10. Memorandum submitted by the Department
for Education and Skills
INTRODUCTION
1. DfES has a key role in the Government's
approach to tackling anti-social behaviour amongst children and
young people. The machinery of Government changes in 2001 brought
responsibility for wide ranging children's services into the Department,
alongside traditional responsibilities for schools, thereby enhancing
the contribution DfES could make to efforts to tackle anti-social
behaviour.
2. In 2004, DfES published its Five Year
Strategy for Children and Learners, outlining its plans for
making sure every child gets the best start in life. These plans
build on the vision described in the Every child matters (Sept
2003) publication, now embedded within the Children Act 2004.
Every child matters made clear how important the Government
views the impact of anti-social behaviour on the lives of children,
young people and their families when it described a central aim
as being:
"to ensure that every child has the chance
to fulfil their potential by reducing levels of educational failure,
ill health, substance misuse, teenage pregnancy, abuse and neglect,
crime and anti-social behaviour among children and young people".
3. The following evidence will describe
how work undertaken by DfES to achieve this aim will contribute
to tackling crime and anti-social behaviour by:
— reforming children, young people
and families services;
— improving behaviour and attendance
in schools;
— diverting young people away from
involvement in crime and anti-social behaviour by providing alternative
activities;
— developing, in the future, an offer
to young people that provides greater choice, with places to go
and things to do; and
— taking all of this forward as part
of cross-Government working, in particular with the Home Office
and the Youth Justice Board.
EVERY CHILD
MATTERS
4. The Government wants to help every child
and young person achieve their potential, and to support parents
and families in helping their children develop. We want to maximise
opportunity and minimise risk for every child. Tackling anti-social
behaviour is a part of this; children are disadvantaged when they
are the perpetrators or victims of negative behaviour, and they
can make progress towards positive outcomes when they live in
communities in which they feel safe.
5. The Government set out its vision for
children's services in the green paper Every child matters
(Sept 2003), and confirmed this in Every child matters: Change
for Children (Dec 2004). The Every child matters reforms
aim to shift services towards prevention and early intervention
in an integrated way, before children reach crisis point. These
reforms are essential to prevent the poor outcomes that blight
children's and young people's lives and have negative effects
into adulthood, including involvement in anti-social behaviour
and offending. The main proposals for achieving this include:
— information-sharing and a common
assessment framework;
— multi-disciplinary teams, in co-located
services, with a lead professional to provide holistic early interventions;
and
— the Children's Trust model to create
effective partnerships, pooling resources, and carrying out joint
planning and commissioning.
6. Every child matters proposed
reshaping services to achieve the five outcomes children and young
people said were most important. They are:
— enjoying and achieving;
— making a positive contribution; and
— achieving economic well-being.
7. To develop a clear understanding of what
the outcomes mean in practice, we have broken them down into specific
aims. Two outcomes in particular are central to anti-social behaviour:
— Making a positive contribution—a
key element of this is encouraging young people to choose to engage
in law-abiding and positive behaviour in and outside of school.
— Staying safe—ensuring children
and young people are safe from crime, and anti-social behaviour
in and out of school.
8. All five outcomes are now enshrined in
the Children Act 2004 as the purpose of local co-operation arrangements.
They put the emphasis on the child and young person, rather than
on the providers of services. They provide a focus for consensus
and co-operation on what needs to be achieved and form the basis
for measuring progress both locally and nationally.
Local Change Programmes—children's trust
arrangements
9. To achieve the outcomes children and
young people told us were most important, DfES has been working
with partners across government and beyond on a wider Change for
Children programme, being taken forward by 150 local change programmes.
10. The Children Act 2004 puts a duty on
each local authority in England to make arrangements to promote
co-operation with other statutory agencies. Forthcoming guidance
will make clear that authorities will also be expected to involve
service providers such as schools and general practices, and the
local voluntary and community sector. Children, young people and
their families should also have a clear voice in how local services
are arranged.
11. Children's Trusts will be the vehicles
for whole system change across services, working in the context
of authorities' broader Local Strategic Partnerships. We expect
most areas to have trust arrangements by 2006 and all by 2008.
