UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 40-vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Education AND Skills committee

 

 

Every Child Matters

 

 

Wednesday 2 February 2005

MR TOM JEFFERY, MS ANNE JACKSON, MS SHEILA SCALES,

MS ALTHEA EFUNSHILE, MS JEANNETTE PUGH and MR MARK DAVIES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 378 - 473

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 2 February 2005

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Jeff Ennis

Mr John Greenway

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Jonathan Shaw

________________

Memorandum submitted by DfES

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Tom Jeffery, Director-General, Children, Young People and Families Directorate, DfES, Ms Anne Jackson, Director, Strategy Group, Children, Young People and Families Directorate, DfES, Ms Sheila Scales, Director, Local Transformation Group, Children, Young People and Families Directorate, DfES, Ms Althea Efunshile, Director, Safeguarding Young Children Group, Children, Young People and Families Directorate, DfES, Ms Jeannette Pugh, Director, Children's Workforce Unit, Children, Young People and Families Directorate, DfES and Mr Mark Davies, Deputy Director of Care Services - Children and Mental Health, DoH, examined.

Q378 Chairman: Good morning everyone and welcome to this morning's session. The new responsibilities for the Department and hence for this Committee on the Children's Act are quite daunting. We have found a whole different world, a whole different language and vocabulary and our learning curve has been quite steep. As you know we have been taking quite a lot of oral evidence and we have received a great deal of written evidence; we have also been to British Columbia where they have had a Children's Act for some ten years. Interestingly it came about after a tragedy similar to the tragedy that focussed everyone's mind on this issue in this country. Tom Jeffery, you are known to the Committee, which of your team would like to say something to open up on the Children's Act or do you want to go straight into questions?

Mr Jeffery: Thank you, Chairman; maybe I could say something by way of opening. Firstly, we are very grateful for the opportunity to give evidence. We have been following some of the evidence sessions to date and they give us much food for thought. They demonstrate clearly the challenges we face and we are very conscious of the challenges and the complexities of the change programme on which we are launched. We also believe we are laying firm foundations for change and that we are building a strong coalition and a consensus around what we are doing. Over the last year or so we have been focussing on putting in place the main elements of what we call a whole system change for children in which the Children's Act is of course central but not in itself sufficient. It is clear that change must be led locally and the most important change will take place on the ground close to children and families. What we have been seeking to do, therefore, is to put in place a supportive national framework for 150 local programmes of change. We set out some of that in a document just before Christmas, including our outcomes framework and the inspection framework which is out for consultation now. There are further elements to come. We will be publishing a workforce strategy shortly. The Children's Commissioner is being appointed. However, we are moving now from a design phrase to delivery. As ever in Every Child Matters the most innovative out there are moving well ahead of government and we are getting evidence of good progress being made across the country on many Every Child Matters priorities. Our priority is very much to support that change and to go forward in what we hope is a joint venture between government, statutory agencies, voluntary agencies, children, families and communities. We know we have a very long way to go on what is a long term programme of change, but we believe we have made a start.

Q379 Chairman: Thank you for that. Let us start with the question that really came out of our trip to British Columbia. Their Children's Act, in terms of its original conception, was broad in intention in terms of having a minister for children and families, having a children's commission and commissioner, but some years after it all seems to have gone rather wrong. What has really developed is that it is rather hard even to engage people in discussion about a universal service for children. To most of us it seemed to be focussed on child protection. The original intention had been diverted into just this obsession with a very important sector but not what this Act is about. Is there a danger that we will start off with a great intention of a broad policy agenda and finish up in the area of just child protection? Do you think that is a danger for us?

Mr Jeffery: These are issues which have been debated throughout the development of Every Child Matters and subsequently the balance between help for the most vulnerable and seeking to promote prevention and early intervention through universal services, and I think keeping those elements in balance is a challenge for any change programme; it must be so. That is, of course, what we are seeking to do, to bring together the universal and the specialist because the distance between services - cultural and sometimes physical - has generated the gaps between which children have fallen. The commitment on the part of universal services - including those in schools - and their interest in this agenda before (and certainly ever since Every Child Matters was published) has been very high indeed and they are very much part of that coalition to which I referred earlier.

Q380 Chairman: From the original inquiry into the tragic death of a child, from that time there does seem to be an indication of some lack of commitment in some areas. We have murmurings from certain people in the health sector that the degree of collaboration is not what it seemed to be at the time, a weakening of the resolve to communicate across disciplines and departments. Does that worry you?

Mr Jeffery: If that is what we were finding it would worry me. It is idle to pretend that there are not people starting from different places and one keeps building that coalition. However, there is strong commitment across government and it is indicated to some degree by our involvement with the Department of Health -Mark may want to comment on this in a moment - and there is a strong commitment on the part of schools and others to this agenda. If there were those variations in commitment it certainly would worry me. There is a major effort in communication to demonstrate how all these parties can play a part in the Change for Children programme and we are engaged on that.

Q381 Chairman: So is Professor Aynsley-Green happier now about joined-up Children's Services or is he still unhappy?

Mr Jeffery: I have never known Al be other than challenging as to how we should work closely together. Al and I see a lot of each other. He is a great champion for children's issues across government; he is a strong member of the cross-government Change for Children Programme Board which I chair. The Department of Health, working with the Department for Education since Every Child Matters has come out with the national service framework for children (which is a very significant statement about children's health and services working together) and with the Public Health White Paper (which will decidedly involve the partnership of all the agencies concerned with Every Child Matters), all those things need to be taken forward together in a single cohesive programme of change rather than be delivered from government separately to different agencies. That is very much what we are trying to do.

Mr Davies: I think it is important that you have been to British Columbia; Al Aynsley-Green has been there too. He has been there at their invitation because of their interest in the national service framework and what he has reported back to us are the same findings that you came up with, that it is very focussed on safeguarding and child protection and on the early years programme. However, they are very envious of our national service framework and I think we should not underestimate the importance of the national service framework; it is the biggest national service framework we have in the health service and it is the most important set of standards ever produced anywhere in the world for children's services and it covers everything from pre-birth through to teenage years and transition to adulthood. It is a very important document and it is a joint document between education and health, and sets out some very clear standards and a very clear framework for the NHS. Obviously just describing a framework is not enough to deliver change at the local level and I think there is no question we have a challenge there. We have 150 local authorities, we have 303 primary care trusts, we have a number of hundreds of NHS provider trusts providing services for children and getting that integration with education and the criminal justice sector is very important and very challenging for us, but we have the framework there and we have the good will of professionals as well who welcome the national service framework and are committed to implementing it over time.

Q382 Chairman: As we listened to the evidence we had - informally mostly in British Columbia - they told us about the inspiration that the inquiry had given them and that the legislation had provided, but found that people still did work in their silos; the joined-upness did not happen for them and still has not happened in many cases. They still saw themselves as having discreet roles and communication had not improved in the way they had anticipated. Are we sure that this joined-upness is possible in our system? It looks very complicated on the ground, giving enormous new roles for people who are already very busy anyway.

