Submission from the Association of Directors of
Education and Children's Services and the Confederation of Education
Service Managers to the House of Commons Education and Skills
Committee inquiry into Every Child Matters
The Association of Directors of Education and Children's
Services (ADECS) comprises all local authority directors of education,
an increasing number of whom have now been designated Directors
of Children's Services by their employing authority. Membership
of ADECS is open to all Directors of Children's Services, and
also to the most senior education manager in a local authority,
where that is not the DCS. Reciprocal membership arrangements
have been agreed with the Association of Directors of Social Services
for Directors of Children's Services.
The Confederation of Education Service Managers (Confed)
is an umbrella organisation representing directors, education
officers, advisers/inspectors and school governor support services.
ADECS is one of three professional associations within Confed.
ADECS and Confed have warmly welcomed the reforms
set out in Every Child Matters and the Children Act 2004. We
believe that the merger of education with children's social care,
and the eventual establishment of Children's Trusts as a means
of creating fully integrated services across education, social
care, health, Connexions and Youth Justice, will over the long
term substantially improve outcomes for children and young people.
As leaders in the management of these services, we are conscious
of the very demanding and complex change management process which
will be required to bring these reforms about on the ground.
We are keenly aware that the process of change will take several
years, even where there is already considerable momentum and enthusiasm
for it, and that great care will need to be taken along the way
to ensure that the quality and effectiveness of existing services
is maintained. This is, of course, particularly crucial in child
protection, but applies equally to educational standards.
We welcome the change agenda, and the framework which
the Government is developing in conjunction with leaders in the
service, at both national and local level, to help bring it about.
We support the five ECM outcomes and the more elaborated framework
based on them, and we support the efforts made to date to set
in place the framework for workforce development, information
sharing and common assessment, and integrated service delivery.
We are, however, concerned that the resources available for funding
the change programme at local level are insufficient. Our estimate
of the costs involved in setting up a children's trust, with the
financial, personnel, ICT, legal and managerial input needed,
is around £1M. Only a fraction of this amount has been made
available to the 35 pathfinders, and no funding has yet been agreed
for the 115 non-pathfinder authorities.
We are also concerned at the insufficiency of funding
for the preventative services envisaged by Every Child Matters.
We have no clear indication of where the resources will be found
to enable Sure Start to be mainstreamed, and in many local authorities
the high costs of fostering, and the provision of specialist support
for children at the 'acute' end of the spectrum, including SEN,
will continue to prevent funding being put into an extended range
of preventative and support services for children in need. Currently
a large proportion of these services at local level is supported
by uncertain or short term funding streams, and any core funded
preventative work is extremely vulnerable to being cut because
of pressures on other budgets.
We have asked Government to carry out, or commission
the Audit Commission to carry out, a review of the funding of
preventative work, in order to establish what will be needed to
ensure adequate funding of the ECM aspirations in the future.
We have also urged the Government to carry out an urgent benchmarking
exercise, in time for the next Spending Review, of the true costs
of children's social care, as Councils have historically spent
substantially more on this area of their work than has been allocated
to them through the FSS formula.
The place of health, social services and education
respectively within integrated services
The first question to ask is 'what are integrated
services?' This is not an idle question, since true integration
requires a bringing together of the management, organisational
arrangements and funding of the services being integrated. There
are many successful examples of partnership working as a set of
collaborative arrangements, where professionals from different
disciplines work alongside one another, but are managed from within
their own service. There are fewer examples of professionals
being brought together into multi-disciplinary teams to work together
under a single manager, with a single set of objectives, and a
single overall caseload. Where they do exist, they often work
extremely well, but they need careful setting up. For example,
the issue of clinical governance needs to be addressed if health
professionals are to work in integrated teams, as well as obvious
matters such as employment terms and conditions, professional
supervision, workload allocation, and career development.
The draft guidance on Children's Trusts being developed
by the DfES helpfully sets out several 'layers' of integration.