Fully effective arrangements will need:
— professionals who are enabled and
encouraged to work together in integrated front line services
which are built around the needs of children, young people and
families;
— to be supported by common processes
which are designed to create and support joint working;
— to bring agencies and their resources
together—for example, by pooling budgets; and
— to be overseen by strong inter-agency
governance arrangements in which shared ownership is coupled with
clear accountability.
12. To protect children from negative outcomes,
we need different agencies to interact with each other through
coherent arrangements across professional boundaries. The Change
for Children programme is trying to get changes in the behaviour
of those who work every day with children and families. Children
and families should experience more integrated and responsive
services, with specialist support accessed through universal services.
A key feature of children's trusts is front-line staff working
in effective multi-disciplinary teams, being trained jointly to
tackle cultural and professional divides, and using a lead professional
where many disciplines are involved in supporting a child. Co-located
services will make this easier, for example, in Extended Schools
or Sure Start Children's Centres.
13. We also need to help front-line staff
by aligning the processes that surround them. Some of these processes,
like the Common Assessment Framework, will be centrally driven,
but many will be local. One area where the Government judges it
appropriate to give a clear lead is the better sharing of information
about vulnerable children, many of whom are at increased risk
of involvement in anti-social behaviour. The Government will be
issuing clear guidance for practitioners on this area.
14. Making sure the system overall is meeting
the real needs of children in the right way needs a clear sense
of strategic direction and planning. This means joint needs assessment,
shared decisions on priorities, identification of all available
resources including, where possible, pooling of resources, and
joint plans to deploy them so that those best able to provide
the right packages of services can do so. The new Director of
Children's Services and Lead Member in each local authority will
be well-placed to lead this, developing the statutory plans for
children and young people at the core of the process, and with
new powers to pool budgets and resources.
15. Throughout the local change programmes,
local authorities, Primary Care Trusts, and other partners, will
be supported (and challenged where necessary) by 10 Regional Change
Advisers based in Government Offices.
WORKING WITH
PARENTS
16. Every child matters also highlighted
the critical importance of family support and parenting in determining
outcomes for young people. Parenting can have a positive or negative
effect, influencing the likelihood of offending and anti-social
behaviour, extent of educational achievement, health outcomes,
teenage pregnancy and drug misuse.
17. Our reforms aim to develop more and
better universal support and services open to all families as
and when they need them. Within this universal offer, specialist
services will be targeted to those families which need additional
support; this will often affect children who are involved in,
or at risk of involvement in, anti-social behaviour. The voluntary
and community sector will have a critical role in the design and
delivery of services.
18. Often the families of children involved
in anti-social behaviour or crime are harder to engage and their
difficulties more entrenched. Government will endeavour to encourage
local services to find ways of engaging with those parents. Unfortunately
there are occasions when anti-social behaviour and truancy is
not addressed, or worse is condoned by parents. As part of our
reforms to ensure the well-being of children, we therefore sometimes
require tougher measures, such as compulsory action through Parenting
Orders.
19. Every child matters recognises
that too often we associate parenting support with crisis situations,
and that we need to ensure such support is universal and available
throughout childhood/adolescence. This universal support should
include information, advice and signposting to other services,
and needs to focus on the key transition points in a child's life.
Targeted support will be provided for families and communities
facing additional difficulties. This could include structured
parenting education groups, couple support, home visiting, employment
and training advice. Support must be accessible from places and
in ways that are comfortable for parents, such as early years
settings, schools, primary healthcare services, and through Childcare
Information Services, telephone helplines and web based information.
20. Building on the success of Sure Start,
children's centres and extended schools will develop a coherent
set of services both to support parents and to involve them properly
at all stages of a child's learning and development. By 2010 there
will be a Sure Start children's centre in every community, offering
access to integrated early years activities, childcare and family
services. We expect children's centres to be developed from existing
Sure Start Local Programmes, Early Excellence Centres and the
mini Sure Start Local Programmes in many areas. For older children
and their families, extended schools will provide a gateway to
local services and, for primary school children, a guarantee of
care for children out of school hours and during the holidays
between 8 am and 6 pm.
