Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100 - 119)

MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2004

MR DAVID BELL, MRS ANNA WALKER CB, MR STEVE BUNDRED AND MR DAVID BEHAN

  Q100  Valerie Davey: You recently published Change for Children, which means that every one of these five outcomes has spawned five aims, so we now have 25 aims as well as the original five objectives or five outcomes. I wondered whether you are happy, whether you think those do reflect the spirit of the original outcomes which we were set for working on, to which you have all readily agreed. Are the additional aims helpful? Anna, we started with health, and if you take the first of these objectives, which is for children to be healthy, in that context do you think the five aims that are added to that are the right ones?

  Mrs Walker: I am extremely sorry, I am not sure I am familiar enough with those aims to comment meaningfully on them.

  Valerie Davey: Very luckily I have in front of me a nice clear document.

  Q101  Chairman: There will be different knowledge of this, and we like honesty amongst our witnesses.

  Mrs Walker: I will come back to you on them and give you those comments so that you can put them on the record.[2]


  Q102  Chairman: We would be very grateful for that. Who wants to take the five aims? Did Gordon Brown draw these up? He likes five, does he not?

  Mrs Walker: Five times five, yes!

  Mr Behan: I thought the biblical number was seven!

  Jonathan Shaw: Perhaps they could name them in the way that John Prescott was asked to name the five!

  Q103  Valerie Davey: Which of them do you feel happiest with? Which of these five relate most closely?

  Mr Behan: I think the difficulty with them is if we asked our children about the kind of issues that are important to them they would probably come up with a list like the five aims. I think the reason we have aims under the five outcomes for children is so that they can have some meaning in terms of the way that services are provided locally. We all said at the beginning how much we welcomed Every Child Matters and you mentioned Lord Laming earlier, where this came from, and the key issues that were identified in Lord Laming's inquiry was a need for coherence and coordination at a local level. Part of the objective was to ensure that all local services were focusing in a clear way so that there was that coherence and coordination at a local level. So I think the five outcomes were designed following quite a broad-based debate following Lord Laming's report, to focus on those issues which children themselves feel are important to them. I know that the five outcomes were subject to consultation with children and young people about are these the right issues that are of concern? So we do think that the outcomes are the right ones to be looking at. The aims that are underneath them—and I could not list them all, that would be a challenge too far, I think, but I know exactly where they are in this pile of papers—are the right issues to be having conversations about with local services, about how needs are being met at a local level. When we go and ask children what they think is important at a local level or ask parents what is important at a local level, then they tend to come out with issues that are identified in that list. So we do think that these are the right areas. That is not to say that they are comprehensive and will suit all children all the time. There are children with particular needs; the parents of severely disabled children will identify particular issues which are important to them, which might not be important for other parents. So I think it is about ensuring that we have some clarity about what we are doing at a local level, and it is important that we are clear as to how we work as Inspectorates to hold to account those services at a local level, that we are meeting needs appropriately.

  Q104  Valerie Davey: It sounds to me as if you are all happy to be flexible. Do you think, as the consultation proceeds, if these aims changed then that would be acceptable? That is the indication you are giving me, that there is a consultation ongoing, these are being looked at and you are genuinely listening and could tweak or change slightly as it moved forward. Is that possible?

  Mr Bell: I think it is important to make the point that the five outcomes and the activities contributing to the outcomes are the responsibility primarily of the Department for Education and Skills, the lead department in relation to Every Child Matters. However, I know that our colleagues have been contributing to the process and, as David said, I actually think we stand as a good articulation of those things that would matter. If you take the one on achievement it essentially covers things like early years and attendance, support for parents, ensuring that children achieve commensurate with their abilities and so on and so forth. You might say could we not express that in a slightly different way, could we express it this way rather than that? I actually think that if you take that one and you take the others—and none of us would sit here today and say we have missed any major items, and if you add a commonsense test to this it is quite helpful—if you are saying, "Does this cover what it means to be safe, to be healthy, to achieve well?" I think all of us would say, "Yes, that is about right; that covers what it means in a commonsense way, to achieve well, to be safe, to make a contribution," and so on.

  Q105  Valerie Davey: The one that interested me on each of those is the reference to parents, carers and families, which are all going to be brought in, which extends your remit, it seems to me, as Inspectors dramatically. Is this going to be possible or is it part of this very positive dialogue which is taking place with, as we have just heard, the parents of handicapped children or others? Is that now part of your overall framework for inspection?

