Memorandum submitted by Professor Peter
Moss and colleagues[4]
from the Institute of Education University of London
1. The Institute of Education University
of London has a wide-ranging interest in policies and services
for children, young people and their families, including: education
and schooling; early childhood education and care; out-of-school
childcare; child welfare and social care, including fostering
and residential care; relations across these sectors, the workforce
in schools and other children's services. The Institute is also
strongly represented in the area of childhood studies, with its
focus on children's rights and participation. In all of these
fields, the Institute has a national and international reputation,
and a deep fund of knowledge and experience accumulated over many
years of research and teaching.
THE PLACE
OF HEALTH,
SOCIAL SERVICES
AND EDUCATION
RESPECTIVELY WITHIN
INTEGRATED SERVICES
2. The government's Every Child Matters
(ECM) agenda places great emphasis on the role of the school,
for example in its policies on extended schools and "wraparound
care". Yet, in some important respects insufficient attention
has been paid to the school and its future within an integrated
children's services perspective. Indeed, there are signs of uncertainty
and ambivalence about the place of the school, and whether government
sees it as a "children's service" or as a separate institution
focused on educational attainment of a certain kind around which
"children's services" focused on other purposes will
cohere. There is little discussion of the relationship between
schools, including their management and teaching staff, and the
other services co-located with them in extended schools. Will
all these services and their personnel find a new meeting place
where they can work together on a basis of equality, mutual learning
and the search for new and common understandings? Or will schools,
in which UK children already spend more time than most of their
European peers, be the dominant partner leading to the possibility
of what has been termed the "schoolification" of other
services?
3. Most strikingly, the school workforce
is treated separately from the remainder of the workforce engaged
with children, both conceptually and structurally. Although teachers
are one of the most numerous groups working with children, they
do not appear in para 4.26 of the Green Paper as one of the groups
of "professionals and non-professionals [who] might increasingly
work together in different types of teams". Within the DfES,
there is a Children's Workforce Unit and a Schools Workforce Unit.
At the same time, responsibility for training teachers and others
working with children is hived off to different organisations,
albeit loosely connected through a "UK Children's Workforce
Network".
4. Moreover, little attention has been given
to how schools, as currently constituted, might have to change
to enable them to take a holistic approach to children, to recognise
children's participation rights (with respect, for example, to
the curriculum or the school day), to enable them to meet the
key outcomes adopted by ECM and to be places where children
will want to spend even longer periods of the day than at present.
For example, the Green Paper quotes (page 16) evidence that almost
half of 11 to 16 year olds in mainstream schools reported being
the victim of some kind of offence in the previous year. In short,
far more attention needs to be given to the implications for schools
and teachers of a genuinely integrated and participatory approach
to services for children concerned with children's well-being
and the development of their full potential. Matters to be addressed
include schools' organisation and practice, relationships between
staff and children, the conceptualisation of children and young
people (frequently referred to as "pupils" in the Green
Paper), and how all these areas are interrelated. Or put another
way, how might schools become more like Children's Centres?
5. One of the main problems facing the development
of integrated services is the need for the matching development
of an integrated concept to underpin this approach to services.
Without this concept, there is a deep-seated problem: we start
from a position of fragmentation, then struggle to piece the fragments
together, while an integrative concept would mean that we started
from viewing children and work with children holistically. One
such integrative concept is pedagogy, a theory, practice and profession
for working with children and young people found today in most
Continental European countries, where it has a tradition stretching
back 200 years, but largely unknown in the English-language world.
Pedagogy and the pedagogue address the whole child and treat learning,
care and, more generally, upbringing as inseparable activities.
In a country like Denmark, where pedagogy is, alongside teaching,
the main profession in children's services, pedagogues are the
main workforce across a wide range of services including early
childhood and childcare services, residential care and youth work.
