Examination of Witnesses (Questions 247-259)
DAVID CRIMMENS,
JANE HAYWOOD
AND PROFESSOR
PAT PETRIE
12 MAY 2008
Q247 Chairman: Jane, you are staying
there, because you are from Yorkshire, and I ask our other two
witnesses to join us. David and Pat, you are cheating, really,
because you have had an insight into the sort of questions that
you get. It was very good of you to sit and listen to the first
part of the sitting, because that makes everyone better informed.
The second part of the sitting will be slightly shorter than the
first. David, you heard all that was said: where are we?
David Crimmens: Interestingly,
the University of Lincoln, where I teach, is in Hull. I was interested
in Graham's comment about ex-students of the University of Hull.
There are some issues around the employment of social workers,
in the sense that the four local authorities in the Humber sub-region
may well now have a largely qualified workforce for different
regions, but according to the newspapers during the week, the
city of Stoke was paying a £4,000 hello to newly qualified
social workers to come and work in Stoke-on-Trent. So, I think
there still is an undersupply of social workers nationally. It
is about whether people, in relation to their family commitments
and other things, are able to move from the East Riding to Stoke-on-Trent
or to one of the London boroughs, where there seems to be a constant
demand for social workers. I say that as an aside and to locate
myself firmly in Yorkshire, as that seems to be important at the
moment. I am a qualified social worker and I am also a qualified
community and youth worker, and that has had a fairly fundamental
impact on the way that I see work with children and young people,
and the way that I practise and research, because it draws on
two distinctly different traditions. Hence my fairly long-standing
obsession with the issues around social pedagogy. From the point
of view of the workforce, I wonder what Sir William Utting would
say if he were sitting here today, 17 years after he published
his report on children in the public care. His recommendation
was that the minimum standard for a qualification in children's
homes should be NVQ3. Seventeen years later, and in spite of significant
investment through the training support grant, we have not reached
that minimum standard. I have not seen any research—I do
not know that there is any—and I do not understand why,
after all that time, we have not managed to educate to A-level
standard people who work with some of the most troubled and troublesome
children in our society. We should think about the fact that teaching
is now being talked about as a postgraduate profession; think
about social work, which is now effectively a graduate profession;
and look at the developments in early years, in terms of the early
years professional status, and all the work that has gone on over
the last decade or so to try to raise the education standards
of people working with children so that they at least start to
approximate the norm across all continental Europe. In terms of
the comments that you made at the outset about whether there should
be radical reform or whether the system is good enough as it is,
I am not sure that the system needs radical reform, but it certainly
needs development.
Professor Petrie: Speaking as
someone from Lancashire, I have been asked to provide evidence
about social pedagogy and what that approach means. I have researched
social pedagogy in some detail for the past eight or nine years,
but I have been in contact with pedagogues in Europe for 15 years
longer than that. Pedagogy is not an easy concept for English
people to come to terms with, but it has a long history that goes
back to the beginning of the 19th century. The social pedagogue
is a role and a profession that is recognised in most European
countries. If somebody said, "What's a teacher?", we
would look at them and say, "What do you mean?" Well,
when you say to some of our European colleagues, "What is
a social pedagogue?", they look at you with the same sort
of bewilderment, and then find it quite difficult to answer, because
the profession is quite complex. Over the past eight or nine years,
my study has directly addressed the question, "What is pedagogy?",
and tried to come to terms with that question. It was a case of
looking at Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and France,
where I found a sort of uniformity of understanding—there
are some differences in organisation, but there is a uniformity
of understanding across those countries. One of the problems is
that "pedagogy" and "the pedagogue" are lost
in translation. I have seen English language publications from
continental European countries that use words such as "teacher",
"educator" or "education" to translate from
their own language a word very similar to "pedagogy".
In Italian and French, they use the words "éducateur"
and "éducation", which does not mean formal education.
In conclusion, pedagogy, as it is understood in continental Europe,
is what we might think of as education in the broader sense of
that word. It is not formal education, but the support that adults
in a child's life—professional and others—and society
in general give to that child to support their ongoing development.