Mr Jeffery: Perhaps we should start with examples of joined-upness that we have already. I think it is an important consideration that Every Child Matters and the change programme we are now setting up is not starting from anything like a blank sheet of paper. There have been some very significant integrated programmes over the last few years - there is SureStart, there is the work of the Children's Fund, there is Connections, there is Quality Protects - all of which began to bring agencies and people together at managerial and strategic level and in the front line. The issue really has been their success which has kept them separate, one from the other, as they have each had their own funding streams and accountabilities. We need to learn from what they have succeeded in doing in bringing the whole system together at a local level. There are many additional incentives now towards that integrated working. There is the appointment of a Director of Children's Services, the one person in charge; there is the example of what the inspectorates have done in themselves working together to create the new inspection framework and to set up the joint area reviews so that they will work together to look at outcomes for children locally. I guess it is that emphasis on outcomes which has perhaps done more than anything else to move the debate forward. People have been very ready to look beyond their professional backgrounds or their organisational arrangements to consider how they can work together to improve a broad range of outcomes for children, thus we have built those outcomes into the Children's Act and we have built them into the change programme and they absolutely run through the inspection framework. While we all maintain a focus on those ultimate ends which are about children's lives, the incentive for organisations, professionals and the voluntary sector and all concerned to work together is very clear.

Q383 Chairman: We do not doubt the intention but when it gets back to this Committee that 70 out of 150 directors of Children's Services have now been appointed and 63 out of the 70 have been former directors of education, in a sense it does give a signal that this is all going to be rather biased towards the education world and the other partners are going to be minor partners.

Mr Jeffery: What is important about the appointment of a Director of Children's Services is that they have the leadership qualities, the vision and the ability to bring all those organisations together. They can come - some of them will come - from many different backgrounds. They will need to work right across the piece.

Q384 Chairman: They are not going to be from many different backgrounds, are they, if 63 out of 70 appointed were all from education?

Mr Jeffery: The figures differ as to exactly how many are in post or about to take up posts.

Q385 Chairman: You do not think that is an accurate figure?

Mr Jeffery: The figure is there or thereabouts; it is a little less than that from our understanding at the moment, but it does represent quite significant progress towards the appointment of that important role and, indeed, faster progress than was originally expected.

Q386 Chairman: You are not going to do very well if all the other partners are sulking in their tents because none of the top jobs have gone to their role.

Mr Jeffery: We do not have any evidence of other partners sulking in their tents. We do have evidence of many different partners talking to us about this. There is some concern - I would not deny it for a moment on the part of ADSS - about appointments. There are some quite significant appointments for people with social care backgrounds. There are very important jobs in social care as directors of adult services where one might expect some of those people to be looking as well. It would be good to have a broad range of people as directors of Children's Services.

Q387 Jonathan Shaw: You would be given a fairly hard rebuke if you started advising local authorities on who should they appoint, would you not?

Mr Jeffery: Beyond general comments on the generic skills which will be required - and colleagues may wish to add something on the draft guidance we have out at the moment on the role of the Director of Children's Services - we would not get directly involved in appointments, no.

Q388 Jonathan Shaw: Do you have any intention of doing so?

Mr Jeffery: We are not involved in those appointments.

Q389 Paul Holmes: You have talked in broad terms about the national service framework, however there are concerns that it is a great idea as a framework but is it any more than an aspiration? There is no funding to make it happen and there are very few specific targets or timetables to make it happen.

Mr Davies: There are a few points I want to make about the national service framework and we have heard these comments. The first comment about funding is that we are in a position now where we do not allocate money for particular purposes in the NHS, we give the money to the people in the front lines - 75% of the NHS money goes to the primary care trusts - and we ask them to deliver services and deliver improved outcomes within a framework set nationally. We are setting fewer and fewer targets and have made a commitment to set fewer targets to people locally. We have set fewer targets in the document which we issued earlier this year called National Standards Local Action which sets out the targets for people locally. Within that there are a few key elements which are germane to the national service framework. First of all, we have set targets which are reflecting the national service framework; we have PSA targets around child and adolescent mental health services and there is a whole standard around that which requires the delivery of a comprehensive child and adolescent mental health service everywhere. There are some very fierce targets around that for people locally. We have targets on teenage pregnancy and obesity which are joint targets with other government departments. We have PSA targets which we share with DfES which again are required to be delivered by the NHS locally. We also have a health and equalities target around infant mortality. So there are plenty of targets around the area of delivering improved services for children all of which are reflected either in the national service framework or we judge that if you deliver the standards in the national service framework we will help deliver the PSA targets. When we launched the national service framework the minister said that although we were not requiring people to deliver it immediately; it is mandatory over a ten year period. We have what we call for the NHS developmental standards which will become over time core standards so there will be things that all services and all NHS bodies will have to deliver. I feel that the money is out there.

Q390 Chairman: Where is it?

Mr Davies: It is with primary care trusts.

Q391 Chairman: If you are in West Yorkshire as I am, my primary health care trust ran out of money long ago; they cannot purchase any more operations from the acute trust let alone spend money on new responsibilities.

Mr Davies: I do not feel qualified to comment on the overall funding situation.

Q392 Chairman: If there is no ring fenced funding for this new responsibility how on earth is it going to be delivered now or in ten years' time?

Mr Davies: There are four or five public service agreement targets which people will be required to deliver and that will, in a sense, require them to implement the national service framework. As you know - I think you took evidence from Anna Walker, the Chief Executive of the Health Care Commission - they will be looking at inspecting again the standards set out in the national service framework and that will be one of the biggest drivers of performance within primary care trusts. I feel that we have the leverage in place to support delivery of the national service framework. I would not deny that it is going to be challenging; that is why we are saying that it is a ten year programme because people are starting from very different points. What we have asked them to do is to determine locally what their priorities are for their local communities and populations in order to deliver it.

Q393 Paul Holmes: Is it the same situation with, say, head teachers who are involved in all this, but their main priority is their school and their league table positions and all the other government targets? Are they going to give full attention to this programme? Going back to the PCTs, they have 75% of NHS money but it is all committed already to different programmes?

Mr Davies: The performance of PCTs will be judged against their delivery of some of the key targets that they have been set, which include targets for children: child and adolescent mental health service, teenage pregnancy, obesity, infant mortality, inequalities. These are all important targets which they will be required to deliver and their performance will be judged against delivery of those targets amongst others. There are other targets for the NHS and I think we recognise that. On the question of funding we know that there have been record levels of growth in the funding for the NHS but, as I say, I do not feel qualified to comment on general funding issues of the NHS or specific issues in Yorkshire. There have been record levels of growth and the money has been given to primary care trusts. It is better that primary care trusts have the money than I have it to distribute through some bidding process I feel.

Mr Jeffery: The implementation of the national service framework goes well beyond the health service and it is crucially a matter of co-operation between Children's Services generally - including local authority Children's Services - and it is very important that its standards are increasingly reflected in the inspection framework which the inspectorates are now drawing up. Then we can look at the area as a whole and see the progress which is being made against those standards on the part of all the agencies involved.

Q394 Paul Holmes: From the DfES point of view - as the Chairman said at the start - Every Child Matters brings to this Committee an area that we have never looked at before. Similarly for the DfES in general it brings in an area they were never involved in before; it is quite an expansion of responsibility. At the same time as taking that on the DfES has said it is going to cut staff by 31 per cent in three years. How can you reconcile the two things?