6. The Institute of Education has undertaken
a wide range of cross-national studies of pedagogy and the pedagogue
in recent years, partly funded by the government. Our conclusion
from this work is that an integrative concept and profession,
like pedagogy and the pedagogue, could have a vital contribution
to make to progressing towards genuinely integrated services.
At the least, they merit being considered more carefully by the
government before workforce policy is finalised.
7. With regard to children in public care
new organizational arrangements are not likely to lead to improvement
unless there is a determined effort to tackle a number of longstanding
problems. These include the instability of care with at least
half of children experiencing frequent placement moves, and the
chronic shortage of foster parents, reducing the possibility of
placement choice. Professional foster care, with foster parents
regarded as colleagues and paid accordingly, offers the only realistic
possibility of obtaining suitable placements matched to the needs
of children and able to support and enhance their development
and education. The third problem is the change that occurred through
the 1990s in the role of social workers, from caseworkers to case
managers. All children in care need a social worker who feels
a personal responsibility for them, is keenly concerned for their
welfare and is prepared to act as their advocate when necessary.
Children need to know and trust their social workers as well as
the people who provide day-to-day care. Without this, structural
changes are unlikely to feed through to improvements on the ground.
STAFF AND
MANAGEMENT NEEDS
8. ECM raises two linked challenges on the
staffing front. The first is how to develop a workforce that will
support a more integrated and holistic approach to children and
their families. The second is how to raise levels of education
and pay among many key workers, in particular those working in
the so-called childcare sector and those working in residential
child and youth care.
9. On the former point, the government has
decided to go down the route of retaining existing occupations
while seeking to enhance connections and movement between them
through, inter alia, developing a common core of training
across the many various occupations and professions. Having undertaken
wide-ranging studies of workforce developments in other countries,
we are concerned that no attempt has been made to consider another
option: re-structuring the children's workforce or large parts
of it, through developing a new "core" profession such
as the pedagogue (as found in Denmark), or "new" teachers
(as in Sweden), or some other cross-disciplinary model.
10. These two options—greater connectedness
within existing workforce structures or restructuring the workforce—are
not necessarily mutually exclusive. New professions will not take
over all occupations working with children, and some degree of
shared training between those separate professions that would
remain after restructuring (eg pedagogues, teachers and health
workers) may be desirable. In saying this, we are not advocating
any one option, but suggesting that options exist and should be
set out at this stage of policy development.
11. On the latter point, the low educational
level in both residential child and youth care and in the childcare
sector need urgently to be tackled, either by raising existing
NVQ requirements or, more boldly, by introducing the kind of "core"
professional referred to above. Studies conducted at the Institute
of Education show that in much of Northern Europe the education,
support and qualification for work in residential care is more
rigorous, and more rigorously expected, than in the UK. Here,
research on local authority children's homes shows a steady decline
in quality and outcomes for children over the past twenty years
despite repeated initiatives aimed at improvement. In most areas
residential care is regarded as a last resort for children who
have severe problems. NVQ Level 3 is an inadequate qualification
for this exceptionally demanding work.
12. This in turn requires the government
to grasp the nettle of pay and funding, especially in the childcare
sector where average pay remains only just above the minimum wage
level, matching low levels of basic education. Revaluing this
work cannot be done without an overhaul of funding.
LISTENING TO
CHILDREN
13. Listening to children expresses an ethical
and political relationship to children, built on an image of children
as citizens with rights, as active subjects who are experts in
their own lives and who are able to participate at all ages and
in all services if adults are capable of listening to what Loris
Malaguzzi (the first director of the world famous early childhood
services in Reggio Emilia) called the "the hundred languages
of childhood". The Institute has widespread experience in
this field, working with children under and over five as well
as young people, and developing a range of methods for listening
to children. Based on this experience, our view is that supporting
innovative practice and promoting examples of what is possible
is important, as well as applying minimum standards for the involvement
of children in the design and evaluation of services.
14. It is also important to develop a professional
ethos or culture of participation across all occupations and services.
