we face around this whole area is that the tradition in the UK is to see parenting as a private concern of individuals with the State really only intervening at points of crisis. The research I have seen, which I would suggest the Committee would do well to look at, by Charles Deforge who did some research for the Department around the impact of parenting on a child's educational outcomes, has some really interesting conclusions. What he says is that of course socio-economic background matters and of course the mother's educational attainment matters and of course good schools matter and of course excellent teachers matter, but the factor that has the greatest impact on a child's educational outcome, unrelated to socio-economic background, is the parenting in the home. What he defines as good parenting in the home and we know what that is. It is not even that it is a concept that we cannot really define and crystallise. He talks about over 10 per cent impact on educational outcome from good parenting in the home. That is quite a considerable impact.

Q195 Chairman: We have had OFSTED here saying that if you balance educational achievement 80 per cent of what goes on is in the home and 20 per cent in school.

Margaret Hodge: I do not know what research they have got. This is a research project that has looked at most of the research on parenting.

Q196 Chairman: We will have to put the two together.

Margaret Hodge: You will have to look at the two together. Anyway, that shows the importance of parenting to children's outcomes. And then you come on to has the State got a legitimate role in supporting parents. I think the State has, yes. So I think we have moved from the tradition of the State not having a legitimate role to one accepting that it does and that is about making services on offer to parents to empower them and things like Home Start in our Sure Start programme is a very good example of a good support programme for parents with children at a very young age, which we want to expand. You also have to look at children in transition from nursery to primary, primary to secondary and I think parenting support around those areas is important. I think helping parents, empowering parents in that sense, with particular needs, children with particular needs, is also important.

Q197 Mr Turner: Forgive my criticism, but you are talking about helping parents rather than parents being enabled and, in many cases, drawing on the experience which parents have, but are not able to assist other parents with. And that is what I mean by empowerment, not highly paid or less highly paid professionals coming in the sort of seven hours a day and then disappearing to leafier suburbs.

Margaret Hodge: To the extent that a child is in a family, so if you are trying to put the child and the young person's interests at the centre of your concerns and build the services round them, part of the articulation of that child or young person's interests will be through their family, through their parents. So are our policies about empowering parents in that general sense? Yes, to the extent that we are shifting them round. That will be reflected in all the services we provide. However, what we are also going to do and where the change is, and I think a lot of what we have done over the last six years reflects that too, the change is really probably in giving greater emphasis to the voice of the child and the young person, as indeed OFSTED have begun to do now in the way they inspect. So of course parents' voice counts and I hope that many of our policies demonstrate that and of course we want to empower. What I was trying to demonstrate is that what we also need to do is support parents as well as empower them.

Q198 Mr Turner: Can I just address a criticism that has been given to me, and I think I start from the point of view of thinking it is a good idea to focus services together, but one of the problems that parents in particular face when they are trying to access support for children with special educational needs is that they do not get that support easily from the education department in a local council, but they do find that perhaps a social worker will be able to bang the table and say "You have got to do this". Now, if they are reporting to the same senior manager, how can they do that effectively?

Margaret Hodge: Hopefully by intervening earlier with appropriate support without the hassle of "It comes from your budget. It comes from my budget", which is often at the root of why children with special needs do not get the services delivered currently. So intervening earlier, intervening in a coherent way, intervening across budgets to more appropriately meet the children's needs. Will there be enough money? Particularly around some of the issues, we will always be struggling, and we have found with our SEN budgets all the way through that children now have more complex needs and, although we have expanded the budgets hugely, there are still many, many children, I get them in my constituency, no doubt you get them in yours, who feel that they could do with extra support to meet those needs. What we are trying to do with the whole of the SEN policy fitting in to what we are doing is getting the earlier identification, earlier intervention, so that hopefully we save money down the line.

Mr Turner: Good, excellent. Thank you.

Q199 Chairman: Minister, can just say a constituency point? I find the very best information I have got in the time I have been a Member of Parliament in terms of flagging up when there is a problem with a child, particularly back round at home, is the health visitor.

Margaret Hodge: Yes.

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 much more effective and 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 hundred per cent but almost every child. Indeed, the General Nursing Officer is currently undertaking a review of the 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 a 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 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 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 "This is still a very rewarding job that you can 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 had a meeting also 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 six or seven per cent. 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 per cent 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 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 things to say is that this year we gave an extremely generous settlement to social services. Indeed it was an 8.7 per cent 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 before. There has been increased 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.