IMPROVING BEHAVIOUR
AND ATTENDANCE
IN SCHOOLS
21. The Five Year Strategy for Children
and Learners recognised that the better engaged in learning
children and young people are, the less likely they are to be
involved in crime or anti-social behaviour. Its offer to young
people included:
"a culture of regular attendance in every
school, supporting learning but also cutting down on crime and
anti-social behaviour"
22. It is essential for parents to accept
their responsibility to ensure their children attend and behave
well in school, and schools must have zero tolerance of behaviour
that disrupts the education and well-being of others. This will
play an important part in protecting children from involvement
in, and the effects of, anti-social behaviour.
23. In recent years, we have taken a range
of measures—some targeted, some universal—to bear
down on truancy and improve behaviour in schools. This work aims
to get across to parents and pupils:
— parents' important role and responsibilities;
— the adverse effect that absence can
have on pupils' education and life chances; and
— that any truancy is a significant
breach of school behaviour policies and an important issue in
its own right, rather than something which can be tolerated up
to certain levels.
24. Steps we have taken and are continuing
to take include:
— a national programme of truancy sweeps,
to generate local publicity and deter parentally condoned absences;
— national roll-out of the "fast
track" case management system, the aim of which is to ensure
that schools and LEAs deal with attendance cases quickly and in
the most effective way to get the child back into school (146
LEAs have already adopted the system);
— high quality training materials offered
to all schools, through the Key Stage 3 strategy, and consultancy
support to help their staff manage such behaviour in and out of
the classroom. We believe an effective behaviour and attendance
policy consistently applied is the key foundation to good behaviour
in the school and to regular attendance;
— a national anti-bullying campaign
to raise awareness of the problem and to help schools share best
practice. (Bullying has been identified as a significant cause
of absence for some children);
— a requirement for LEAs to provide
full time education for permanently excluded pupils;
— making available to LEAs new powers
to promote parental responsibility for the behaviour and attendance
of their children. Voluntary parenting contracts, which give parents
the support they need to improve their children's attendance and
behaviour, are now being used in 138 LEAs. For a small minority
of parents unwilling to engage with the voluntary approach we
have introduced stronger measures. Parenting Orders, which require
parents to attend a parenting course and comply with other conditions
imposed by the court, are now available following a permanent
or two fixed period exclusions for serious misbehaviour. LEAs
have also made headway in adopting the new penalty notices for
truancy—137 already having done so—although it is
early days, indications are that the penalties are proving an
effective deterrent in certain cases.
25. Through the Behaviour Improvement Programme
we have targeted additional funds and support at some 1,500 schools
(300 secondary, 1,200 primary) in Excellence in Cities areas where
the challenge is greatest; these are often in communities suffering
the worst effects of anti-social behaviour. Key measures offered
under the Programme which support the drive against truancy are:
— multi-agency teams working with schools
to support young people at risk (and their families);
— additional Learning Support Units
and Learning Mentors, supporting vulnerable pupils who might otherwise
truant;
— police officers working in schools;
and
— full-service extended schools (one
in each BIP area).
26. In addition, we continue to provide
dedicated additional expertise to LEAs identified as having particular
problems with absence. Over 530 schools with high truancy rates
have been funded through the Capital Modernisation Fund to introduce
electronic registration systems.
27. The new behaviour package, announced
on 18 November by Charles Clark in his speech to the New Heads
Conference and refined by Ruth Kelly at the Secondary Heads Conference
on 1 February, offers a variety of new initiatives to tackle the
problems of indiscipline in school. For instance, when a school
is named by Ofsted as having unsatisfactory behaviour, we will
immediately invoke a review procedure to examine with the head,
governors and local authority what needs to be done, and require
the school to produce an action plan for improvement. We will
target local and national resources to support the implementation
of the action plan. We will ask Ofsted to re-visit each of these
schools within a set timescale, starting with those so identified
in the 2003-04 inspection round.