That is the work of the pedagogue on behalf of society, whether,
as is the case in some countries, the pedagogue works across a
range of services from early years through to residential care,
or, as is the case in other countries, whether the pedagogue works
more closely within the social work sphere. At any rate, the pedagogue
works and is trained at graduate level to work, day by day, in
close contact with children. In residential care, for example,
that involves supporting a child's connections with their own
family and their formal education, sitting down and eating with
them, talking with them and supporting them emotionally. The difference
in training compared with that for social workers involves a much
greater emphasis on child development and group dynamics, and
there is also work on the arts and creative opportunities for
children, which is what pedagogues bring to their day to day work
in, for example, residential settings. They not only concentrate
on the child and the child's problem, but ask, "What shall
we do together?" the pedagogue and the child or group of
children engage in joint activities such as making kites and flying
them, or playing hide and seek all over the house—as a young
person said in one of the studies in which I took part. Role plays
may deal with problems, but they are not seen as therapeutic work
and the arts subjects are not used on the basis of diagnosis.
Those activities are just for children to enjoy their time with
their pedagogues and other young people.
Q248 Chairman: Some members of this
Committee who were on the previous Select Committee on Education
and Skills went to Denmark to meet pedagogues who are involved
with children up to the age of seven. Would that be the same pedagogue
group that is also in social care with the same basic training?
Professor Petrie: Yes.
Chairman: We are familiar with that,
but they belong to a totally different union—the teachers'
union takes over when the children are seven.
Professor Petrie: There are two
unions. One for people who work in nurseries and out-of-school
child care services and a second union for those who work in what
we would call social care.
Chairman: In a couple of weeks, we are
going to Denmark to see what they do.
Professor Petrie: In some of my
work, residential care is seen as a plum job, so they cut their
teeth in the early years services but have ongoing and specialist
training.
Chairman: And they then move on. I must
not break up the questioning. John, you are going to start us
off with the status of residential care in the system.
Q249 Mr Heppell: From the evidence
that we have heard so far, there is still a tendency to see residential
care as the Cinderella, and that every social worker manager would
prefer to have children not in residential care, which seems to
be almost a last resort. What effect does that Cinderella image
have on the service in care planning?
David Crimmens: I wonder whether
the notion of a Cinderella service has become so deeply embedded
in popular culture that we believe it. I spent three years working
on a research project to examine the evolution of a children's
home, and that was not how those people perceived themselves.
Among those who look after children who are highly marginalised,
there is a tendency to develop a sense of being in the bunker
alongside the children whom they are looking after. To have solid
relationships with children, there must be a strong sense of identification.
It is a fact that residential child care in this country has declined
phenomenally, not only in the early days in the 1970s, but during
the 1990s to a relatively small number of children. Given that
relatively small number, we should be able to see residential
care, as Willie Utting suggested, as a placement of choice that
can achieve particularly good outcomes for young people—teenagers
and those who do not need alternative parenting, but who need
looking after and developing so that they can grow into healthy,
law-abiding citizens.
Q250 Mr Heppell: Just to follow on
from that, does the image become more of a problem the fewer such
children there are? In Denmark and Germany, almost 50% of children
in care are in residential establishments. If you get to the situation
where you just take the most difficult children into care, does
that not give an image that residential care is bad and that the
last thing you want to do is to put people in it?
David Crimmens: Residential care
and children in residential care have had a better press over
the past decade. When I first went to Hull, the story on the front
of the Hull Daily Mail was about the leader of the council
being up in arms about the behaviour of children in a children's
home opposite where he lived. The consequence was that the children's
home disappeared fairly quickly after that. You do not tend to
see those sorts of examples as frequently as you used to. It is
difficult to reconcile the fact that we have a concentration of
children who are more troubled with the task of trying to develop
their skills and potential in a situation where, particularly
in terms of human resources, it is clear that the sector is under-resourced.
I have thought for some time that the dichotomy between a family
and a residential placement ought to disappear, and that we should
instead ask, "Where is the best placement for bringing the
child on and meeting their needs for somewhere to belong and to
be brought up until such time as they can either return to their
family or become independent?"
