Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440
- 459)
WEDNESDAY 2 FEBRUARY 2005
MR TOM
JEFFERY, MS
ANNE JACKSON,
MS SHEILA
SCALES, MS
ALTHEA EFUNSHILE,
DR JEANNETTE
PUGH AND
MR MARK
DAVIES
Q440 Chairman: I understand that
is a challenge and that is why we have been probing that, but
most of these services have been delivered in the context of a
community generally. Increasingly one bit of government policy
in terms of specialist schools and diversity programmes this Committee
has looked at in some depth and this is actually taking many schools
away from being community schools. If you want technology you
go five miles up the road, if you want foreign languages you are
going somewhere else and so on. Yet in a sense the Children Act
that you are having to implement runs across that; really you
are trying to recreate communities round schools. If the children
do not come from the community in which the school sits, that
is a problem, is it not?
Mr Jeffery: And it takes us back
to many of the points which Anne Jackson was making. You will
know from your inquiries around schools that part of being a specialist
school is having a community policy within that specialism.
Q441 Chairman: It is a strange different
community.
Mr Jeffery: Not necessarily.
Q442 Chairman: It is if the children
are not coming from the community in which the school sits.
Mr Jeffery: But it still sits
in a community and will work with the community schools.
Q443 Chairman: It may well not sit
in the same local authority area so the social workers will be
different, it may be in a different health authority area so that
the health visitors will be different.
Mr Jeffery: I think we cannot
legislate for those boundaries. There are bound to be those issues
locally, but I do want to stress this, Mr Shaw asked earlier about
what we were doing in terms of talking to head teachers. Another
thing we are doing is working and talking to the National College
of School Leadership which will have a very important role in
this territory. It takes us back in a sense to training as well.
I was talking only the other day to their executive leadership
course and that brings together head teachers with five or more
years' experience who are top heads in their territory. We talked
all through this in some detail in a very free flowing seminar
and there was really huge enthusiasm on their part for their engagement
with this agenda. Their key message to us was actually about communications:
"Tell us more about what this is about"—the prospectus
which has been mentioned was seen by them to be key—"and
help us and our staff to get engaged in this".
Q444 Chairman: They also responded
to you by saying that when push comes to shove they will actually
give time on this rather than concentrating on exam results and
test results.
Mr Jeffery: They took absolutely
the point that Anne was making, that we have five outcomes one
of which is about achievement: how do we deliver that outcome
without schools? They took completely the notion that their business
was more than that and that they could contribute to the five
outcomes. They understood what Every Child Matters was
bringing to them, the greater certainty that young children will
have been through early education and their families would have
had access to children's centres, the common language that we
have been talking about coming out of the Common Core. They were
very enthusiastic about what they could do in widening children's
opportunities in learning and other positive activity beyond the
school day; they were very enthusiastic about extended schools.
Q445 John Greenway: Do you plan the
development of child databases and indexes or is this a low priority?
Dr Pugh: The better, more effective
sharing of information about children between different professionals
and practitioners across different sectors is a high priority.
It is clearly set out in the Every Child Matters Green
Paper as being one of the issues that we saw to key effective
integrated front line working to better co-ordinate services around
the needs of a child. I have seen some of the evidence presented
to the Committee and I think it is worth reminding what our policy
objectives are here. They are to ensure that all children have
access to the universal services to which they are entitled; they
are to make sure that those children who have additional needs
have those needs identified at the earliest possible opportunity
so that prompt and more effective interventions can be made; and
they are to enable and allow any practitioner dealing with a child
to be able to correctly identify that child. That is where the
development of the indexes comes in, particularly under Section
12 of the Children Act. They are designed to be an IT tool to
support the more effective sharing of information.
Q446 John Greenway: Do you have concerns
about the not particularly distinguished record of government
departments in developing such complex IT systems and the competing
costs that these are likely to involve in an area where there
is already pressure on budgets?
Dr Pugh: We are certainly very
mindful of the experience of government IT projects and that is
why we are taking a very steady, staged approach to this work,
drawing in the appropriate expertise and subjecting the project
to the Office of Government Commerce Gateway Review procedures.
