Q
40Mrs.
Miller: If you are trying to get to the most vulnerable
young people, you should determine the services that are delivered
through a Sure Start centre to ensure that you actually get to those
youngsters. Clare
Tickell: Local authorities have to have a
responsibility for doing that. I agree with much of what Anne has said
and think that who provides that is a secondary consideration. Meeting
the needs of the most
vulnerable children and young people in a particular
locality has to be determined by what the locality throws up. The core
offer needs to be there, and we support the core offer as expressed,
but the flex that Anne described has to be there, because communities
are very different. As I have said, the most vulnerable children are
often very much under the parapet, so you have to look hard for them
and work quite assertively to find them and bring them into the
provision. Anne
Longfield: Community provision is not a soft
option—it is not about leaving it all to make its own way. It is
a way of best determining how to provide a service that responds to
local community needs, but within that you have to have leadership and
a duty on the local authority to take those services forward
strategically.
Q
41Mrs.
Miller: Should we be satisfied that local authorities are
continuing to see themselves as the main providers of children’s
centre
services? Clare
Tickell: We run some very good children’s
centres. Who should provide children’s centres is the wrong
question. For my money, the important things are the ingredients of a
good children’s centre: it is genuinely at the heart of the
community, it reflects the community, it involves the citizens of the
community, and it demonstrably puts the needs of children and their
families first in its arrangements. That means that different people
are best at providing services in different places. Prescription is not
helpful. Anne
Longfield: And local authorities do not always
necessarily do it best. Some may find themselves as the predominant
provider by happenstance or because of the phase of the roll-out. Some
need to get running quickly, and local authorities are often able to do
that better than others, but we have to look at the next phase, which
is about opening up services and encouraging and supporting others to
become involved. Some small third sector organisations just cannot go
through lengthy commissioning processes, so there may be issues there,
too.
Q
42Jeff
Ennis (Barnsley, East and Mexborough) (Lab): Continuing on
the theme of children’s centres, I represent a deprived
constituency. The children’s centres are doing a fantastic job
in many of my communities. Sometimes they are attached to or next door
to a primary school, sometimes they are stand-alone facilities. Do our
witnesses think that that is a relevant consideration to the
establishment of future children’s centres? Is there debate as
to whether they should be attached to a formal learning institution or
stand
alone? Clem
Henricson: We did some research into
children’s centres for the Department and found that several
work fairly effectively attached to schools, but there are obviously
reservations because of parents’ experience of schools. However,
the same anxiety was raised before we trialled another project, which
was on parent information sessions in schools. We trialled the sessions
in community centres as well, but it was the schools that parents went
to. Perhaps we can be a bit over-anxious about that connection. That is
all I have to
say. Anne
Longfield: Many centres are based in schools, and
naturally so. Often there is space—premises and so on—and
often the impetus is there to do that. Whether centres are based at
schools or not, they have to have
firm links and good relationships with schools. This goes back to some
of the questions in the earlier evidence session about how to build
relationships with the wider community, but also how schools provide a
strategic link. When you are looking at how best to respond to
individuals’ needs, you need to take into consideration not only
the children’s centre but also the
school. The
other point is that if you are looking at ongoing support for parents
while their children are in school, if you can pull out some of the
support from children’s centres—parent support,
specialist support and so on—you can get to a situation where
you have much more ongoing family support system than you would if the
children’s centre were separate. There is a big opportunity
there that we need to capitalise
on.
Q
43Jeff
Ennis: Would a possible alternative viable model be to
site some of the new children’s centres that will be established
with new health centres, for example, rather than in a school
setting? Anne
Longfield: Yes, and some are run by health, are they
not? Clare
Tickell: Yes, some are run by heath. Again, the key
is not to be prescriptive. We have children’s centres that are
bang next door to primary schools. Actually, we have one that is in an
undersubscribed primary school. Half the building is now used for the
children’s centre. It is what actually happens, the
relationships that develop between professionals and what the locality
needs that are the pre-eminent
considerations.