Jane Haywood: The question is
whether residential care is fit for purpose, and I do not think
that it is. We are warehousing children in residential and foster
care, if we do not put fully trained and skilled workers with
them. We keep them safe and give them some care, but we are not
actually able to move them on so that they can learn and grow,
become independent and achieve their outcomes. We have a mixed
group of workers in the foster and residential care workforces.
Their absolute passion about and commitment to the child, their
level of skills and the warmth that they give to the child are
great to see, but we must give them the other skills to do the
job. That would start to relieve some of the pressure on the social
worker. Why is the residential worker or the foster carer not
able to manage the relationship with school, ensure that the school
is given the right support or draw in the help of a virtual head,
child and adolescent mental health services or out-of-school activities,
if they are needed? We do not allow them to do those things. Instead,
we say, "All you do is care, so those other things must be
done by this other person." Actually, if we invested in their
skills, they could do a different job. They could become the social
pedagogue of the type that has a real impact overseas. That way,
we could release our social workers to do the job that needs to
be done.
Q251 Chairman: On that point, is
there not evidence that the best place for a child is in its natural
family, that the second best is good foster care and the least-favoured
option is institutional care? Has research not shown that the
psychological effect of institutional care is more damaging than
foster care?
David Crimmens: The discussion
of the evidence has been fairly contentious between academics.
Clearly, as a society, and internationally—I am talking
about the children's rights convention—we are committed
to every child having the right to a family life, but what do
we do when their family of origin is unable to look after them
in either the short or long term? That is the fundamental question.
Are children better off or likely to thrive most in a family placement
or in some kind of institutional setting? The evidence is variable.
If we were to ask children in residential care, we would hear
many of them tell us that that is where they want to be. They
say that they have their own family and that they hope that they
will be able to return to them when the dust has settled, but
in the meantime they do not want another family. They want to
live in group care.
Q252 Mr Heppell: I suppose that I
am thinking the unthinkable. Could the problem be the other way
around? A recent survey said that 75% of the staff in residential
homes are completely satisfied and really enthused by their job,
so I wonder whether we are looking for qualifications when they
are not necessary. We have an under-qualified staff who learn
some of the skills. You have mentioned the social pedagogue and
other things. Sometimes, people want to talk or relate to someone,
but I am not sure whether that can be trained—it comes as
a person's life skills. I wonder whether we are trying to invent—it
seems this way to me—a qualification. We have the social
work degree qualification, but we seem to be saying, "The
degree qualification is great, but it doesn't actually train people
to do the job." That is a worry, because then I start to
think, "Well, why have the degree qualification? What is
the point of a qualification if it doesn't actually enhance the
job?" I know that that must sound controversial, but it seems
to me that we might be looking for qualifications that are not
necessary.
Jane Haywood: We need people with
warmth and the ability to give a listening ear. Only so many people
can do that, and only so many people can cope with the stress
of what that listening ear finds out. We need that, but if such
people are going to help the child move on and deal with the things
that they are talking about, that requires a higher level of skill,
an understanding of child development and an understanding of
the research that Celia was talking about. What is the intervention
that will help that child move on? It is about not only keeping
them safe—if it were just that, it would be easy—but
helping their development. If they are supposed to be helping
our children in care to improve their GCSE results but they have
no qualifications themselves and struggle with literacy and numeracy,
they will not be able to help.
Professor Petrie: Or provide a
good role model for them in educational terms, either.
Jane Haywood: Absolutely.
Professor Petrie: In one of our
studies, we talked to about 100 staff in Denmark, Germany and
England. We asked them what they would do in response to various
hypothetical situations—for instance, if they heard a child
crying at night. The English people were much more likely to talk
about procedures and organisation. They would give what they thought
was the right answer to a researcher. When asked what they do
when they hear a child crying at night, they might reply, "I
get up, I put on my track suit, I wake up my colleague, I go and
knock on the door." They have been trained in that, and they
thought that that was the important thing to tell. The Danes and
Germans—it was not that they did not follow procedures,
because they gave other evidence that they do so—spoke much
more in terms of providing emotional support, listening, empathising
and finding more help. They are trained to be reflective practitioners
and team players, and they have support in team meetings where
they discuss things clearly and supportively. They are not locked
down in organisation, procedures or, as I have seen in children's
homes, logging everything.