  Mr Bell: It is important to make the point, of course, that we are not inspecting the work of parents; what we are doing is inspecting the extent to which services and agencies can help parents, and the wording is very carefully chosen, the extent to which parents are helped to ensure that their children are physically and emotionally healthy and so on. So the answer to your question is, yes, the inspection framework does look exclusively at the extent to which services help parents help their children, and it seems to me that that is the way it should be; that it is not for local services and certainly not for Inspectorates to usurp the role of parents, but I think it is a legitimate question to ask how do local services help parents? And that is an explicit requirement in our inspection arrangements.

  Q106  Valerie Davey: Can we focus on enjoy and achieve? We have five aims there which focus almost exclusively on the educational attainment. Is that sufficient or should that one not in fact be broader so that it does include the enjoyment, which is there in the original aim?

  Mr Bell: To be fair, it does say it is one of the outcomes that children should attend and enjoy school, and I think it is important that it is there. If you then look at the activities underpinning that it talks about children developing not just academically but developing personally as well, and it seems to me that that is right. One of the things that is rather interesting when you talk to young people in local areas—and of course they will talk about school—we know from some research that we have carried out collectively to ascertain young people's views that they are interested in safety. They are interested in how well lit is the area because "I feel safe" or "I do not feel safe" if the area is not well lit. When you consult young people—and I am sure Steve would say more about this in the Audit Commission's work—often they are interested in parks, open spaces, recreational facilities, leisure facilities. Those are the sorts of things that young people are interested in. I think one of the great virtues of our inspection programme here is that together we are devising arrangements for consulting young people and getting their views, and I think all that does is build upon a distinguished tradition that the various Inspectorates had over time of increasingly trying to get children and young people's views. So I think you should be quite reassured by that, that this is not just academic attainment—important though that is—it is about the wider quality of life and how it affects young people.

  Q107  Valerie Davey: One last question. Just focusing back on the five outcomes, is there any one of them that you feel is going to be more difficult to attain than the others?

  Mr Bell: I would invite my colleagues, but can I give you a very specific example, which has been drawn to my attention? You will see that one of the outcomes is achieving economic well-being. Those five outcomes apply. It is a bit of a stretch for us to see how a two-year old child in the care of a childminder, which is our responsibility to regulate and inspect, that generating the evidence for that one might be difficult. But to make a more serious point about it, we are not necessarily looking in every case that you will get explicit evidence. So, for example, I would have thought for the well-being of that young child we are obviously more interested in are they healthy, are they safe, are they beginning to have the right kinds of experiences that will help them to flourish as a young child? Whereas if one is interested in older young people clearly one would be interested much more on the evidence around how they have been enabled to contribute actively and to contribute to society and the economy.

  Mr Behan: A clear issue there will be the educational attainment of children looked after, where there is one of the objectives about economic well-being for children looked after. We know that one of the key issues to success of children that have been looked after in later life is going through education or into vocational education, into the employment market. So, again going back to one of the earlier questions, it may well be that we would look particularly at how an area is responding to the educational and vocational needs of children looked after, so that they can go on to be economically active, because when you speak to groups of children looked after—and I did on Friday afternoon—they wanted to be train drivers and doctors just like the rest of us wanted to be when we were that age. So I think it is ensuring that we are able to harness their ambitions so that they can be economically active, and that may mean that some specific activity is required at a local level to ensure that those outcomes can be secured.

  Mr Bundred: If I could follow up on the earlier point that David made about the outcome on enjoy and achieve? One of the inspection criteria for that specific outcome is whether there is adequate recreational provision available in the locality.

  Mrs Walker: May I add a point which I think is going to be very important under the "be healthy" outcome? That is, that there is a Children's National Service Framework, which will drive a lot of our work on the healthcare side and we will certainly want to ensure that those issues that have been identified on the healthcare side are brought to bear and looked at in relation to the Joint Area Reviews. We do know that under the National Service Framework there are some big questions on healthcare, about whether there is enough help of the right type for some children; whether that help is sufficiently child-centred, needing to make a difference between treating children not just as mini-adults but as people who need care in their own right; and whether there is sufficient link-up with other services. Partially that may be social care services, but one of the issues that is actually emerging is whether a child who does need some quite extensive healthcare help for a period of time is then properly linked back into the education services because if they are not then their re-entry is going to be very difficult indeed. So those messages, which have come from a different framework, we are very anxious to bear in on the Joint Area Reviews.