We have already conducted an independent feasibility study last
year. Following that we appointed an experienced interim programme
director who has now gathered around him a wider team of IT experts,
each of whom are quite senior and experienced in their particular
field, fields like security for instance. Last autumn we completed
the OGC Gateway Zero Review and this coming autumn—September—we
will go through Gateway Review One. We are very mindful of the
experience of IT projects and learning the lessons from them,
for instance the crucial importance of user involvement, the experience
of the 10 ISA trailblazers based in 15 local authorities. I know
you have heard evidence from Professor Cleaver who conducted an
evaluation for us. We are learning a huge amount from them and
I would come back again to the importance of information sharing
practice; this is about changing culture and practice. If you
read the OGC's report and guidance that they themselves have written,
they will say that the key to success in any IT project is 80%
practice and 20% IT. The ISA trailblazers have taught us a valuable
lesson.
Q447 John Greenway: How do you plan
to ensure the confidentiality and security of information on systems
and what conclusions have you come to about the legality of the
sharing of information between different areas within these multi-task
forces? I think again experience shows that whilst the objective
of government both national and local is clear, suddenly information
is not shared because someone says that it is confidential and
information does not get passed on and the tragedy that then ensues
is seen to be a consequence.
Dr Pugh: There are a number of
issues there. Just picking up on your last point, we have seen
that there is a confusion amongst present practitioners in some
sectors about what information they can share and what they cannot
share. There is plethora of different bits of guidance coming
from different parts of the centre about information sharing so
one of the things that we are going to do in September is to come
forward with cross-government information sharing guidance which
the practitioners we have spoken to—we have spoken to a
great many—are welcoming. The clarifying of what people
can and cannot share is a key priority and that guidance will
help that. There are a lot of issues of confidentiality and security
which it is helpful to separate out. The first point to underline
is that the indexes will only contain very basic data and that
is set out now on the face of Section 12 of the Children Act,
name and address and so on, precisely designed to minimise the
risk so that there is just factual information there. There have
been particular sensitivities and a deal of debate when the Bill
was discussed in the Lords in particular about the inclusion of
information about the involvement of sensitive services so, for
instance, sexual health support service, and about the controversial
issue of how a professional would indicate a cause for concern.
We therefore, in response to that, have just completed a public
consultation which was only completed last week so I am not able
to tell you the outcome of the consultation but we put forward
what we thought would be the ways in which those two aspects might
sensibly work and we are listening now and talking to and will
take account of the written responses we have received and come
back with a response on that in the spring. Confidentiality is
absolutely crucial; security is absolutely crucial. That is why
we have drawn in the experts I referred to earlier to advise us
on that.
Q448 John Greenway: How do you plan
to ensure that parents have access to what information is stored
about their child and the opportunity to challenge information
that they believe to be incorrect?
Dr Pugh: They would have that
right under the Data Protection Act. There is no intention in
anything that we are doing in the establishing of indexes to change
people's normal rights under the Data Protection Act so that parents
of children would have the right to see the information and be
able to correct it if it were incorrect. I think also it is worth
mentioning the experience of one of the trailblazers that we have
at the moment, if I may, which, because it is operating under
current legislation issued 26,000 fair processing notices to all
the parents in the area informing them about the intention to
set up this index. Only 50 parents responded wanting further information.
Of those 50 only five had particular concerns and they were concerned
about security issues about the potential of people hacking in.
Once discussions had been held with those five, none had residual
concerns and they were all content. I think it is important if
we explain and are clear about the reasons why we are doing this,
then I think our experience—certainly from the trailblazer
examples—is that people feel more comfortable.
Q449 John Greenway: You talked earlier—or
someone did—about the lead member in cabinet within the
local authority and his role, but you have proposed that a lead
professional should be responsible for co-ordinating information.
Who should this be and what guidance will you issue to this person
and the local authority or other agency as to what his responsibilities
are? One gets the impression from all that has been said this
morning that in the end ultimately one person is going to be responsible
for making this work and I think we need to know who you think
that person is.