Q253 Mr Heppell: I am sorry to interrupt,
but you seem to be saying that it is not more training that is
required for what is happening in residential homes, but different
training.
David Crimmens: May I take this
up. I heard a degree of Geordie pragmatism in your question. The
research that you referred to about morale and job satisfaction
was commissioned by me on behalf of the Social Education Trust.
It was carried out in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
separately, and it made it clear that the best-qualified workforce
in the UK was in Northern Ireland, working in children's residential
care. They had the highest morale and job satisfaction in terms
of how that was measured, but they were clear—they had a
higher number of people professionally qualified to social work
standard—that social work was not the right qualification
for residential child care. The issue is not about the qualification
per se. It is about learning processes that focus on an
understanding of the child as a whole person rather than as bits—not
a juvenile delinquent, a depressed child, an anorexic or whatever,
but the whole child—and what kind of process has to be undertaken
in order to enable that child to prosper and grow.
Q254 Mr Stuart: Are you saying, David—well,
you just did—that a social work qualification is not the
right one? It has been suggested that we need to put more elements
into social work training that take into account residential care.
Are you suggesting that we should have a social pedagogy training
course as opposed to social work with a bit of residential care
add-on?
David Crimmens: To return to the
comment that I made initially, we do not have a professional education
structure for residential child care. The national minimum standard
is NVQ3. I have spent the past 17 years working with social workers,
among others, on their professional education. They tend to focus
on problems—they go in and resolve problems. There is a
certain understanding of the notions of pathology, for instance,
and the response is based on the idea that problems can be solved
and people will get on with their lives. The pedagogue is concerned
with children's upbringing and their education in the broadest
sense, outside school and outside the family. It is about all
the things that children need in order to grow up. Social pedagogues
engage with those processes on the basis of the experiences of
everyday life. That was why I said that youth workers have historically
tended to be more the kind of people who have worked with such
issues in England.
Q255 Mr Stuart: I want to find out—I
did not really get a direct answer to my question—whether
we should just bolt some extras on to existing social work training
or whether we need something entirely separate.
David Crimmens: I would argue
for something entirely separate—a different pathway, because
there is different core content.
Jane Haywood: In the two different
pathways, there is different core content, but there is also some
common content, which we would not want to lose. There is a common
goal, but the roles are different.
Q256 Mr Stuart: In your opening statement,
David, you mentioned the collapse in the number of children in
residential care. One would have thought that 17 years on, with
a massive contraction in the workforce, a massively reduced number
of children and a subsequent focus on children who are much more
demanding, there would be an explosion in the qualifications of
those looking after them. It is quite hard to imagine how there
would not be. One would think that there would be specialist people
who, by hook or by crook, were trained up to do it. Instead, we
are still chronically short, which seems very peculiar. You told
us about the problem, but you did not explain how we have got
ourselves in this position, or what you feel we should have in
our report to try to ensure that, 17 years on, we do not all end
up complicit in another 17 years of failure, if that is what it
is.
David Crimmens: For me, it is
about the two R's—risk and regulation. The response to the
child care scandals of the late '80s and the '90s particularly
pinned down the need to specify the number of people who should
be working together in a children's home. Although the numbers
reduced significantly, the size of the workforce did not reduce
proportionately. Before the 1989 Act, I ran a specialised children's
home, and we often worked with one or two on shift. One thing
to consider, particularly with adolescents, is that if you load
a children's home with staff, you do not necessarily get a better
learning environment for those children to grow in. I suppose
that one thing that would enable more social pedagogical engagement
with children would be to relax some of the regulations. I am
thinking about what the new Secretary of State said when he came
in—we have to allow children to play snowballs and conkers,
and equally we have to start trusting the professionals in whose
training we have invested large resources to get on and do the
job on behalf of the rest of us, as they do in continental European
countries.