  Q108  Jonathan Shaw: In your opening remarks, Mr Bell, you talked about inspection being process of bringing improvement to services as well as highlighting areas that were not doing so well. As the Chairman said, we heard from Lord Laming last week and he was less than complimentary about Ealing Social Services who were at the centre of the Victoria Climbié inquiry, and he noted that the Commission for Social Care Inspection—your organisation, Mr Behan—had given it no stars and "getting worse". Your organisations have been about in various guises, as you referred to earlier, David Bell. What have you done to improve Ealing Social Services, whether it was yourself or it was the Joint Inspectorate with the Audit Commission? I suppose if is the case that inspection can bring about in-service improvements how is that going to be different in the future from areas that you would want to change from those of the past, Mr Behan?

  Mr Behan: Probably as you were taking evidence from Lord Laming I was seeing Ealing in terms of the Leader, the Chief Executive, the Director of Education and Social Services to secure from them their commitment to drive their improvement programme in relation to children's services. I go back to what David Bell said in the introduction. Our job is to identify where improvement is required, ensure that improvement is taking place and then go back and measure that that improvement is sufficient. It is Ealing Council's job to ensure that they are meeting the needs of their local population and improving their services. We need to hold Ealing Council to account for that and that is what we were doing last week in terms of the zero stars. In terms of their performance on children's services, we judge them to be meeting the needs of most of Ealing's children well. We were concerned, however, at the fact that it had had four Directors of Social Services in the past 12 months and therefore their infrastructure, their leadership, their capacity to improve further was, in our view, uncertain. The deterioration in Ealing's performance was not on the children's side, the deterioration in their performance was in the way they meet the needs of their adult population, and again we saw their capacity to improve being poor. We do have a positive regard for the Assistant Director for Children's Services in Ealing and think that she is part of the solution in Ealing and not part of the problem. However, there was not a similar leader amongst the management on the adult side, which is why we judged their capacity to improve in the future as being poor. So what we were doing last week was holding them to account and that is what we will continue to do. They will now be monitored rigorously by the staff of the Commission for Social Care Inspection. In the arrangements that we are currently out for consultation on, that will be a joint holding to account, probably done by David and myself in relation to their integrated services. But until we begin these arrangements in "anger", so to speak, we will continue to scrutinise Ealing, and I am obliged to report in January to Margaret Hodge, as the Minister for Children, and Steven Ladyman, on how I am holding those zero star authorities to account. It is clearly open to Ministers to use their intervention powers if they felt that was appropriate, and it is open to me to make a recommendation to Ministers that they may choose to use their intervention powers if we think that is appropriate. So we are driving Ealing hard in terms of their deteriorating performance, but I do stress that the greatest cause for concern was on the way that they provided services to meet the needs of their adult population. Our concern on children was about their capacity—their performance on children had not actually deteriorated—and we had an uncertain view of their capacity for the future, just because of the sheer volume of changes that had taken place at a senior level, and we know that organisations which are not well led do not have a common vision are not going to deliver, and that is where our concerns were.

  Q109  Jonathan Shaw: Thank you very much. I think that is quite helpful to give us that clear picture. Obviously we had just a few questions about Ealing, about which we were rather alarmed, and I appreciate you putting that on the record. One of the comments that was made by a couple of you in your opening remarks about how joined up you are, how there are no fag papers between you and anniversaries, et cetera, there has been a concern expressed that all four of you are going to a particular area to talk to the strategic organisations, so the local council, the PCT, and you will see them working together because they have a duty to cooperate. But what happens when you find that the local authority are cooperating with the PCT but actually the problem is that the schools are not; that there are a number of schools in a particular area who say, "Take your fag papers and forget it, we have a great big roll of paper between us and that is the way we want to keep it, thank you very much," in the same way as GPs? So, strategically great. The vision, the strategies are all there, but what matters in Every Child Matters is that those people on the ground are cooperating but GPs and teachers do not have to. So what do you do then?