Q
44Jeff
Ennis: But the local community needs to have a big say on
the location of the children’s centres so that they have
ownership of
them. Clare
Tickell:
Absolutely. Anne
Longfield: Yes, and the relationships need to be in
place. Sometimes you get a children’s centre on a school site
but the relationships are not fantastic. Just because a centre is
plonked beside a school does not mean that everything is working
fantastically. There have to be strategic and operational
relationships.
Q
45Annette
Brooke: One final point on children’s centres: do
you have a recommendation as to how outreach work could made be more
effective than it is at present? It is not specifically covered in the
Bill, but it is clearly a major
concern. Clem
Henricson: I think that it is regrettable that it is
not in the Bill. Several things are not specified clearly enough in the
Bill, such as what co-operation means in relation to children’s
trusts and how that would be effective, and what the definition of need
is in relation to children’s centres. While one would of course
say that a local response was needed to address local issues or
preferences, there has to be some definition of the need if you are
asking the local authority to provide children’s centres to meet
that need. Our research showed that outreach was viewed as one of the
most critical things that children’s centres were doing. The
providers found it absolutely essential and were developing it a
lot. Clare
Tickell: We feel that it is critical to think about
outreach in the context of children’s centres. We run about 85
centres, and it troubled us that we were not sure whether we were
attracting the most disadvantaged
families into them. We have commissioned a national study to look at the
delivery of intensive family support services through our Sure Start
children’s centres, and although we do not yet have the final
report our initial findings suggest very strongly that intensive
support can make a very positive difference to the lives of children
and their families in even the most challenging circumstances. We have
employed people explicitly to go and find the parents who are not
coming into the children’s centres. The anecdotal evidence from
talking to parents and professionals—health visitors and so
on—was that people who already felt stigmatised in their
communities sometimes felt they could not go into the “lovely
building”—that they would be unwelcome and excluded from
it. If we send staff to work closely with those people and develop the
relationship, they do come in. They realise that their perception that
they will be stigmatised is false. They quickly develop very good
relationships with members of the community who hitherto were not
there, and tremendous support develops between families. Some of the
most marginalised families engage very well once they are in, and that
is incredibly
encouraging. Anne
Longfield: I agree absolutely that the outreach
function is very important and needs to be embodied in
children’s centres. There are a couple of opportunities to pick
up on. First, there is the status of outreach workers. I am less
worried about the name they have been given than about their status.
They should be expected to work alongside multidisciplinary teams and
take their place alongside social workers and other specialist
professionals in identifying need and responding to it. Secondly,
because this provision has evolved organically, we have a mass of
people who deliver on a huge area of common ground but who have
different names. There are parent support advisers, outreach workers,
family support workers, and even health visitors and social workers.
There is a job to be done there in looking at how we can bring that
together in a much more coherent package of support workers for
families. Whether that is the job of the Bill is a different
matter.
Q
46Annette
Brooke: Focusing on the Bill, did you look particularly to
see whether there were any areas where there should be more mention of
bringing in the voice of children and young
people? Clem
Henricson: There are some children’s trust
advisory boards or children’s trusts that already have parents
and children on them. Whether you would want to extend that and look at
how well it is working is an issue to at least be
considered. Clare
Tickell: Certainly, in terms of the consultation that
I am pulling together on the children and young person’s plan,
it is curious that they are not involved in that process. That would be
a relatively straightforward thing to drop into the
Bill. Anne
Longfield: It is now commonplace for local
authorities to have well-developed systems to consult children and
young people from an early age, and there are also some quite formal
mechanisms in place to allow them to feed into decision making. There
is again an opportunity to enshrine this in some of the language around
children’s trusts and the children’s
plan.
Annette
Brooke: The power to
search—
The
Chairman: Is this your last
one?
Q
47Annette
Brooke: I think it might be. We have been looking at the
power to search from the school perspective but not from that of
children’s rights. Are there any issues that we should be
debating on that proposal as far as children’s rights are
concerned? Anne
Longfield: My starting point would be a relationship
and culture of respect that goes two ways within the school
environment. If asked, children and young people would probably say
that it is fine to search them because a lot of them suffer from the
difficult behaviour of others, and children are usually quite strident
in those situations. Clearly, it has to be done within a culture of
positive behaviour and respect and one that bears that in mind
throughout.