One way to do this is to ensure that listening to and communicating
with children forms an important part of training, both for particular
occupations and professions (including teaching) and for any developments
in common core or other forms of joint training. This involves
both issues of practice (developing effective skills in communicating
with children and acting upon their views) and theoretical underpinnings
that promote practice such as childhood studies.
THE ROLE
OF THE
CHILDREN'S
COMMISSIONER
15. The government has insisted that the
Children's Commissioner in England should not assume an advocacy
role for individual children. The argument put forward is that
responding to individual complaints is antithetical to retaining
a strategic focus and role: advocating for individual children
is therefore seen as in opposition to advocating for children
as a group. We are not convinced by this view. Experience of the
Children's Commissioner in Wales—who adopts both roles and
has dealt with over 500 individual complaints—provides support
for the opposite viewpoint: that contact with individual children
and their complaints informs more general advocacy.
FINAL COMMENT
16. We welcome many aspects of the Every
Child Matters agenda, and recognise it as a major landmark
in public policy towards children and young people. ECM
and the government's new agenda on children's services mark an
important development in public policy, attaching higher priority
to children and families and addressing some of the structural
problems that have bedevilled the field for so long.
17. Such an ambitious agenda requires good
technical inputs (finding effective structures and processes).
But it also requires a strong critical environment. Bigger and
better services and policies may improve the lives of some children,
but also risk "governing" children more, subjecting
them to powerful normalising forces. Targets and outcomes can
be treated as purely managerial tools, without appreciating that
these are necessarily contestable in a democratic and pluralist
society because they raise important ethical and political questions.
For example, why is the outcome "being healthy" described
in the Green Paper in terms of avoiding negative behaviours? Or
why is "enjoying and achieving" reduced to school achievement?
18. This critical environment needs to encompass
other issues which, unless addressed, are likely to impede achieving
the government's goals. Two are of particular importance. First,
there is no serious attempt to relate the lives, well-being and
rights of children to the wider world of employment and economic
change. While we recognise that parental employment can reduce
poverty and enhance gender equality, we also believe that policies
on employment need to take account of children's interests and
rights, for example the right to enjoy family life and time with
both parents (here, the long working hours of many fathers are
of particular concern). Second, little attention is given to the
social and political position of children and the conditions that
would need to be met if children were to have their participation
rights met, given their current low status as a social group in
society and power relations between adults and children. This
would require rethinking power structures and adult behaviour
in all areas of life towards children as well as broad issues
such as children's share of national resources.
19. In short, government policy on children
and young people needs to be based on a critical understanding
of the position of children and of childhood itself in our society,
the relationship between children and adults, and the social and
economic situation of parents. Such issues should form part of
a vibrant democratic politics of childhood. Any enquiry into ECM
needs to address how this politics of childhood can be promoted
and sustained to avoid the government's good intentions becoming
simply a managerial and technical exercise.
20. Two examples of how this democratic
politics of childhood could be promoted concern training and the
role of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
A notable omission from the suggested content for common core
training for people working with children—an omission which
could be readily rectified—is any reference to promoting
critical understanding of the position of children and of childhood
itself in our society. A democratic politics of childhood would
be stimulated if the ECM agenda was related more closely
to the UNCRC, which sets out a comprehensive manifesto of children's
rights and needs. These are, of course, themselves subject to
argument, interpretation and debate, and as such contribute to
a democratic politics of childhood. But they would also do so
by providing a set of principles and values against which policy
and its implementation might be assessed. For example, in the
light of the Convention there can be no argument for failing to
give children legal protection from assault on the same basis
as adults. The experience of other countries shows that this leads
to a reduction in physical abuse and not to prosecution of parents
for trivial offences. There is no mention of this issue in ECM
but we consider it fundamental to a proper respect for children's
rights.
November 2004
4 Professor Priscilla Alderson, Dr Liz Brooker, Professor
Sonia Jackson, Professor Berry Mayall, Dr Virginia Morrow, Professor
Pat Petrie. Back
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