  Mr Bell: The Education Bill that has just been presented to Parliament, which will bring about some changes to the inspection system, will make one of the new statutory responsibilities on the Chief Inspector to report on the contribution that an individual school makes towards the five outcomes for children that we have been talking about. So at the micro level you have reporting on the contribution that schools make, and I should just say incidentally on that, that far from being a burden on schools I think most of us would say that many schools would see things like keeping children safe, helping them to be healthy is just part of the day job. So I do not think that would be a huge issue. At the level going beyond the micro level—perhaps at the level that you are talking about—I have talked in front of this Committee before about policy tensions, and I think we have a potential policy tension here. On the one hand we have a strong emphasis on school-based autonomy, which I support, actually; and on the other hand we have an emphasis on collective responsibility. I think in the vast majority of cases there will not actually be a tension because schools who want to help vulnerable young people, vulnerable children, will want to cooperate with local services that are available to them. However, there is no hiding from the fact that schools do have a high degree of autonomy and may choose, for whatever reason, not to cooperate or to collaborate in the same sort of way with other schools or the local services more generally. That is the way in which we have constructed policy, and I think we have to recognise that that is there and trust—and I think it is not just a finger in the wind, it is a real expectation—that schools will see the virtues of cooperation and collaboration with other services for the sake of the children in their care.

  Q110  Jonathan Shaw: May I ask Anna Walker to talk about GPs?

  Mrs Walker: Our annual rating systems will actively encourage cooperation between relevant local partners—the so-called Department of Health developmental standards are actually all about cooperation between different parties. The idea behind that is to actively encourage that sort of partnership. Where we would potentially like to be over a period of time—and because our systems do not begin until March of next year and we are going to have to phase them in and there is a bit of a journey for us to go—is that when we give our annual ratings we will do it on the basis of partnership working, so people will only be able to get positive ratings if they are working well in partnership. That is one aspect and that is, if you like, the encouragement of improvement in partnership working. The other element we will aim to do in our annual rating is to look at local outcomes. What are the factors in the local population in relation, for example, to sexual health or to tobacco control; or, to take an example of some work that we are about to begin with the Audit Commission, on obesity? If those indicators are high then our objective would be to go back in to talk to the PCTs, the hospitals, the GPs about why that was happening. The outcome alone being high would not necessarily condemn a particular PCT. What you have to do is to get behind that information to ask the questions because it may be that there are problems with the local population, and then the issue is what are the PCT and the GPs' surgeries doing about it? We believe that the combination of improvement, together with analysing the outcomes and asking questions, is the best way that we can contribute.

  Q111  Jonathan Shaw: Will the inspection assist in building capacity to improve services? Perhaps Mr Bundred could answer that?

  Mr Bundred: The corporate assessment which we will undertake for the combined purposes of our Comprehensive Performance Assessments and the Joint Area Reviews will comment on the capacity of the local authority in its partnerships and in its leadership role across partnerships, and in that sense it will go beyond what Comprehensive Performance Assessment currently does, and we believe will help to raise capacity in that way.

  Q112  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Bundred, do you think the 2005 framework is capable of contributing to making more important outcomes in practice? Is it going to deliver this framework on the ground?

  Mr Bundred: This comes back to the earlier question about the training and skills needed to deliver this on the ground. In the case of the corporate assessment element of JAR and CPA 2005 we have already undertaken some successful pilots of that element—and we are now in our final stage of consultation—and this is a process which has been under development throughout the past year. One of the things, however, that we have recognised is that it is capable of being delivered, it is capable of being assessed but it does require some higher order skills of our Inspectors than we have required in the past. So there will be an intensive training programme for the people that we will be putting on those assessments. We are fortunate too that we have learned some lessons from CPA 2002 when we attempted to assess all 150 authorities delivering the range of services that we are talking about here in a single year. That strained our resources considerably. We will not be repeating that for this exercise; this exercise will be spread over a longer period and it will therefore enable us to put the training in place and to ensure that we have the best people on the assessment teams.

  Q113  Chairman: Steve, you have been a Chief Executive of a local authority and, interestingly, of my introductory questions the one you did not answer is how those departments and those local authorities that were going to be inspected and possibly inspected, inspected and inspected would feel about the new regime?

  Mr Bundred: I think the answer to the question is that we have asked them what they will feel, and it is in response to some of the things that they have said to us that we have decided that it would make better sense for us and for local government for the two processes to be run in tandem, rather than have one set of assessors from the Audit Commission coming along to make an assessment and then a joint area review coming along perhaps only a few months later to ask many of the same questions. Much of the effort that we have been making with David and his colleagues and with others over the last few months as we have been developing this process is about how you can get those two together. So I think the answer to your question how local authorities view this is that they would view it as a process that does recognise their interests and their demand for less inspection. They see the value of inspection, they see the value of these assessments and they recognise that they are helpful in driving improvement, but they also experience the burden too, and I think they would recognise that we have done everything possible to minimise that burden and again, as I said in my opening contribution, one of the consequences of the introduction of joint area reviews is that some of the other inspection regimes that they currently experience will be abolished.