Dr Pugh: The lead member and the
lead professional are of course quite different concepts. We will
be issuing guidance for the lead professional I hope in April.
That guidance will be based on the good practice that we have
drawn from areas which have already begun to operate the lead
professional or sometimes the lead practitioner. The idea of the
lead professional or lead practitioner is where a child is assessed
as having needs to be addressed by more than one agency, what
we want to get away from is the position—I am sure we have
all had experience of—of a child going to one agency and
then being passed to another, so that one person takes responsibility
for making sure that all those different agencies and the support
and services of those agencies are better co-ordinated around
the needs of that particular child. That is the role. As to who
it might be, again I hesitate to say that it will be down to local
determination and local circumstances but to an extent it will.
Even in the experience of those areas that have operated the lead
professional concept so far there have been many head teachers
who have taken on the role; in other areas it has been a social
worker. It will often depend on the local circumstances and the
needs of the individual child. What our guidance—which I
hope is fairly extensive and contains a number of case study examples—is
doing is trying to help people see how it can work, what the skill
set of a lead professional should be and how it is intended that
it should operate.
Q450 Chairman: Can I just interject
here and say that this is the most worrying group of answers we
have had in the sense that you must have read the session we had
last week and there was a very strong opinion coming from the
Information Commissioner and from Eileen Munro from the London
School of Economics about the whole process of the trailblazers
and the intention in the Bill and in the Act was really to get
better communication. It was not supposed to be just a complex
IT system which some people have estimated will cost billions.
In a sense you have picked up a bit of the Act and you are running
towards big IT systems and the people you are running to are those
wonderful IT giants who love to see civil servants who have a
bee in their bonnet about yet another big IT contract. The evidence
clearly came out last week that they think you are moving fast
in absolutely the wrong direction because the best communication
is improving the human interface between teams working with children
and you are going to throw yet more tax payer's money at a glorified
IT system that the Commissioner for Information is not going to
let you use properly. You give one experience of the trailblazers,
had tens of thousands of people and only 50 people responded.
That shows you how many people and how much of that million pounds
the trailblazer cost. Did you get nothing out of reading the evidence
of that session? It was pretty worrying stuff, was it not?
Dr Pugh: Indeed I did read the
evidence and I have met the Information Commissioner personally
and his assistant at the end of November. As he mentioned in his
evidence to you he also responded to the consultation on sensitive
services and flagged some concern. That is why I was so keen to
stress at the beginning of the previous set of answers what we
are trying to do here, to remind ourselves of the policy objectives
and I am trying to just get us back to what the facts are of what
we are actually intending to do, how we are taking it slowly and
steadily, how we are learning from the trailblazers. People talk
about a complex IT system, but we do not want that. We want a
simple an IT system as possible. If I can quote from the conclusion
of Professor Cleaver's report—I do not know whether the
Committee has seen this, but we would be happy to share it with
you—"Outcomes for children will be improved if practitioners
communicate and services are delivered in a co-ordinated way.
A child index with details of how to contact other practitioners
involved could aid this process but must not be seen as a sole
solution to protecting children." I completely agree with
that. Other comments were made in the report about not making
the IT system complex.
Q451 Chairman: Quite rightly you
are being very cautious in saying what money is available to deliver
this, to train people, to deliver the programme and mostly you
are saying that it is not centrally provided and there are budgets
in health and education and so on already, yet there will have
to be money for IT systems. You must know that some of these predictions
of how much it might cost in different areas of the country is
a lot of tax payer's money. This Committee would be wrong if we
did not say that after last week's session we are very concerned
that you do not go steaming down to higher IT costs but do not
afford to train people to a new standard.
Mr Jeffery: Chairman, we completely
understand you saying that. Clearly you listened to last week's
witnesses and I would ask you to listen to the stress that Jeanette
is putting on the very great care that we are taking with this.