Mr Jeffery: Every Child Matters and the appointment of a minister for children does indeed bring a range of issues to DfES which we have not dealt with before, although it also brings together a number of key interests which we had in the Department including around Sure Start and Connections. Just as the Department is seeking a more strategic approach to its business, so we are in the Directorate. When we came together we had about 1100 people and we will be looking to reduce that in size over time. The drivers for that really are this whole system change which we are seeking to put in place and the development of a key role for local authorities leading children's trust arrangements locally. We need to support that change by moving out of the micromanagement of some services - after all we have been very hands-on in the development of early Sure Start programmes - and by rationalising a lot of what we do. When all these functions came together we brought together a huge array, for example, of grant schemes. We need to think about how we use information much more effectively to support change locally. We need to think about how we do business; do we do it through the proliferation of guidance or do we do it through seeking to work much more in concert with our partners who are leading change on the ground? We will be reducing in size but we will be seeking to do so in a way which is about supporting change for children.

Q395 Paul Holmes: So the cut of 31 per cent in staff will not undermine the service the DfES delivers and are you saying that none of it will be offset by just moving those staff over to other bodies, to quangos or to consultancies?

Mr Jeffery: By and large we will come down in size alongside and perhaps a little bit more than the departmental average. We are saying that we think we ought to be able to work in a way which is more supportive of our local partners. One of the things that we have at the moment is a substantial array of field forces and that has followed almost inevitably from having an array of different policies sometimes driven out of different departments. It is not a criticism of the way people have put policies together to say that in the past inevitably they have said, "Right, we must have a field force to work out there with our partners" but whether that is the most helpful set of arrangements for partners is very debatable. They may find they have too many well-intentioned people coming to them to help them deliver change. We need to rationalise those arrangements; we need a more effective way of working through government offices and we need authoritative respected interlocutors with key people leading change in local areas. We have a lot of work to do around that as well.

Q396 Paul Holmes: There is no hint there that reducing the staff would partly be done by simply moving their functions to other departments.

Mr Jeffery: In a sense this is about moving responsibility for strategic change to children's trust arrangements and local authorities, if you take the Sure Start example; it is not about moving it to a plethora of non-departmental public bodies. We do not have a plethora of non-departmental public bodies in this territory.

Q397 Helen Jones: I want to follow up what you said, Mr Davies, about the national service framework for children because we are hearing a lot of talk both from you and your colleague about delivery on the ground but in my experience departments are very good at drawing up strategies and not so very good at seeing them implemented on the ground. Without ring fenced funding for the national service framework for children, is this not all a bit of moonshine? You are expecting it to be delivered by PCT boards who are untrained by and large in this area and who face a number of competing demands. Are you convinced they are going to put this NSF at the top of their agenda? Yes, they will be inspected but the chickens may come home to roost several years down the line and some of them could be gone by then.

Mr Davies: It is a very good point you make. I think our experience in the Department of Health - where we have been through a change which Tom has just described the DfES is just beginning, one where we have reduced our number of staff by 38 per cent within a year so we are a very much leaner and fitter organisation than we were a year ago - is that we do not drive things from the centre. We support people locally delivering services and it has been a big shift for us in our mindset as to how we work with people locally. I know health is not your key area of interest but one of the key government targets for the NHS was to reduce the amount of time that people wait in A&E departments. I was responsible for that target until a year ago and by and large there has been huge progress made on that without any ring fenced money at all; there was no money allocated specifically to that target although it is a different type of target, I admit. I think the point is that money is not the answer to these questions. What people are looking for is support and advice and help to deliver services locally, to deliver change locally. We have good experience of putting in place systems of support for people through things like the Modernisation Agency in the National Health Service, through the National Institute for Mental Health (in another area for which I am responsible, mental health services), where people work alongside local services to support their delivery of change and to advise, to help and to share good practice. That is a model that we support and we promote and is actually effective. If we just gave them the money I still do not think it would be delivered because this is about a change in the way of working.

Q398 Helen Jones: Are you then telling me that you are convinced that in delivering this through PCTs you have in place chief executives of PCTs and PCT boards who fully understand the necessity of this? I am not convinced from my experience that they do. They may be very willing but I have experience of a no-star PCT. They do not the training or the expertise to do this, have they?

Mr Davies: I understand that and I would like to make the point that it is not just through PCTs, it is through the whole of the NHS and through their partners as well. The national service framework is not just about the NHS, it is about the NHS working with its partners and that is part of why we are using the Change for Children programme as the framework within which it is delivered. I think that is one aspect of this, that it is not simply an NHS issue. I know what PCTs are concerned about, they are concerned about their financial bottom line and they are concerned about delivering access targets and delivering improvements in particular service areas. However, they have a responsibility to all the citizens they serve; they have welcomed the national service framework by and large and they see this as an important set of standards. It is a ten-year strategy and if people at the moment do not understand the importance or the consequence of the national service framework then that is the challenge for us over the next ten years. It was published in September last year and we set it out as a ten year strategy and we are only at the start of what I think is a very long journey. Some places are further down the road than others and clearly your primary care trust has a lot of work to do but that is precisely why we want people out there to work alongside them. I think for people working across education, health and social services we have regional training advisors who are jointly appointed by Education and Skills and Health to support them. I take your point that it is a long journey we are on and it is a challenge; it is the largest most comprehensive set of standards for Children's Services anywhere in the world and if in ten years we can look back and say that we have delivered it then we will probably have the best Children's Services anywhere in the world.

Mr Jeffery: Sheila Scales does a lot of work on supporting change, including issues of leadership locally and at some point - now or in due course - Sheila may want to say something about that.

Q399 Chairman: Sheila Scales, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Ms Scales: Mark mentioned that we have put in place ten regional change advisors to help support on this agenda and they are jointly owned by the two departments. That has meant adding to the number of strategic advisors who are out there helping and supporting across the piece. We have education advisors - as you probably know - working with local authorities as well and the Social Care Inspectorate also has advisors. What we are trying to do is to bring those together into a single force by April of next year so that we have a joined-up set of regional advisors who can talk with authority to local authorities, to PCTs and hospitals and make sure that where there are issues locally that need to be pursued we can put our collective effort towards getting those sorted. That would be one of their roles. The others - and this is about the issue of sharing good practice as a key driver for change in this new model which we are very conscious of - is that we have done quite a lot of sucking good practice up to the centre and trying to bottle it and use it as the basis for a lot of the advice and guidance that has gone out. We prepare that in consultation with a lot of our partners. What we really think would be powerful is developing much more lateral arrangements for transmitting good practice and developing networks. We have a network already of the new directors of Children's Services whom we bring together to share their own good practice and help with that leadership challenge which they all have across the piece locally. We are also starting to run some regional events starting next week up in the north east which will bring together all the key partners locally - education, social care, health, the police, the whole package of partners - and start to use those as the basis for regional networks for sharing good practice and making sure that those who are leading edge in this (as Tom says, a lot of people are way ahead of us in terms of developing this policy on the ground) can actually help those who are finding it more of a struggle and use that as an effective way of driving change without us having to do it all from the centre with our smaller forces.

Q400 Jonathan Shaw: Are there regional advisors for particular areas within Children's Services? If I am running a local authority do I get one regional advisor providing advice across the piece or are there separate ones for education, for child protection, et cetera?

Ms Scales: As I was trying to explain, currently we do have a set of advisors.

Q401 Jonathan Shaw: I think there have been complaints from local authorities that a regional advisor turns up and says, "I can advise you on this." "But what about SEN?" "Ah, sorry, not me, you have to wait for the next one to turn up." It is not very integrated.