  Q114  Jonathan Shaw: David Bell, do you foresee a formal interface between your inspectorate and the Children's Commissioner?

  Mr Bell: I would hope so, because it would seem to me important, and it will be an important part of the Children's Commissioner's work to look at how inspectorates, alongside other public bodies, carry out their duties in such a way that gathers the views of children and young people. I think we have quite an encouraging story to tell already, and in our separate inspectorates, in our separate inspections, we do seek the views of children and young people. We have made it a high priority for development work in this system of inspection and we want to continue to look further at how we involve children and young people. So whilst it is early or even pre-early days in relation to the Children's Commissioner, I would hope that all of us, singly and collectively, would talk to the Children's Commissioner about how we might more effectively use our work to gather the views of children and young people.

  Q115  Jonathan Shaw: One last quick question about common assessment. I think you are having a contribution to that. Are you getting that done quickly enough in order for practitioners on the ground to be able to use it, so when the new regime comes in it is going to be fit for purpose, the people who are going to be doing these joints assessments?

  Mr Bell: I suspect there will not be an exact match because local services—and I think we have to go beyond councils in this respect—for children and young people are progressing at different rates and they are choosing to do things in different ways. One of the comments that David Behan made earlier was that we are not going in presupposing a particular organisational structure for local councils in particular, and that is an important point because we are not going in to say in September 2005 "Do you have a director of children's services?" Some authorities have chosen to do that, some have not. Our focus has to be on outcomes, and I would have thought that people working in services will start to orientate their work towards those outcomes for children, perhaps in a more overt way than they have done previously, and therefore I do think that the inspection system will start to reflect that pretty quickly. I am encouraged by that.

  Q116  Jonathan Shaw: So the message is: do not look to the inspectorate for a blueprint of how to shape your services; have the confidence to do them yourself?

  Mr Bell: I think that is a very important signal. We made the comment earlier that our focus has to be on outcomes, and I think that is terribly important. What we may find—and this again would be based on previous experience—we might be in a position to inform the minister and others about systems or structures or approaches that are working better than others, but it is very important to say we are not going in and saying, "Show us the organisational blueprint, right or wrong." We are saying, "What outcomes are you securing for children and young people?" That is what matters.

  Q117  Jonathan Shaw: People want to develop services for children and get it right, but is that more important than getting it wrong? That is the worry and the concern of the culture change.

  Mr Bell: I hope that people will not feel inhibited by inspection but will feel the need to create services appropriate to their local needs.

  Q118  Mr Pollard: I am taking a keen interest in EBD schools, and I have eight in my own local authority and I visited one a few days ago, and we know that they are not achieving on at least three out of the five outcomes, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic wellbeing, just by their very nature. Would it not be better if we started where we know that failures are already occurring, not through any fault of the system but where we are, and therefore added value might lead to huge improvements in that particular area, where we are failing in my own area 500-600 children every single year?

  Mr Bell: I think we can, in a sense, have complementary systems. We will continue to have institutional inspection, and that will be the same, very much so, for David's organisation, and we will continue to identify difficulties and that will lead at the level of individual institutions to intervention, should that be required, so I think we can continue to do that. We are not taking our eye off that ball, if I can reassure you. At the same time, we may find—and this, I think, would be likely—that sometimes schools serving the most vulnerable children and young people stand in isolation from other services that might help, and one of the ways in which we can use our joint inspection activity is to see where that might be so. We continue to work at the level of the individual institution to bring about improvement. At the same time, you look at the wider range of services to identify what improvements might help that individual institution to bring about better outcomes for children.

  Q119  Mr Pollard: If we do look at these EBD schools in any serious way, it would seem to me that there could be a massive question about allocation of resources. I wonder whether that has also been taken into account in the thinking, particularly from the Audit Commission viewpoint. Perhaps, Steve, you could think about that.

  Mr Bundred: Yes. Again, one of the changes that we are making in the new approach to comprehensive performance assessment 2005 are some substantial changes to what is the use of resources element within CPA, a much stronger focus on value for money within that element, a specific judgment by auditors on the value for money being provided by each local authority and a stronger role for that use of resources block within the overall model.


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