Ministers are of exactly the same mind; they will not want to
take irrevocable decisions to go ahead until they have had and
been convinced by the most thorough analysis. Last week's witnesses
made some very important statements; there are others out there
working with the systems at the moment across trailblazers who
would give a positive account of what they are finding and what
this might—this is what we are analysing—enable them
to do for children so that, for example, if the system is a means
of allowing people to talk to each other much more quickly about
a child they are worried about they do not have to hunt for days
or weeks for who the social worker is because it is there immediately.
The communication starts from that point.
Q452 Chairman: We are a Committee
who sat here talking to colleagues of yours who seem to have been
extremely naïve about IT systems and the people who sell
them and the kinds of contracts they came to with them. We come
from that background.
Dr Pugh: I do completely understand
the issues you raise and I am what is called in the jargon "senior
responsible officer" for this programme. It is critical to
me that it is a success. I submit quarterly reports to the Office
of Government Commerce. We have an IT director with considerable
expertise and we are constructing at the moment a detailed business
case that we will be submitting in the autumn and it will be only
on the merits of that business case that any further more substantial
investment decisions will be made. I have heard estimates of billions
or a billion; I have no idea on what basis those references are
made but I can assure the Committee they are not the sorts of
sums of money that have even entered into our discussion.
Q453 Paul Holmes: Going back over
the ground we have been talking about, I am finding it very difficult
to reconcile, for example, what the witnesses told us last week
with what you are saying this week because they just seem totally
opposed. Jeanette quoted the conclusion of Professor Cleaver's
report as being favourable towards an IT programme, but Professor
Cleaver was one of the people last week who was saying to us (a)
it is not happening out there in the country and (b) nor should
it because it is a waste of resources that could be better used
on other things.
Dr Pugh: I have read Professor
Cleaver's report; I have spoken to Professor Cleaver; I read her
evidence last week. I think the point she is underlining, certainly
in her report and certainly from my reading of the evidence last
week, was that what we do not want is a complex IT system, one
that will make the job of communicating more difficult, one that
might through its very complexity actually deter practitioners
from fulfilling their responsibilities in talking to one another.
On that point I completely agree with her. That is why we are
looking to establish as simple an IT system as possible.
Q454 Paul Holmes: Can you clarify
what the vision of the Department and the Minister and so forth
is on this? Before this inquiry started my impression of all this
from the Minister's initial speeches on Every Child Matters
and from the press reports was that there would be a national
database, every child would be on it, there would be flags of
concern where there had been concern. This would be a great advantage
because, for example, the appropriate professional in Cornwall
could look at the database and could say that there has never
ever been a concern about this family who have just moved from
the other end of the family; or when they lived up in Yorkshire
they went to hospital three times, the school reported suspicion
of child abuse, et cetera. One of the witnesses last week asked
if that was the vision the Government had as to how this is going
to work.
Dr Pugh: The intention is that
the indexes will cover all children in England. The way in which
we think it will be designed will be on the basis of 150 local
indexes—one per local authority—that will be operating
to common standards so that we ensure interoperability so that
the systems can talk to one another and the children do not fall
down the gaps between local authority boundaries. In addition
there will be something that we are referring to as 151st system
to act as a central monitoring, an additional failsafe system
to make sure that children do not fall down. You are probably
aware that we are also working to identify a unique identifying
number so that every child has a unique number that will enable
that precise identification. I mentioned earlier the basic data
that will be held on each child is set out on the face of the
Act. We are working through the outcomes of the consultation on
how flags of concern should operate so that is something that
we have not yet fixed. The purpose of this is precisely to make
sure that children are receiving the services they need, that
practitioners can tell who else is dealing with a child so they
can speak quickly to that practitioner. We have had social workers
tell us that they spend three days phoning people, desperately
trying to track people down, trying to work out who it is they
need to speak to. That is a desperate waste of their time and
it results in a very poor service to the child. That is what the
vision is about.
Q455 Paul Holmes: So essentially
the simple outline that I gave is what the vision is, but the
witnesses last week said, "No, that's not it; we're not going
to have a database with all the children on it". Professor
Cleaver who has analysed the initial experiments on your behalf
said that this is not what is happening and they all said that
this is not what should happen. There is a huge contradiction
there between what the Minister and the departments are saying
is going to happen and what other people are saying (a) should
happen and (b) is happening on the ground.