ADECS/Confed support the general thrust of this guidance, but
would counsel caution against thinking that the arrangements will
be easily put into place, even where there is a local willingness
to do so. In our experience, the following are needed for integration
to become real:
- Clear accountability for the integrated service,
via the DCS to the Children's Trust governance structures (principally
Lead Members and PCT Boards)
- Robust arrangements for 'offline' professional
supervision, advice etc, to operate alongside the line management
arrangements
- Common referral and assessment, and information
sharing protocols
- Shared data
- A single pooled budget held by the manager of
each integrated team
- An operating culture which is equally 'friendly'
to professionals from the education, social care, healthcare and
voluntary sectors
We support the view that Children's Trusts should
be led from within the local Children's Services Authority, but
we are also aware that they need to effectively straddle the local
authority and the NHS. This raises the important question of
the accountability of the Director of Children's Services. He
or she will need to be both accountable to, and call to account,
his or her own organisation (the local authority) and the local
NHS trusts, including the PCT. Structural arrangements for Children's
Trusts will need to reflect that position.
A particular issue relates to Special Educational
Needs, where there is an urgent
need to bring the present 'stand alone' statutory SEN framework
within the integrated services agenda. This would be best
achieved by the Government pursuing a common assessment process,
a single 'child's plan' and full, equal accountabilities upon
each statutory agency to make appropriate provision.
The practical implications of the 'duty to collaborate',
including the effect on funding streams and location of staff
and facilities
The duty to collaborate will be made a reality through
the strategic children's partnership in each local area, which
in most cases will be incorporated into the governance arrangements
for the Children's Trust. Through the partnership we would expect
the local partners to commit to a common set of objectives, and
carry out joint reviews of services, in order to re-commission
them on an integrated basis, with pooled budgets where appropriate.
This position will, however, need to be negotiated at the highest
level in each organisation, even where a strategic partnership
already exists. Integrated commissioning leading to integrated
provision will need clear agreement between the partners about
a commissioning process (the concept varies enormously from one
sector to another), to the pooling of budgets (for which a pre-requisite
is the identification of those budgets, and this can be notoriously
difficult), and to the co-location of services (including the
sharing of premises, IT infrastructure, back office services etc).
None of this is straightforward, and it is often the conditions
attached to different funding streams, together with a large number
of cultural and organisational differences, which stand in the
way. We would hope that the introduction of the Single Children's
Plan in 2006, the Joint Area Reviews, and the proposed new Local
Area Agreements will all be catalysts for bringing services together
in this way. However, it will be important to ensure that all
three of these mechanisms apply to NHS organisations as well as
the local authority.
In collaboration with the Local Government Association,
the ADSS and a range of national children's charities, we argued
for schools (and GPs) to be included in the 'duty to cooperate'
clause of the Children Bill. In the light of the rejection of
that amendment, we now look to guidance following the Act, and
the revised inspection arrangements for schools, to provide strong
encouragement to schools to cooperate. In our experience, the
great majority of headteachers are keen to cooperate with one
another, and with their local authority, to secure better outcomes
for children. However, there tend to be large gaps in understanding,
particularly in the area of children's psychological and emotional
development, which at times prevent schools from supporting vulnerable
children appropriately.
Staff and management needs: team building, leadership
and training
The development of a skilled workforce able to take
forward these reforms is a priority, and we are pleased that the
DfES is taking this strand of work forward energetically. ADECS
seeks to provide, alongside ADSS, an effective informal service
for directors to network and learn from one another's experience.
Our staff development arm, the Virtual Staff College, is working
with the DfES to develop a programme for second tier officers
in education, social care and health who will become the DCSs
of the future. We are also aware of a number of learning sets
and arrangements brokered by a number of organisations for the
sharing of expertise between authorities. These will complement
the more formal arrangements being put into place by the DfES
to support the local change process through the newly established
network of Regional Change Advisers.
Inevitably this is fertile territory for trainers
and consultants of all kinds. We would, however, voice a note
of caution about the number of separate, and sometimes conflicting,
training and support initiatives in this area, and also about
the danger of pulling good managers out of local service development
to train others. It is important that the best people stay in
the system, and the national change programme should be geared
towards facilitating the sharing of expertise between managers
in local services, rather than creating a large fieldforce which
will deplete the resources available within the services themselves.
