Examination of Witnesses (Questions 48
- 59)
MONDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2004
MR PHILIP
COLLINS
Q48 Chairman: Phil Collins. You are
not grey?
Mr Collins: I am not.
Q49 Chairman: Are you looking for
a job as a Children's Commissioner?
Mr Collins: I am not really, no,
not after the exposition of the problems we have just heard. It
is a tough job.
Q50 Chairman: We have seen you pop
up in many different guises in the education world. It is very
good of you to take time to be with us today. We particularly
want to probe with you some questions around this whole new shift
in the approach to children's issues. From your wide experience
in this area we hope you can give us a unique look at these issues
and wonder if you want to say something to get things started?
Mr Collins: I agree with an awful
lot of what Lord Laming said so I will not recapitulate any of
that so we can go through quicker. There are two arguments that
collide here which show where we are, one of which is the aftermath
of the Victoria Climbié process. We should remember that
the Green Paper had a life prior to that. It was not originally
the Victoria Climbié response. We went through a number
of iterations and it has collided with this view which is now
very prevalent and in fact becomes a bit of a cliché that
the early years of life are more important in policy than any
other moment in a welfare state. Generally speaking, the welfare
state has never been from cradle to grave. Once the health visitor
has been and the immunisation programme is over the welfare state
has left you alone for a few years until the door to the primary
school opens and the old Jesuitical insight that that is the most
important moment. There is a lot of evidence built up, mostly
from America and of course Scandinavia, that £1 spent in
that era has a significantly better return than £1 spent
in remedial activity in the teenage years. I think that argument,
which has now really taken hold, has come together with the attempts
to respond to the failings which sometimes has fatal consequences
like the Victoria Climbié case. That is where we are now.
In a way, the first big question is: who is the Green Paper for?
Who is it about? Is it simply about the mercifully small number
of cases where systemic failure leads to fatal consequences? Is
it about that 10% of least well off children or is it universal?
I think there are all sorts of tensions in answering the questions.
An interesting thought is: who in fact is this Green Paper, this
Bill really for?
Q51 Chairman: To follow those thoughts
through, who do you think it is about? Do you think it is the
very vulnerable minority? Is it the poorest 10%? The Bill purports
to be for children right through to 18. You do not hear much discussion
of the older age groups in terms of that, do you?
Mr Collins: No. That is where
the gap starts. To give an example of where this becomes quite
depressing is we know that if you can attach a named person to
people in public services their satisfaction with the service
goes up. Also, the actual experience they have is improved, but
their report of their experience is that it is much better. The
usual response in public service is a post facto joining up. You
have lots of disciplines doing their own thing and you join them
up in a multi-disciplinary team. The approach in the Green Paper
was to try to get a named person to follow all the way through.
One point where I think I probably do disagree with Lord Laming
on specialisation, or at least it is worth posing the question:
specialisation may exacerbate the tensions. One of our big problems,
which is common to all of the fatal examples and is common to
much less not non-fatal but important instances of mediocrity
in service, is that the system does not talk to each other. The
levels of coordination are very poor. It is partly a technical
problem that we do not have the systems that work, but it is principally
more than that; it is principally cultural. One of the reasons
professions within the system do not talk to each other is that
they are very, very busy and have other things to do. It is not
the first thing on their radar. I have said this repeatedly at
conferences to the various professionals, and understandably they
do not like it, the professional rivalry that exists between them,
that expertise and professional prestige involves pulling the
ladder after you and erecting barriers around yourself. This is
going to be a very significant problem when we try and integrate
this profession. For example, the tensions between people who
see themselves as educators, people who see themselves as carers
are already looming. I do not think at the moment there is a very
clear way through that problem. Those professional demarcations
I think are going to prove to be extremely hard to negotiate.
Q52 Chairman: Do you think health
is going to be a particular problem?
Philip Collins: Health. Yes, I
do. Health is a good example because the original vision of the
Bill in the Act, in the Green Paper, I think was to envisage moving
from a social care workforce and health workforce to a children's
workforce. It is now unclear to me whether that is still where
we are going. The position of health visitors and midwives, for
example, is made much more complicated by this process because
their hope and aim is simply to carry on in their neatly defined
professional package and be part of a multi-disciplinary team.