Clare
Tickell: It is incredibly difficult and I would
agree. When we did our “Step Inside Our Shoes”
consultation about the use of guns and knives, we were surprised by the
extent to which young people felt the importance of their role as
victims and how little that was understood and thought about. Equally,
we learned how important it was not to patronise them but to explain
properly the reasons for doing things—and to do it in a way that
was upfront and honest—and to listen to what they had
to say and to do it with respect in the way that Anne
described.
Q
48Sarah
McCarthy-Fry: I have one question on children’s
centres and then I want to move on to a different area. The NUT
believes that every children’s centre should have a properly
qualified early years teacher and that education should be the primary
focus of a children’s centre. What is your view on
that? Clem
Henricson: It should be one of the primary
considerations, but other aspects of well-being for a child of that age
clearly are critical. The proposal to have an educational expert is
sensible and there probably does need to be more of a link with the
education sector, certainly in relation to the advisory boards that are
considered for the children’s centres. I would not say it was
the primary purpose. There is a big health function, after
all. Anne
Longfield: There is a lot of evidence showing that an
early years teacher is helpful in reaching outcomes but, as has been
said, there are much wider outcomes within this. It would be a mistake
to place children’s centres entirely within an educational
framework. An issue in the amendments concerns governing bodies. We
need to keep an eye on that. We are not thinking of school governing
bodies, we are talking about governance mechanisms that reflect
communities. We are not just throwing this in within the governing body
of a school. Educational outcomes are important as part of this, but it
goes much broader. I see children’s centres as a vanguard
movement within the wider children’s services. If we can get a
culture of seeing things in the round rather than in professional boxes
when children are very young, maybe we can start transforming schools
with a much more rounded approach.
Clare
Tickell: As Anne says, one of the great strengths of
good children’s centres is that they are genuinely working with
the child at the centre of what happens. A lot of kids in our Sure
Start children’s centres in some of the most deprived
communities have an awful long way
to go before they can even engage with some of the more traditional
approaches, even on early years education, because the issues involved
are resilience, well-being and building up their ability to receive, if
you like. Therefore, it seems to me to be a mistake to over-emphasise
health, education or any other discipline, because that loses the sense
of what children’s centres are about.
Having said
that, we have a lot of early years provision involving qualified staff
in our children’s centres, and, if you are going to do that, you
certainly need to do it well, professionally, get the best possible
people involved and not do it on the
cheap.
Q
49Sarah
McCarthy-Fry: During your earlier evidence, Clare, you
were very passionate about the people who are left behind and our most
vulnerable young people, some of whom are in youth custody. Education
stops for such people, but what are everyone’s views on the
proposals to change
that? Clare
Tickell: I go back to my opening comments about
trying to find a way to run a slide rule over the issue and how we
manage to capture the most vulnerable people. I am delighted that you
have raised the point, because if there is any area in which we fail
young people, it is in getting them in and out of youth justice. That
is particularly true of young people with special educational needs who
have an unequivocal statement that gets lost as they move in and out of
the criminal justice
system. We
all do ourselves a disservice in terms of the huge achievements or
attainments that could have been made by individual young people in the
face of enormous adversity. Nobody intends for that to happen because
of a short period in custody, but it does because of a disconnect in
terms of where the young people have gone, so everything is
disproportionately lost. There has to be some scrutiny of how we
maintain some continuity for a young person who is still a child.
Actually, this week, newspapers have reported the extent to which
prison governors and staff are not necessarily aware that SEN
statements still apply because children are
involved. Anne
Longfield: That is right. Again, this goes back to
the core threads around the Bill in terms of ensuring that early
intervention is in place and that all areas of children’s
services work strategically, including those that focus on youth
offending, which are often not involved in partnership discussions of
the mainstream kind that we are talking about, nor are they often
active partners in wider discussions. I therefore think that the Bill
is helpful in terms of support for the
individual. Clem
Henricson: I support what the others say from the
same
perspective.
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