Professor Petrie: We found in
our study that the ratios of children to staff were much lower
than in the continental countries that we studied. That might
account for the relatively high numbers of staff in our homes.
I would just like to take up the question about other sorts of
training being tacked on to social work. In fact, that is something
like the model in Sweden, where there is general social work training
and a specialism in social pedagogy, and there are other pedagogic
courses that Swedes can take. Let me point to the value of the
pedagogue in fostering. In France, for example, the people who
support foster carers and deliver training, often on the same
basis as the education and training for pedagogues, are from schools
of social pedagogy. Residential care is important as far as pedagogues
are concerned, but they have more than that to offer to children
in care.
Q257 Mr Stuart: Despite the changing
face of training, 17 years on, we have still not got the workforce
trained to NVQ3. Should the Committee recommend in its report
that such a standard becomes mandatory at some practicable point
in the future?
David Crimmens: Yes. The question
is how, and it is about finding ways of engaging with a residential
workforce with a view to considering modern approaches to work-based
learning, learning in groups, distance learning and group learning.
Otherwise it is impossible to conceive of a situation in which
we can pull out those people and take them through a conventional
university-based education.
Jane Haywood: Wherever people
work in the children's workforce, the minimum qualification must
be a Level 3 and it must be graduate-led. We are not there across
the country and across different settings partly because, in this
country, we still have a view that anybody can look after children,
that it is not a skilled job and that it is not difficult—all
you need to do is to be cheery and friendly and it will all be
fine. When you are looking after other people's children, it is
a completely different job. That is the push for us right across
the piece. In our early years sector, we are pushing for a minimum
of Level 3. At the moment, most in the early years setting are
at a Level 2.
Q258 Mr Stuart: You are the chief
executive of the Children's Workforce Development Council. Are
you saying that the Committee should recommend to the Government
that they make that mandatory at some practicable point in the
future?
Jane Haywood: Yes.
Q259 Chairman: You might know that
one of the very first inquiries under my chairmanship of the previous
Education and Skills Committee considered early years. We went
to Denmark and looked at the whole notion of qualification around
pedagogues. What you are saying in a sense, Jane, is that we should
have a pedagogy profession that people know about, and that is
used in early years and residential care. If we talk about it
only in terms of residential care, we are considering only a very
small base. We said extensively in the report, and since, that
it is a scandal that our very youngest children are looked after
by the least qualified and poorest paid people in the community—certainly
in the education sector. Should you not be out there campaigning,
as Graham says, for a pedagogy profession that is well trained
and reasonably well paid?
Jane Haywood: Yes.
Chairman: Are you?
Jane Haywood: Yes.
David Crimmens: The question is
how to get there. Rome was not built in a day.
Jane Haywood: If we look across
the piece, we have in place what is called the early years professional
status. People at graduate level are getting the status to lead
the early years. There is constant pressure from underneath to
get to Level 3, but that is still not required. Similar things
are happening in the youth workforce and are starting to happen
in the play workforce. Now we are having conversations about the
residential workforce. The problem is that we are doing that down
different strands. I would like to hear a clear statement that
says across the children's workforce—wherever you work and
whatever your role is—the minimum qualification is Level
3 and it is graduate-led. Within both those sets of qualifications,
there is a common core of child development. The next stage of
the children's plan could make that clear statement. It will take
us a while to get there with different sectors, and that is partly
because many foster carers do not have qualifications. They are
actually quite scared of going for qualifications, but we do not
want to lose them because their skills are very good. We want
to help them to get better, so we have to put in place training
and development with which they will feel comfortable and that
will move them on. You will need a different action plan in different
parts of the workforce.
Chairman: If I was in the private sector
selling these qualifications, I would think, "Look at all
these classroom assistants who have to be trained."
Mr Stuart: Yes, I was thinking that as
well.
Chairman: It sounds like good business
to me—you have lots of people.
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