If instead we head towards something like a children's practitioner,
everybody is in some way a children's practitioner with their
specialisms underneath and that alters the nature of those professionals
quite markedly in ways which as yet we have not thought through
seriously. Trying to think through what the integration of service
means for people's jobs is very, very important. That leads to
another important point about entry routes into these professions
because I agree with what was said before about recruitment and
retention being absolutely pivotal and difficult. I think pay
is something to do with that. It is no coincidence that as a nursery
assistant on £5.60 an hour they struggle to recruit. I just
think it is dishonest to pretend that pay is not part of this;
it absolutely is, but it is not the whole thing. The particular
managerial problem that I would pick out is that it is very hard
to promote people who are really good and it is very hard to get
rid of people who are really bad. You have the status within the
professions, the labour market rigidity in these professions is
not organised with the citizen principally in mind. It is like
most public services organised principally with the providers
in mind. So you have serious problems there.
Q53 Chairman: You said the integration
of people's jobs is one of the true aspects to success. Have you
made any observation where departments are merging to provide
children's services? Very often it is the education directors
that are becoming the dominant people getting those posts. That
is perhaps not surprising given education is the most dominant
public service at a local level.
Mr Collins: I think that is right.
That is what has happened. I think if any of the sectors has to
dominate it is probably the right one. The reason I say that is
because it consorts with the evidence. If we think of Every
Child Matters as more than just a response to the Climbié
Report, but it is also about doing the best of all for least well
off children, then there is a lot of evidence now that the right
kind of education in the early years can make a very significant
difference. The right kind of education is a begging phrase. It
is absolutely critical. There is a lot of evidence that says if
you simply cover across universally, if the quality of what you
offer is not very good then it may have a negative impact. In
order to do something which is useful which improves the life
chances of children it is very expensive. It does mean that we
are going from a situation of simply caring or looking after or
keeping control of children during working hours to one where
we are educating children. That shift will inevitably mean that
the educational aspects of the professions are paramount and it
will cause problems—it already is doing—where services
are being integrated between the different rivalrous groups.
Q54 Jonathan Shaw: What do you think
we need to keep an eye on when we are looking at speaking to the
minister and plotting the progress from what is, I think, universally
agreed to be an ambitious programme?
Mr Collins: I think the workforce
issues are principal. They are absolutely crucial because the
profession will rarely candidly confess that it is going to have
trouble integrating, but it will. It is a major reason they do
not talk to one another. There are serious gaps in the market
for provision at the moment. It is not at all clear how we are
going to fill those in. There is no particular ideological problem
here. Nobody has a real ideological problem in its provision in
healthcare. In fact, the Chancellor at a seminar at the Treasury
recently on this, where he contrasted this market with the healthcare
system where he said he does have an ideological problem with
a major extension of private provision, but that is not the case
here. That market provision is extremely patchy. One of the reasons,
to my mind, is the funding mechanism. I think another thing which
is worth considering as we go through this process is whether
the childcare tax credit, which is the main channel for funding,
is fit for purpose for a large expansion of supply, especially
in areas which are not very well off. The main reason you do not
get sustainable provision is the money just is not there. As the
funding is on the demand side it is just not worth it for lots
of providers to offer a durable service. There is a consensus
pretty much I think in the field that funding it through a component
of the childcare tax credit is deeply problematic, so I think
that is something to probe. One other thing: I think relations
with schools, the role of local education authorities will prove
to be, again, interesting and problematic. It is not at all clear
yet what the role of LEAs will be in this as in lots of other
areas. It may be that LEAs that are imaginative become deal
brokers essentially, assembling packages of education, taking
money from different sources, but we have not aligned what is
expected of them in this Bill with the PSA targets, for example.
There are all sorts of peculiarities in what we are asking LEAs
to do. I do not think they have yet responded particularly well
to a change of role.
Q55 Jonathan Shaw: What about research?
What priority would you attach to research? Which particular aspects
do you think the Committee should be looking at or ensuring the
Government are carrying out on their behalf, in seeing that this
ambitious programme is fit for purpose?