28. Ruth Kelly also re-emphasised that the
task of certain schools is exacerbated by the admission of significant
numbers of challenging pupils. Local authorities must work with
their schools to ensure:
— there is a wider range of high quality
alternative provision available to get at-risk and excluded pupils
back on track; and
— that no school is asked to admit
a disproportionate number of potentially disruptive pupils.
29. "Hard to place" pupils, including
excluded pupils, now ready for readmission to mainstream, tend
to be sent to schools which have spare places and these tend to
be the weaker and less popular schools. Managing behaviour in
such schools can be very challenging indeed.
30. LEAs have already been asked to agree
by September 2005 protocols with all their secondary schools to
ensure the fairer sharing out of hard to place pupils. These protocols
must cover looked after children and may cover other hard to place
categories such as asylum seekers' and travellers' children. Protocols
need not include previously excluded pupils, if schools do not
have the support in place to manage such pupils effectively, but
we expect them to be working with other schools locally and to
include them in protocols by September 2007. Many of these children
are at increased risk of involvement in anti-social behaviour;
a risk that could be intensified by not having fair access to
better schools. Such protocols will seek to ensure an equitable
pattern of admission of such pupils to schools across an area.
31. This approach is complemented by encouraging
all schools to work together to manage support and provision for
excluded pupils and those at risk of exclusion, with delegated
or devolved funding. Bringing groups of schools together to collaborate
in managing their challenging pupils offers the most promising
route to ensure that schools have the range of provision that
they need. Together, schools can share expertise and facilities;
pool their resources to buy in provision; and use money devolved
to them from the Local Authority to pay for extra support specifically
tailored to their needs. There are already a few examples of such
partnerships around the country eg in the Swale area of Kent and
in Derbyshire. We know that there are sound economic, educational
and social benefits of early intervention and LEAs which have
adopted a preventative strategy have seen dramatic reductions
in high cost permanent exclusions. Already, a third of LEAs are
committed to working with DfES in this way and there should be
a number of such partnerships in place by September 2005. Ruth
Kelly told the delegates of the Secondary Heads conference on
1 February that she wants every school to be part of a group working
together to manage behaviour provision by September 2007.
32. It was agreed in the 2004 Spending Review
discussions that the future PSA target in this area should focus
on reducing all absences from school, not just unauthorised absences.
Our approach in working towards the new PSA target will entail
bringing together the full range of support available for helping
those pupils (and their families) who have a range of needs which
manifest themselves in poor school attendance but which need to
be addressed in the round, as part of the wider "youth offer"
we are seeking to develop.
DIVERTING CHILDREN
AND YOUNG
PEOPLE AWAY
FROM CRIME
AND ANTI-SOCIAL
BEHAVIOUR
33. In addition to the wider reform to children's
services, and the work to improve behaviour and attendance in
schools, DfES has responsibility for a number of programmes and
initiatives that make a real difference to the lives of children
and young people, particularly those most at risk of negative
outcomes.
34. We know that PE and sport in schools,
both within and beyond the curriculum, can improve pupil concentration,
commitment and self esteem; leading to higher attendance and better
behaviour and attainment. The PE, School Sport and Club Links
national strategy is now rolling out across the country to ensure
that all young people are able to participate in at least two
hours of high quality PE and sport a week. Government is investing
over £1.5 billion to 2008 to make that happen and every school
will be part of the programme by 2006.
35. The Positive Activities for Young People
programme (PAYP) enables young people aged 8-19, at risk of social
exclusion and community crime, to:
— participate in positive activities
during the school holidays;
— access out of school activities throughout
the year; and
— be supported to engage in learning
and/or employment with key worker support for those most at risk.
36. Youth offending teams, Connexions partnerships,
Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP) schools and others working
with "at risk" young people are responsible for identifying
the target group of young people in the referral process. 113,000
young people have taken part in various activities in the period
from 1 April 2004 to 31 January 2005. The most frequent "at
risk" category flagged up for young people on the PAYP database
is "Nuisance/anti-social behaviour". This category accounted
for 42% of the participants in this period.
37. Connexions partnerships, with their
network of personal advisers, aim to reduce the number of young
people not engaged in education, employment or training (NEET).