Ms Scales: We know that we start from a complicated position of having education advisors, of having social care advisors embedded in the Inspectorate, but what we are trying to do is to bring together those advisors and the new change advisors who have a much broader remit and their backgrounds are in either health or social care or education, but they have already got a remit which stretches across the whole of this change programme. We know that it looks a bit messy this year, it is a bit of a team sport because all of those advisors do still exist, but by April next year we hope to be moving to a position where each local authority, each area, each joined-up set of Children's Services will have a single authoritative voice from government that they can talk to about the whole range of things.

Q402 Jeff Ennis: My first question is a follow-on about the information we are getting back from the regional change advisors and the new body of advisors that were implemented who have the broader remit. What sort of feedback are you getting in terms of the potential stumbling blocks and the most promising aspects of the establishment of the children's trusts?

Ms Scales: It is obviously still a very mixed picture because people are starting from different places. I think there is enormous enthusiasm for the agenda; that is one of the things that is coming back to us, a general recognition that this is a positive way to go. There has been a lot of work on assessing needs and starting to analyse across the piece exactly what issues are being faced locally based on the outcomes framework which a lot of people are finding very helpful to break down the sort of siloed analysis of issues that they have been doing in the past. There is also a lot of on the ground joined-up activity, a lot of it coming from the programmes that we have developed in the past such as Sure Start where there has been a concentrated effort on little bits of joined-up activity. I think people are recognising the challenge of moving from that to a genuine, across the board re-engineering of the way in which they do business from the top to the bottom. A lot of them have change programmes very firmly in place and recognise that unless they do tackle it top to bottom there will be those problems.

Q403 Jeff Ennis: Are there not major problem areas then?

Ms Scales: There are lots and lots of problem areas. I think a lot of areas have discovered that building on existing partnerships has been a very strong suit. Those who have been a bit slower in forming those partnerships are finding the sorts of things that we have been talking about - bringing health on board, getting their schools engaged in this agenda - more of a challenge and I think it is one of those things that some of this regional sharing will help us to do. Helping those who are finding this a struggle to learn from those who have actually made a good deal of headway would be very useful. People are finding some of the more technical things about budget cooling a bit of a challenge but again I think recognising that that needs to build up from shared leads analysis to shared planning because people are coming together now actively to prepare their first children and young people's plans across the piece. That is a way in which they will start to get into some of those more strategic issues about use of resources.

Q404 Jeff Ennis: That leads me very nicely onto my next question because in your memorandum at page six, paragraph 21 you refer to the fact that "Section 10 of the Children Act allows the pooling of budgets sand other resources, which can include staff, goods, services, accommodation". Does that mean that we are going to see the pooling of budgets or will it be left to the local boards to decide whether they need to pool their budgets or what?

Ms Scales: I hope it is yes to both of those options. There is no formal requirement to pool budgets but we hope that increasingly people will see that one of the things that has got in the way of sensible decision making and the best use of resources has been some of these artificial distinctions. Some of these distinctions we are removing ourselves by trying to strip out separate grant streams that have got in the way of common sense decision making, but equally at local authority level it often helps - and this is something that has come back from the feedback - that the way you have grass root staff not trying to defend the budget and move somebody's problem to somebody else's budget, but seeing it as a collective budget and a collective problem, you start making much more intelligent decisions about what to so.

Q405 Jeff Ennis: So you see the pooling of budgets very much as the norm, as we have in Barnsley or we are going to have in Barnsley shortly.

Ms Scales: We certainly think it will be a very, very powerful tool.

Q406 Jeff Ennis: Barnsley is leading on this, as usual, Chairman. Turning to stronger partnerships - and that is effectively what we are trying to do with this legislation, to build up stronger partnerships and who leads the partnerships is going to be key I guess in how successful the partnerships are - who do you foresee to be chairing the partnerships? Will it be a professional like the Director of Children's Services? Or would it possibly be a lead member from the local authority?

Ms Scales: We certainly have not tried to be at all prescriptive about how local structures of that sort work, not least because it is important for local areas to build on successful things that they have in place locally. It is not for us to seek to design those sorts of things from the centre. We are putting in place through statute a single lead member who will be in a very powerful position to take that leadership role and also a Director of Children's Services who will have that duty. The local authority, because it has a duty to make arrangements to secure co-operation will have to take the leading role in developing and devising those arrangements. Exactly how they work on the ground is for local determination. In Knowsley I think it is their local partnerships are actually based around clusters of schools and they have head teachers chairing them on a sort of cluster regional basis. They have found that to be very helpful, but we would not want to prescribe that.

Q407 Chairman: Just to interject for a moment, this is all rather good but there are some rather jargonistic terms being used her. What is the sort of platonic idea of the children's trusts? What is the ideal trust? What does the architecture look like? Show us a children's trust; paint a picture of a children's trust.

Mr Jeffery: We have sought to draw a picture. I had better introduce it at this stage; it has become known as the onion. You may have seen a series of concentric circles where we have outcomes for children and the involvement of children and young people and families at the centre and then we say that there must be purposeful activity at each layer of those concentric circles if we are to have proper co-operation in practice and if we are thus to have children's trusts arrangements in practice. There must be integrated activity on the ground close to children, for example in the form of children's centres, extended schools, multi-disciplinary teams based around schools or elsewhere. There must be common processes working right across the children's workforce so that a common assessment framework and information sharing is very important. There needs to be a local strategy which is all about needs analysis and vision and a shared idea of the outcomes to which the local area is aspiring. There needs to be some governance arrangements to hold those things together through tough times as well as good, so it is sustained over the long term. In working through our field forces we are seeking to say to colleagues and partners out there that it is not one of these things which makes a difference, it is all of them in concert. We have been trying to get away from the notion that it is something to do with, if this is ever so reasonably simple organisational change which gives a children's trust in action, it is all these things working together.

Q408 Jeff Ennis: Pursuing the potential of a lead member who has to be defined now by law, that is going to be a really important job. What preparation is being made for councillors or individuals to carry out this particular task? Is the Local Government Association, for example, aware of the situation and what are they doing about it?

Ms Scales: Yes, they are talking to us a lot about that. The IDA is running some specific courses which people are very keen to attend and to get to grips with this agenda. I think there is a recognition about what a big role it is. It is an interesting way in which local authorities are working to have maybe a team of members actually supporting the individual lead member because of the size and scope of the role. There is indeed training designed to help.

Q409 Jeff Ennis: In the more deprived parts of the country we are seeing the development of children's centres now in particular. Does this particular legislation mean now that the ideal location for a children's centre would be adjacent to a school campus or can they be in different locations now?

Mr Jeffery: Once again that will be for local determination but we did publish just before Christmas the ten year childcare strategy which, as you know, envisaged the very significant expansion of children's centres and also the provision of childcare through schools - not always in schools, but through schools - and certainly the co-location of children's centres with schools on site adjacent is a possibility or (and there are one or two instances of this) with further education colleges, for example. So you can envisage in some parts of the country campuses and some of that is beginning to happen; all sorts of institutions are coming together on the same site or very close to each other.

Q410 Chairman: One thing that seemed to be missing from the outer level of the skin of the onion was national co-ordination and you actually touched on it in your last answer. You have a ten year childcare strategy; there is a five year education strategy. Do they join up at the national level? What about the healthcare strategy?

Mr Davies: The national service framework is a ten year strategy. We also have - as all government departments have - a five year strategy for the health service but they are consistent and coherent.

Mr Jeffery: We have been working very hard ever since the machinery of government changes to get greater coherence, co-ordination, clearer communication across all the government departments concerned with children's issues.