Mr Collins: As I am sure you know
the Government has its own evaluations running on some aspects
of its Early Years programme. One thing which has come out of
the research which I think will be worth following up, is the
next question of whether these things ought to be organised nationally
or locally. That came out in the early evaluation of SureStart
where it showed that a mere 26% of SureStart initiatives had demonstrably
positive outcomes on children. What the accompanying literature
showed was that SureStart did not exist as a single thing. There
had been enormous local discretion on what people did with SureStart
money. People followed a hunch locally and they had done what
they thought was needed in their area, which generally speaking
I applaud as an approach to things. It turns out that the bulk
of them did things that made no difference at all. It was at best
a placebo effect in most cases. In 26% of cases there was a very
good effect which is a remarkably successful venture when you
talk about the most difficult to reach, but one conclusion that
could be drawn from that is what you need is a bit more centralisation.
You need somebody to come in and say: these things seem to work,
what you need to do is that. What it points out is that our mechanisms
for sharing best practice in the public sector generally and in
this area particularly are very poor. It is not just we do not
share information well; it is that when things work in one place
it takes forever.
Q56 Jonathan Shaw: That is also culture,
that people would not go out and look for things that are working
well. They plod on and think what I am doing here is fine because
to do that would be to somehow admit that you are not providing
a very good service. This comes back to your provider service.
Mr Collins: There is precious
little incentive to go out and seek.
Q57 Jonathan Shaw: They do if they
are forced to. That is the way we work. You are forced to or you
plod on?
Mr Collins: There is a very interesting
study at the Mackenzie US Retail Centre in which they pointed
out that a novelty becomes standard practice within 14 months.
If you do something interesting I will be doing it in 14 months
even if I am the most unimaginative provider in the sector. I
wonder what a comparable period in the public sector is.
Q58 Chairman: Is not the fact that
in terms of SureStart there was a vague departmental remit and
the problem we had when we were looking at this was there was
a queue of people wanting to get a SureStart programme going and
a commitment with the Government rolling them out. The problem
was they were analysing what they were going to do, comparing
it with what other people were going to do and getting that right.
So the department's fingerprints were all over these SureStart
programmes. How did they all go off at tangents and not deliver?
Mr Collins: To a large extent
than is normal the variations in what people did within their
SureStart programmes was really quite marked. In a sense, it is
an inadvertent exercise in localism and not all of it worked.
I do not want to sound like I am too harsh on that because part
of the way of getting things to work is through trying things
and they do not work. I am not saying that that was, therefore,
a terrible failure, as long as there is some mechanism which by
the good spreads through. That is what worries me, if the 26%
will be mimicked and copied by the rest all to the good.
Q59 Chairman: Phil, is this a social
market foundation line that you are giving? You sound very pessimistic.
First of all you were very pessimistic when you were answering
questions to Jonathan and I about multi-discipline approaches,
that people could get rid of that tradition and work together
as multi-disciplinary teams, co-located, all the excitement
of the Children Act, if you like. You seem to pour cold water
on it thinking it is never going to happen because these people
are traditional human beings working in silos and they are never
going to get out of them.
Mr Collins: I do not quite think
that, but I do think if you are thinking about where might it
go wrong, where will the problems be, I think there will be intractable
difficulties. I am not really pessimistic actually. In fact I
think the progress in this area over the last 10 years has been
remarkable. We have to remember we do not have to go back very
far to look at the Early Years terrain and then there was nothing.
There was nothing there at all, so the folk memory of policy is
pretty short. It is a pretty remarkable transformation. The commitment
to the next phase of policy I think is sincere and will follow.
It is going to be extremely costly, but the big problem—the
problem which in a sense insofar as this is a question about pulling
levers in government I will be optimistic about—is not mostly
a question about pulling levers in government, it is trying to
get a profession to alter its way of behaving and that is really
difficult. If I am pessimistic it is simply a refection of how
difficult it is to get cultures to shift. I think that point needs
to be stressed. Very often, I did it before, people make an easy
translation from something that happens in a private market, something
that happens in a public sector. I am sure we ought to recognise
that they are not the same things in the end because the incentives
are different. The problems that we encounter in some of these
communities are really extremely difficult. It would be like saying
to a business: go and take the most difficult customers who have
the least money and then sell them a very high quality good. They
will say: I am not going to do that. I will go over there and
sell to it somebody who has more money. We have to remember that
we are trying to do something here which is extremely hard. Therefore,
if I sound pessimistic about our capacity for success it is not
because I am just being gloomy, it is just recognition that this
is a really tough thing to achieve.
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