Dr Pugh: I know that the Information
Commissioner has had concerns and he has raised issues with us
about the universality of the universal coverage. As to Professor
Cleaver, I can bring before this Committee any one of our trailblazers
and you will find them enthusiastic supporters of this approach.
All bar one of the trailblazers now has in place an index. Clearly
they are operating under existing legislation so they cannot be
operating the system quite as it will be once we have the national
standards and so they will not have managed to achieve yet full
coverage of all children in their area. They will be populating
their indexes with existing databases from schools and so on.
Q456 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask about
the consultation that Ofsted is currently conducting of inspection
acceptance provision. The new framework will clearly be based
on the five objectives and the 25 aims. If the response to the
consultation is that 25 aims is far too many, and that the overwhelming
consensus is there really should be fewer—or more—how
would you respond to that? Are you really going to listen to what
the consultation says, or are the 25 aims fixed?
Mr Jeffery: The 25 aims were drawn
up in quite wide consultation with all sorts of partners in the
statutory and voluntary sector and with the inspectorates. Of
course they—and it is David Bell and his colleagues in consultation
with us and with Ministers—will listen. We have had—and
Sheila may want to come in here in a moment—a very positive
response to the outcomes framework. This is a very, very broad
field and it is capable of data, aim, outcome, objective proliferation
of a quite unmanageable kind and I think the reaction has been
that this has put useful, clear shape on an otherwise extremely
diffuse and complex area. So we have very positive feedback to
the outcomes framework and an understanding—as Sheila was
mentioning earlier—that many areas are already using it
in their needs analysis. However, there may well be particulars
and we wait to see whether there is a more general reaction.
Q457 Mr Chaytor: Could you tell us
the timescale for the completion of the consultation and publication
of the Ofsted consultation?
Mr Jeffery: I think it ends on
the 28th of this month.
Ms Scales: That is right, and
the idea is to have a final framework out in time for the inspections
to start this autumn in the light of the consultation.
Q458 Mr Chaytor: Will the responses
to the consultation be published?
Ms Scales: Yes, I am sure they
will; it is common practice now. Could I say that there is the
issue of what the framework contains but there is also of course
the methodology used to pursue the different aims and objectives.
One of the propositions is that they will select on the basis
of written evidence and data 10 particular themes to pursue throughout
an inspection. That may or may not be the right number and I am
sure the consultation responses will have quite a lot of views
on that. There is the issue of the overall range of the objectives
with the aims underneath them. There is also the linked issue,
the methodology by which you pursue those particularly in the
field work. Those are the things that the current four pilot areas,
and the previous piloting that some of these new bits of methodology
have actually been testing out to make sure that we have a package
that works.
Q459 Mr Chaytor: One of the issues
in the previous Ofsted inspection framework for schools was the
extent of the intervention and the shift away from the more detailed
and arguably more oppressive kinds of inspection. How do you think
the new inspection regime from Children's Services will work?
Will it veer towards the strategic light touch end of the spectrum
or in the early stages will it be more interventionist and more
detailed?
Ms Scales: I guess the parallel
is with the local authority inspection rather than with school
inspections and it will be replacing a lot of inspection work
that happens currently of social services departments, of education
authorities, of Connexions services, of youth services. It will
be pulling all of that together and it will be trying to look
at what it is like to be a child in Middlesbrough, for example,
so it will have to take a very broad overview of the effectiveness
of all of the arrangements and all the co-operation in terms of
what is going on. I think the key is going to be using the evidence,
the numbers, the data particularly on outcomes to work out what
are those key areas that need drilling into to make sure that
this is not simply a rather high level description of a set of
arrangements but is actually looking at how people are working
together at a strategic level but critically on the ground to
make sure that needs are met. Part of the methodology is a neighbourhood
study which looks at whether the needs of particular neighbourhoods
are being met and also tracking a child's journey through the
system so that you can again check that these things are happening.
It will be a rigourous process I think; it will have that broad
overview but it will also have some real drilling into the reality
for children in an area.
| 