Q411 Chairman: Even the Home Office with youth justice?

Mr Jeffery: Decidedly with the Home Office and youth justice. At ministerial level you will know that there are cabinet committees and there is a Misc9(D) which is the cabinet committee charged with the delivery of this programme and we have a wide range of government ministers coming together on that. We then have a programme board which I chair and which does bring together the key senior players from every government department and also from the inspectorates to take a broad view of the Every Child Matters programme.

Q412 Chairman: The reason I am pushing you on this is because, as a member of the Liaison Committee, I have pushed before with the interviews with the Prime Minister on the very fact that where delivery is the weakest it is when the policy has to be delivered across more than one department. That is when the real test of joined-up government takes place. Why we are pushing you is because this is a very complex bit of joined-upness and there are a lot of warning signals. As soon as you get policies that have to go across many departments there is a tendency to put them really rather low down on the priority of the department; there is a day job to do in the Home Office, there is a day job in health and in education and in elsewhere and it is really difficult to tug ministers and officials out of their day job to do something different.

Mr Jeffery: I completely accept that, Chairman, and it is something which we are tackling with a will. It is absolutely at the heart of my day job and the day job of the Department for Education and Skills, but I am absolutely confident our partners across government recognise their part in it too and it is a genuine cross-government venture on behalf of better outcomes for children. This programme board that I was describing does have the commitment of very senior officials. The heads of the Inspectorate and others come and we have serious discussions about how we can make this programme work. It is in indicative, for example, that before Christmas when Mark and his colleagues were bringing out the implementation plan for the national service framework that we were absolutely clear that the Every Child Matters programme and that implementation framework went together. Stephen Ladyman was there together with Al Aynsley-Green, and Margaret Hodge was there virtually and I was there on the platform as well. We launched this together.

Q413 Chairman: What do you mean that she was there virtually?

Mr Jeffery: She was there on a video. You take the point that it is not just that we are sitting round a table purposefully in government; it is that we are seeking to organise these change programmes in a coherent way. Of course there are tensions and of course departmental priorities sometimes pull against each other; of course we work on that all the time. I genuinely believe that this has been a significant step forward and there is a real commitment - I am absolutely clear with this with colleagues in the Department of Health - to effective cross-departmental working.

Q414 Jonathan Shaw: Head teachers are going to be essential in order to deliver extended schools. Can you tell the Committee what discussions you have had about the obvious tension where head teachers' focus has been - and I guess will remain - to improve performance, to improve education performance and exam results and SATS results, et cetera? Now you want the head teacher to co-operate and give a lot of energy and effort to integrating services. Tell the Committee what discussions you have had about that tension.

Ms Jackson: As with working with other government departments a lot of it comes down to recognising that we have a tremendous common cause here because particularly with head teachers it is part and parcel of helping children to achieve academically, that they have the right sort of contact and the right support, and where there are barriers to learning which some children experience more intensively than others that the right sort of support is in place within the schools and also in schools in their local community to help tackle those barriers. We have been doing a lot of work specifically across the Department with colleagues in talking to head teachers' reference groups and talking to implementation review units run by head teachers about the practical implications of this with those involved in the school workforce agreement with the teacher unions. The practical implications of Every Child Matters for schools, the way in which well-being and standards are really integral to each other and the way in which the thinking that we have evolving here can help head teachers and which they can then play back into that.

Q415 Jonathan Shaw: That gives us an overview but it is not all plain sailing, is it? You said yourself you have this head teacher group; they will not just agree to do it, they would ask questions. Tell the Committee what are their questions?

Ms Jackson: Specifically head teachers want to understand what the implications would be of, say, some of the common processes that Tom and colleagues talked about earlier. If you are thinking about a common assessment framework which will be a shared initial assessment for children with complex needs, is that going to be too bureaucratic for schools? Is it going to be more trouble to them filling it in than the sort of response that they will get then when we use this? The trailblazer activity on the ground and the pilot are showing some very interesting evidence of the way in which schools and other services can work together using the common assessment approach backed up by better sharing of information to get a more effective support for children who need it. That is one example. I think another example I would like to mention is extended schools and the increasing co-location of services in schools. If what we are about here is getting a better interplay between universal services for children and then specialist services coming in behind, the way in which, over time, schools can become more centres of community resource is one of the practical long term developments.

Q416 Jonathan Shaw: Let us consider the very marginalised family or marginalised child displaying a whole host of different difficulties and for that family, their experience and that child the last place in the world they want to be is at that particular school (an extended school), so while all the focus is on providing services at the school is there a tension between this particular vulnerable group that really have no real positive relationships with the schools institution.

Ms Jackson: There is a distinction between the service being provided actually on the school site and the school acting as a gateway to the people who can help that child and family in whatever way is most appropriate to them. Sometimes they are may feel comfortable accessing some sort of support through school; sometimes it may be a very special need which is actually more sensible to provide centrally so I think there is going to be a different sort of pattern. One of the things we do not want to do - again because it is much more sensible for it to be worked out locally - is to define very precisely what the exact pattern of services will be for any individual school.

Q417 Jonathan Shaw: I think it is absolutely right that you do not want to be very prescriptive; that is what the Minister of State has said along, that it is about developing a bottom-up approach. However, it cannot be so bottom-up that gaps appear. When gaps appear we have Victoria Climbié and cases like that which appear.

Ms Jackson: Schools are looking for guidance on the practicalities and so we know that there are a set of questions around what is the funding going to be, what support will we have, what will the governance arrangements be in a school, so we are taking those into an extended schools prospectus which we are working on now - we hope it will be ready over the next few weeks or months - and which will start answering some of those practicalities and then again we are working with schools on the ground to understand how those work out. The other dimension you raise about the need for a dialogue between the individual schools and the authority and its partners in the children's trusts arrangements about what exactly a pattern of extended services ought to be, we can see some areas developing services based round clusters of schools. Knowsley is the example that Sheila mentioned earlier; other areas are looking to ward based services. I think there needs to be a process of discussion at local level between trusts and schools about the most sensible way forward for all of the partners.

Q418 Jonathan Shaw: The school does not have duty to co-operate - there has been a lot of debate about that throughout the passage of the Bill and that continues - so what happens if one area of policy is going in the direction of schools being more independent and they say, "Sorry, children's trusts, it is nothing to do with us; forget your extended school." The head teacher says, "My concern is standards; that is what the parents in this community tell us they want. We will get on and if there is a problem we will ring you, but I am sorry I do not have time for all this paraphernalia with the common assessment." Have any of the head teachers given you sentiments like that?

Ms Jackson: It is because of the need for this dialogue between school and local authorities that we did not think that a blanket duty to co-operate was going to be terribly meaningful. There is specific legislation though in two areas that are worth highlighting. One is that there is a duty on schools to safeguard children and protect their welfare which stems from the Education Act 2002 and we have just put guidance out on that. That clearly is something the local children's safeguarding board will be looking at.

Q419 Chairman: That might be a very easy job in a leafy suburb, but if you are in a challenging school in a more deprived area you might be turning the head into a director of social work instead of doing his proper job as a head.