It goes without saying that, with a change programme
of the scale envisaged, a huge amount of staff training and team
building will need to take place in each local authority/Children's
Trust. While much of this can be done by using existing training
budgets, there is undoubtedly a need for extra training budgets
to carry through the reforms properly. A pooled budget should
be created at national level between the DfES and the Department
of Health, to allocate to Children's Trusts for staff training
as and when they are established. In our view the budget should
be sufficient to allow for three days training for every member
of staff involved in the local Children's Trust. A rough apportionment
of the three days would be one for building understanding of the
new service context, one for learning new protocols and procedures,
and one for team building.
Inspection
We welcome the development of a common inspection
framework based on the five ECM outcomes. We believe that the
concept of inspecting a local system rather than individual organisations
is the right way forward. We would want to ensure that each of
the organisations which are part of the local system - health
trusts, police, probation, Connexions services, LSCs, housing
authorities, the courts - receive clear guidance from their national
sponsoring body that their contribution will be scrutinised as
part of the Joint Area Review. For the system to work properly,
it will also be necessary to ensure that the DCS, as part of his/her
accountability role, is able to report to these sponsor bodies
on the contribution made by their local agencies, especially where
the area review shows up weaknesses.
We also welcome the fact that the new framework for
the inspection of schools is designed around the five ECM outcomes.
We believe that, if inspectors are well briefed and properly
trained, this could be a powerful lever to ensure that schools
are fully embracing the principles set out in Every Child Matters.
However, this will depend on having at least one member in every
inspection team fully familiar with this agenda, and it will also
depend on it being looked at and reported on in every school inspection
as a matter of course. The local Children's Services Authority
(which replaces the LEA under the Act) will need to be able to
comment to the inspectors on the extent to which a school about
to be inspected is co-operating with other agencies in securing
better outcomes for children.
Listening to Children: the role of the Children's
Commissioner
This is not directly related to our remit, and we
have no comment to make, other than that we support the need for
both children and parents to have an active voice in the system,
and that this needs to apply at both national and local level.
Working with Parents
We see this as of crucial importance. We support
the establishment of parent partnerships for each Children's Trust,
and the current parent partnerships will need broadening in scope
to address issues arising with children's healthcare, as well
as their educational and social support needs. Parent Governors
and their representatives on local authority scrutiny committees
need to be brought into these partnerships, as do foster carers.
We support the various initiatives promoted by Government
to work with parents through family learning, parenting support
and related schemes. We also support the work we carry out in
conjunction with the police to enforce parental compliance in
areas such as school attendance and anti-social behaviour. It
is important to view parents as partners, and more work is needed
on the hard to engage parents. Starting young, through the Sure
Start programme, is the right way forward.
We are concerned to ensure that, where children are
suffering because of their parents' problems - of substance misuse,
mental illness or domestic disharmony - adequate resources are
devoted to those parents' needs by adult social care and health
services to support the work we do with the children. In a very
real way, dealing with these parents is as much part of children's
services as it is of adult services. Similarly, services to carers
of children with severe disabilities are often as important as
the services to the children themselves.
In a whole system approach, it should be possible
to pool budgets between adult services and children's services
in the same way as between different parts of children's services.
Likewise, the contribution which adult services make to children's
welfare needs to be considered as part of the Joint Area Reviews.
The same applies to other services which impact on children,
such as Housing. In one local authority it has been estimated
parental substance misuse is a major factor for 30%, parental
mental health for 40% and poor housing or overcrowding for 90%
of the children most at risk in that area.
The creation, management and sharing of records,
including electronic databases
Progress in this crucial area has been very slow
nationally, with even the original IRT pathfinders finding it
difficult to develop a common local system which works. Problems
have been encountered repeatedly with database compatibility,
agreeing and operating information sharing protocols and lack
of clarity about legal requirements. Few local areas as yet have
anything approaching a common database, and few have managed to
streamline their data management systems. This is, however, essential
if integrated working is to become a reality.
A clear lead is needed from Government on this, reconciling
the requirements of the DPA, the FOIA and the HRA, together with
the professional standards on confidentiality operating within
the NHS, the Police, and local authority social services departments.
It is disappointing that progress in producing the necessary
guidance has been so slow.
ADECS/Confed, November 2004
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