Connexions also aims to contribute to improvements in young people's
behaviour and a reduction in the number of young people who become
involved in crime. This is evident in the shared target between
Connexions and youth offending teams to get 90% of young offenders
aged 13-19 and supervised by YOTs into education training and
employment.
38. Connexions can have a role in identifying
young people at risk of offending and anti-social behaviour and
help link them to activities that will address this risk. Connexions
can also work with YOTs to ensure continuity at key transition
points, including helping ensure a package of support is available
to the young person at the end of their engagement with the YOT.
39. Children's Fund focuses on children
aged 5-13 and aims to provide a flexible and responsive approach
to meeting needs and developing good practice for services for
children and young people at risk of social exclusion. It aims
to shift the agenda from remedial to preventative action. This
includes the objective to ensure that fewer young people commit
crime and fewer children are victims of crime.
40. Recent evidence of Children's Fund relevance
to this area can be seen in figures relating to the period July
to September 2004. 3,685 Children's Fund supported services helped
nearly 300,000 young people, and 29% of these services were "explicitly
targeted at children exhibiting anti-social or criminal behaviour".
41. Youth Services make a major contribution
to the promotion of social inclusion and diversion of young people
from anti-social behaviour. They provide informal personal and
social education for young people. They help them prepare for
adult life by:
— acquiring social skills;
— helping them to become responsible
citizens; and
— preparing them for the world of work.
42. Local Education Authorities (the statutory
sector) and a range of voluntary organisations provide the Youth
Service. The priority age group for the service is 13-19 year
olds but may extend to 11-25 year olds in some cases. Provision
is usually in the form of youth clubs and centres, or through
"detached" or outreach work. The Government has made
additional funding available to support the modernisation of youth
work; the Transforming Youth Work Development Fund (TYWDF). A
priority use of the fund is to support projects which tackle the
issue of youth crime and anti-social behaviour. The Government
also provides funding to the voluntary youth work sector to support
the sector's work in diverting young people from anti-social behaviour
through the National Voluntary Youth Organisations (NVYO) Grant.
This runs on a three year cycle and for 2002-05, has a budget
of £18 million.
43. Looking to the future, the DfES is publishing,
early in 2005, a Green Paper on Youth which aims to ensure that
all young people are supported to do well. This green paper will
help to shape the future context in which work with those most
at risk will be delivered. It will proposes a comprehensive youth
offer which will present young people with more things to do and
places to go in their communities—chances for them to get
involved, and simply places to be and enjoy themselves.
44. The green paper will focus on giving
young people alternatives to engaging in negative activities,
such as crime, substance misuse and anti-social behaviour. We
want them to have opportunities to do things rewarding they find
enjoyable and have access to places they want to go as a route
out of these behaviours.
CROSS-GOVERNMENT
WORKING
45. The evidence presented so far clearly
illustrates how any efforts to promote positive outcomes for children
and young people is a cross- government agenda. In the sphere
of tackling anti-social behaviour, and making our communities
safer for children, young people and their families DfES working
jointly with the Home Office and the Youth Justice Board is crucial.
This joint working is essential if we are to ensure any measures
introduced have long term impact by striking the right balance
between the rights and the responsibilities of young people and
their families.
46. A few of the many examples of where
this is happening include:
— the piloting of Penalty Notices for
Disorder for 10-15 year olds; operational guidance has been produced
by the Home Office with significant input from DfES. Home Office
and DfES are also working closely to monitor the pilots, in order
to learn how this measure can fit with the Every Child Matters
agenda.
— DfES is working with the Home Office
on early intervention guidance to support the revised Child Safety
Orders, which are aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour by children
under 10 (who themselves are at risk of adverse outcomes). Used
in conjunction with parenting contracts or orders, the revised
Child Safety Order will provide an effective way of engaging with,
and providing support to, the child and parents where a voluntary
approach has failed.
— Home Office and Youth Justice Board
are represented on DfES Youth Crime Programme Board which reports
jointly into the DfES Change for Children Programme Board and
the Home Office Crime Reduction Delivery Board.
28 February 2005
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