Ms Jackson: Indeed, which is why it is so important to get the right sort of support around schools so that they do not feel that they are being asked to take on a lot of extra responsibilities. However, it does mean that when we say to schools that it is important for children to have access to sport, to cultural activities, for the staff to be sensitised to safeguarding issues that they understand then what other support is available around schools and from the authority that can help them. If I may just come back on the other piece of legislation which is currently before Parliament which is relevant here, we are also amending the inspection criteria for school inspections to recognise the contribution that schools make across all of those five outcomes. It is right that schools' contribution towards helping children achieve on all five fronts is recognised

Q420 Jonathan Shaw: One of the areas that is going to be essential is that of training. In their evidence to us the Association of Directors of Education and Children's Services - the 63 former education directors - have said that staff are going to need three days' training. Who is going to pay for that? Is that back to the PCTs again? The Association of Directors of Education and Children's Services - I am sure we will get used to the acronym and it will trip off the tongue as many others do that we are used to and familiar with, but that one perhaps not so at the moment - have said that we need to have three days' training for staff in terms of child protection and integration, is that something you are looking at at the moment?

Ms Pugh: We are looking at training needs across the piece and we would be happy to talk further later about the proposals that we will be putting forward in the workforce strategy that Tom referred to in his opening remarks. Clearly there are already obligations for a good training in order for practitioners to carry out their existing responsibilities. In some areas of our work - in information sharing and common assessment for instance - we have included some provision for training in the funding that is available through the change fund, for instance. We are working closely with the Association that you referred to and, indeed, a range of other representative organisations to discuss skills and training needs, so there will be training needs.

Q421 Jonathan Shaw: They are saying that there should be a minimum entitlement to three days of joint training for all staff across agencies.

Ms Pugh: We have not been speaking in terms of an entitlement to training. We certainly have been looking to identify what training needs there will be in particular areas like the common assessment framework for instance. However, we have not been discussing entitlements because again, as Sheila mentioned in her earlier comments, circumstances will vary from area to area and there will be differing needs across different sectors and in different types of skill areas. We do not think that entitlement is the most appropriate approach.

Q422 Jonathan Shaw: These 70 people, why would they say that then? Is this just a bargaining chip? Are they trying to put pressure on the departments to give them some money? Why would they say that everyone needs three days of joint training before the trusts are established?

Ms Pugh: It is not for me to speculate as to why they might say it, but let me comment on a couple of things. First, I can well imagine why they might understand the value of joint training. The experience in our information sharing trailblazers for example in some of our other pilot projects has shown the huge value to be gained by practitioners and professionals from different sectors - social workers, teachers, nurses - getting together in the same room and thereby effectively doubling the value of the training because not only do they learn about the skill that they were in the room specifically to learn about but they also learn about starting to build those relationships that are going to be so important to making this agenda work on the ground. I can certainly understand why they would emphasise the need for joint training. As to the specific notion of a particular number of days, I can only imagine that they have arrived at that figure through speaking to their colleagues across different local authority areas. We have not had any discussions with them about the notion of an entitlement as such, but we have certainly talked to them about the importance of training and the importance of joint training and the value that can bring.

Q423 Jonathan Shaw: Do you know how much the Department spent on training for Children's Services last year?

Ms Pugh: I am afraid I do not have that figure.

Q424 Jonathan Shaw: In terms of this training, are the departments going to pool their budgets to assist this? Is there going to be some pooling of budgets at a national level as well as at a local level to assist in paying for the training?

Mr Davies: I can write to you with the information, but it is not my understanding that we hold budgets at the centre for local training. We hold significant levies from the NHS for medical, education and training which is a completely different issue, but I do not think we hold it for those types of localised training programmes.

Q425 Chairman: It is a bit worrying because in one set of questions you say there is not going to be any special money for this and now you are saying there is no resource for the training of personnel.

Mr Davies: I am not saying there is no resource; I am saying that we do not hold it at the centre. The question was about whether we are going to pool it centrally. People will have local training resources available but the Department of Health does not hold it for them.

Ms Efunshile: You talked about training for safeguarding as a particular example of one those three days and I think it is important to recognise that local areas already have training programmes. There are already resources on the ground for training and what we will be expecting and wanting local agencies to do is to bend those training opportunities so that they are taking account of the changed agenda. Over the course of this financial year and the last financial year as an example we have had a safeguarding children grant which has been issued to local authorities, £90 million each year. We have not said that this is a sum of money for training; we have said that this is a sum of money to assist you as you move forward and improve the levels of your safeguarding and training will be part of that. Whilst we will not be saying that there is additional money for training we would certainly expect existing resources to be taking account of the new duties for example under Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 where they have a new duty on a wider range of agencies to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and, indeed, to co-operate under Section 10.

Q426 Jonathan Shaw: So this will be replacement training. If they have their budgets and they are using this money presumably for things that you approve of in the first place, there is going to be additional training or it is going to have to replace some existing training. That is the implication of what you are saying.

Ms Efunshile: Indeed, but we do not have central pots of money which are labelled "training" for this agenda. There are resources which are allocated to local authorities and other agencies on the ground from which they can train; they can use resources to train. It will be down to local agencies themselves to work out across that range of agencies at the local level - the children's trust, the local safeguarding children's board - to work out what those training priorities are and how they are going to use their existing resources in order to deliver that training.

Q427 Jonathan Shaw: In the many discussions that you have had, Tom Jeffery, with the various representative bodies that represent the agencies that are going to deliver Every Child Matters, have any of those agencies at any time said, "Look, it is essential that we have some more resources for training if this is going to happen"? Has anyone said that to you?

Mr Jeffery: I am sure they have said words to that effect and we are making available a change fund, as you may know, over the next three years for local determination as to how it is spent in support of the Every Child Matters agenda. There are substantial resources out there at the moment as colleagues have said. We are also developing a workforce strategy and we will want to continue discussions with all our partners about workforce issues. I absolutely take the point that here we are right into the heart of change on the ground, change in understanding and culture and people working together, and many of the programmes which we are putting in place - including common assessment, including information sharing - are already generating and have done for some months if not years now people working together and training together in a quite unprecedented way.

Q428 Helen Jones: Can I come back to this training because it seems to me that we have two problems in what we are setting up here. One is that teachers do not receive training in child protections during their initial teacher training and yet schools have a duty to safeguard children's welfare. Are we going to do something about that? Who is safeguarding children? The person who often has most contact with the child at school who might most immediately notice if something is wrong is their teacher. Why are they not trained in child protection, and are they going to be?

Ms Efunshile: I am a bit flummoxed because in my experience there is significant training in schools.

Q429 Helen Jones: I am talking about initial teacher training first of all.

Ms Pugh: One of the areas that we have been developing in working with a wide range of organisations over the last year or so has been the development of something that we are calling the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge that we expect will become the foundation of induction across the range of Children's Services. We have the support of our colleagues in the teacher training agency and we have discussed that with other representatives of the schools' organisations precisely with a view to seeing how we can fit that Common Core within initial teacher training. The Common Core includes within it a number of units of core areas of skills and knowledge of which one is precisely safeguarding children so I think I can say to you quite directly and specifically that that is one area that we are looking at particularly.

Q430 Helen Jones: So it will become a component in initial teacher training. Is that what you are telling us?

Ms Pugh: That is what we are looking towards. We are about to publish a prospectus for the Common Core hopefully in the next few weeks and we are discussing through the shadow Children's Workforce Development Council that has been established and it, in turn, through its wider network that it is working with - which includes the teacher training community - how that Common Core can over the coming months and years become firmly embedded within the initial training of practitioners across the full range of Children's Services including teachers.

Q431 Helen Jones: That is very helpful, but let us go back to the teachers who are already in school because there are a huge number of calls on the training budget in schools as you would expect, so if we are going to move into this whole area of involving schools very closely with an extended range of services, how are we going to ensure that the teachers in the front line are actually trained in child protection and are trained in working with all the other services that they have to liaise with? The three teachers here would tell you that currently that does not happen. How are we going to do that? Please do not tell us that it is for local decisions because heads have so many calls on their budgets and this quite frankly is not going to be at the top of many people's agenda unless we find a way of making it so.

Ms Efunshile: Can I speak as a former teacher as well? We have existing arrangements and in every area there should be an area child protection committee. The best area child protection committees will be working out across the agencies what the training requirements are, what the training needs are in that local area in order that there can be satisfactory child protection practice. As we move forward we are wanting to build on the best practice in those existing local child protection committees by establishing local safeguarding children's boards and again we will be expecting that it will be very clear that part of their duty will be to assess, to audit and to look at what the training needs are in that local area in order that they can improve the level of safeguarding jointly across the range of agencies and of course in the individual agencies who are the constituent members of that safeguarding children board.

Q432 Chairman: Can we get the terminology right? You started off by saying they were called child protection committees; they are really safeguarding children boards, are they not?

Ms Efunshile: If I could clarify that, there are two slightly different things. At the moment every area should have an area child protection committee but we know that there is variable practice across the country in terms of the effectiveness of these bodies and one of the most important factors there in terms of the variability is that they are not statutory bodies, they are in fact voluntary bodies. Whilst it is the norm to have an area child protection committee in fact they do not have to have one and there is no duty on the local agencies at the moment to participate in the area child protection committee or to contribute to it. The Children Act 2004 establishes local safeguarding children boards which will be in place across all 150 local authorities by April 2006 on a statutory basis, very much building on the recommendations which emerged from Lord Lane's inquiry where what he wanted to see was a much firmer line of accountability in terms of safeguarding and child protection. Training will remain one of the key responsibilities of the local safeguarding children boards. Their role in fact is in two parts. One is to monitor the level of safeguarding across the local area and secondly to monitor and to challenge the level of safeguarding in the respective bodies that make up that safeguarding board. They will include education, police, various National Health Service bodies, probation and so on.

Q433 Helen Jones: That is helpful but we are still back to the position that Jonathan raised earlier that you can do all that monitoring and evaluating but if the individual head says, "It's not my policy, I'm not releasing my staff to go on that course" then we are not getting anywhere, are we?

Ms Efunshile: If we look at the range of levers that are available to us and try to use those levers, one is the duty because there is a duty on schools to safeguard and to promote the welfare of their children. Guidance has been sent out which, in fact, will mean that they should under legislation participate in safeguarding activities across the area. Secondly, I think Anne has mentioned the performance management framework so the inspection framework for schools will in fact look at the extent to which schools and an individual school is contributing to the improvement of the five outcomes for children, one of which is, of course, staying safe. Individual schools' activities in terms of safeguarding will in fact be a part of how they are inspected and how they are judged. Those are actually quite important and powerful levers on the school in order that they do take part in, for example, releasing teachers for training.

Q434 Helen Jones: Can I just ask you before we move on about another group of staff? I am thinking of who the child is going to come in contact with most of the time because I think that is the key. In early years they are often not even trained nursery nurses. There will be some trained nursery nurses about but very often they are people who have not had much training, often quite young, who are very badly paid. How are we going to expect these people in these frameworks to recognise not simply when a child is at risk of harm but when a child has particular problems that may need early intervention? How are we going to get these people trained? The reality of life is that those are the people who are going to be dealing with the children in early years care on a day to day basis. I think that is perhaps where we have a real problem. Other countries have people who are well trained; we have an under-paid, under-trained workforce. How are we going to raise the game there?

Mr Jeffery: The development of the early years' workforce was a major theme of the ten year childcare strategy. It will be a major element of the workforce strategy on which Jeanette is currently working so I wonder if she would like to say something.

Ms Pugh: The ten year childcare strategy that was published in December highlighted the crucial importance as you have mentioned of raising the quality of the workforce working with very young children.

Q435 Helen Jones: Could we say raising the training? In my experience they are often extremely good people; we are not making a judgment on their character but on their training.

Ms Pugh: I think the two go hand in hand. As Tom mentioned, the workforce strategy will be highlighting the early years as a particular priority and looking at coming forward with propositions around strengthening the leadership in early years settings, looking at the notion of how we raise the levels of all those who are working in early years settings, looking again at making the Common Core a foundation for training for everyone working with children including very young children. I think that will address some of the points that you raised in terms of raising awareness of the signs to look for, how to identify when a child might be having a particular need or having a particular difficulty that needs to be addressed. It is absolutely a top priority because, as you say, those workers come into contact with a lot of young children and, as we know, intervention in the early years has such a vital part of play in the overall development and future of those children and young people and in fact on their later life. I completely agree with you and we will be saying more about this in the workforce strategy.

Q436 John Greenway: This is very interesting and presumably the intention is that the Sector Skills Council will be responsible for delivering much of this training. Can you clarify for us that the Sector Skills Council is not about teachers, it is about the non-teaching workforce?

Ms Pugh: The new Sector Skills Council is a UK-wide body. The Children, Young People and Families Workforce Development Council is the name of the England based council and I think the basis of this discussion is that it is this council that is germane. Its footprint covers early years, social care and youth work so it brings within it the half a million or so workers that are embraced by those sectors. I mentioned earlier - this is quite an important part of how it operates - that under the chairmanship of Paul Ennals the shadow council (because it will become fully operational from April) has organised around it a wider children's workforce network that draws together all the other relevant sector skills councils and like agencies - like the teacher training agencies, skills for health, skills for justice - to talk about how we can develop a stronger common culture, common training requirements, looking at the revision for instance of occupational standards, looking at the review of qualifications, working with us on the development of more coherent career pathways across the whole children's workforce that allows clearer progression within sectors and indeed greater lateral movement across sectors as well as more flexible entry points at different points along the qualification structure.

Q437 John Greenway: I think the question that your answer to Helen Jones begs is: who is going to be responsible for delivering this training and who is going to pay for it?

Ms Pugh: The Children's Workforce Development Council with partner agencies (teacher trainer agencies in particular will have a particularly crucial role because of the points you made earlier about teachers) will be responsible for designing training, providing support; the funding is something that we are needing to work through because as yet we are not clear about our precise funding allocations. As Althea and other colleagues have highlighted, there is already funding available within local areas and local organisations to support training, so it is not a net addition that is needed. It will be about changing training as much as additional training to support this agenda. The Children's Workforce Development Council will play a crucial role in this.

Q438 Chairman: Just to sweep up one element of that, it is clear from listening to people as senior as you from the Department - you talk in theoretical terms largely, and that is understandable - that what is coming out of some of the questions here is what is the difference going to be to the average social worker, health visitor and teacher or head on the ground? How much change will there be to their lives and are they being communicated with now? They are the people who will deliver this policy so how far are they aware of it. Are they going to meet each other more often?

Mr Jeffery: There is communication with teachers on the ground. For example, you may know we have a teachers' magazine, one for primary, one for secondary that is carrying a lot of information.

Q439 Chairman: Teachers TV is launched this afternoon; perhaps that will be used.

Mr Jeffery: Teachers TV is a potentially seriously helpful medium.

Q440 Chairman: When is it going to enable them to meet with social workers and health visitors?

Mr Jeffery: It is happening more and more. Of course it is happening through Sure Start local programmes but it will happen more through the rapid development of children's centres, it will happen through extended schools, it is happening through the training which is taking place particularly in the trailblazer areas but more widely around information sharing. I think it is a very real challenge for us all communicating effectively in powerful language in a way which really enthuses front line workers and gets them to own change and take it forward. That is something which we need to work on very, very hard indeed. We need to learn from them what they would like and it is a real challenge.

Q441 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.

Q442 Chairman: It is a strange different community.

Mr Jeffery: Not necessarily.

Q443 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.

Q444 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".

Q445 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.

Q446 John Greenway: Do you plan the development of child databases and indexes or is this a low priority?

Ms 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.

Q447 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?

Ms 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 ten IT 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 per cent practice and 20 per cent IT. The ISA trailblazers have taught us a valuable lesson.

Q448 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.

Ms 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 it. 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 indicated 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.

Q449 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?

Ms 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.

Q450 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.

Ms 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 that 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.

Q451 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?

Ms 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.

Q452 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.

Q453 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.

Ms 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.

Q454 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.

Ms 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.

Q455 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.

Ms 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 150 first 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.

Q456 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.

Ms 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.

Q457 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.

Q458 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 28^th 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.

Q459 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 ten 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.

Q460 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 connection 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.

Q461 Mr Chaytor: What sanctions will there be realistically for those who finish up with zero stars or whatever the rating system is going to be?

Ms Scales: The legislation has extended to children's social services, the intervention powers that the Secretary of State has had in education since 1998, so as a very long fallback there will be powers to intervene. What we are hoping is that with strategic advisors that we were talking about in their regular dialogues with these local authorities will be able not to wait for the inspection because they will need annual assessments and star ratings of local authorities on the same criteria, will be working with them to identify what the problems are and hopefully offering the sort of targeted support that they are going to need to tackle those problems. There will be a range of approaches much as we have had in the past in the education service but with a very stern fallback power.

Q462 Mr Chaytor: Going back to the question of the role of schools and the impact of all this on schools, in retrospect would the Children Act have been stronger had it included a statutory duty on schools to co-operate with other agencies? Just as the Act was going through, the Department was publishing its consultation document on enabling schools to apply for foundation status which, as Jonathan pointed out earlier, will lead to greater managerial autonomy. Looking from the outside it does seem that we have two trends moving in exactly the opposite direction here. Was that intentional or was it accidental?

Mr Jeffery: There was a rationale that the duty to co-operate is placed on the strategic planning and commissioning bodies and that they will be dealing - and the children's trust arrangements will be dealing - with a very diverse world. Twenty-three thousand or so schools is another matter. That they are absolutely at the heard of Change for Children is not in doubt, but whether they are there by virtue of a duty to co-operate or all the other levers that we have described is what has been the focus of the debate. They stand alongside a huge array of people in the statutory, private and the voluntary sectors who will all need to contribute to this local system of Children's Services. I think the Minister would say that only time will tell and we will look at this as it goes along, but the current signs are, as I say, an enthusiasm for schools to be engaged.

Q463 Paul Holmes: Back on the question of the database, if you have a hundred or a hundred and fifty different authorities developing their own databases, how are you going to ensure compatibility so they will actually read into a national database?

Ms Pugh: As I may have mentioned earlier, we will be developing a national standard for them so that they are all operating to a single standard. It is crucial that they are interoperable so the system will be designed in that way.

Q464 Paul Holmes: So if the national standard is not there yet some of the trailblazers might have to scrap everything they have done so they fit a national standard later on.

Ms Pugh: There is an issue of the transition of the trailblazers. We have written to all of the trailblazers and invited them to come and work with the team on the development of the national model. Every single trailblazer has responded enthusiastically to that request. We have also established a local authority group now bringing in the wider set of local authorities and are having a range of events additional to the regional events that Sheila mentioned earlier, drawing all of the local authorities and trailblazers together. Yes, there will need to be some adjustments in some of the trailblazers to a national model once that is established.

Q465 Chairman: It is interesting that from the initial questions that Paul and I asked - and Jonathan to some extent - that where you have actually said that money will have to be spent on the IT system, it is actually on child protection. You are going to have a register of every child in the country in order to find out if there are problems in a very small number. You are not going to use that database for anything else but finding out if a child is threatened in some way. We started off by saying: "Is this going to end up just about child protection?"

Ms Pugh: I think it is broader than child protection; it is about making sure that all children are receiving services that they need. Those additional needs may not necessarily be in the area of child protection; it is not a child protection database, that is not what it is about.

Q466 Chairman: Success is never having any data on the child, is it not?

Ms Pugh: We will always have the basic data on the child. The success will be how much more quickly and effectively practitioners can identify who they are.

Q467 Chairman: But this Committee is saying to you that other witnesses have said that that will still come from face to face well-trained teams.

Ms Pugh: Indeed, but in order to communicate with someone you need to know who you have to communicate with.

Q468 Chairman: How are you going to get a unique number for every child?

Ms Pugh: We have been discussing with out team and with colleagues in other government departments and with Misc9(D) how we should arrive at the unique identifying number. We are due to go back to Misc9(D) in April with a recommendation.

Q469 Chairman: There is not one, is there?

Ms Pugh: There is not a unique identifying number, no, and I know that is the subject of some debate. We do all have a National Insurance number.

Q470 Chairman: That starts at the age of 16.

Ms Pugh: It becomes live at 16; it actually exists before then.

Q471 Chairman: From birth?

Ms Pugh: Yes, from birth, unless you are a child in care. We are looking at all the issues around how we can establish a unique identifying number because the feasibility study that I mentioned earlier that was carried out last year recognised that unless we have the ability as part of the system to have a unique number or some unique identifier for a child then the system will not operate effectively because there are issues of multiple identity and so on.

Q472 Chairman: Most of us have been members of Parliament for quite a long time and have always trusted the health visitor to be very perceptive very early on. They have always had a unique entry into a domestic dwelling. They could go into the home in a way social workers, as I understand, could not. Are the laws around that going to change in terms of access into domestic residences?

Mr Davies: I do not think we have any such plans. They are a crucial part of the local workforce.

Mr Jeffery: There was a very helpful report by the former Chief Nursing Officer last summer on the role of health visitors, midwives and other children's nurses which did place health visitors absolutely centrally in the Every Child Matters agenda and in children's centres as they come together there in all sorts of ways.

Q473 Chairman: They have always been crucial. Are you so sure about GPs participating, co-operating and seeing themselves as team players?

Mr Davies: I think in a sense we ought to stop thinking about GPs and think about primary care because the traditional arrangements for the GP practices are becoming increasingly rare. GPs and primary care will be delivered under a different range of contracts by different people as well. Very often you will have primary care practices, for example, which have no GP involvement whatsoever. We need to think about the broader issues around primary care and the delivery of primary care in the community and the engagement of other professionals, and health visitors often are part of that team. There is always a feeling that GPs are the last people to get on board the bus as it leaves the bus station and I think we need to think a bit more widely about the role of primary care because the model of an independent contracting GP often will not be single-handed. I have no reason to think that primary care practices are not part of this and do not want to be part of this; all the evidence shows that they want to be part of this system. It is not easy but we are quite positive about the approach that we are taking.

Chairman: Good. It has been a good session and we have learned a lot, which is the most important thing. Thank you very much for your attendance; it will very much add value to our Committee's report.