Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
40-47
MAGGIE ATKINSON
12 OCTOBER 2009
Q40 Annette Brooke: We sign up
to something as a nation but we don't do the things that we think
might be unpopular, I think I might surmise from that.
Maggie Atkinson: No, that is not
what I am saying.
Q41 Annette Brooke: Very quickly,
as I know the Chairman is anxious to move on, obviously the previous
Children's Commissioner submitted a very detailed report to the
convention on the rights of the child and then we had feedback
on our Government's performance, which can be said to have improved
in some respects. There are still lots of recommendations coming
through, including the remit of the Children's Commissioner from
that report. Do you see any part of your role as pushing forward
the agenda on the United Nations convention on the rights of the
child, so that we can hold our head up with other countries?
Chairman: Could you be brief, Maggie?
Maggie Atkinson: I can try, Chairman.
We as a nation have to get to know its content better. Doing things
such as making sure that every youth assembly, every member of
the Youth Parliament and every schools council understands what
is in it, is absolutely one of the roles of the Children's Commissioner.
When I come back to report to you and to the Secretary of State,
I ought to be highlighting where activity in the country and the
United Nations convention actually align. It is not something
that we should take off the table.
Q42 Helen Southworth: You described
to us a little earlier some of the things that you would like
to do differently, some of the young people you would like to
engage with and some of the mechanisms you were hoping to use
to do that. I wanted to ask whether you thought that the commissioner
should use the time equally on behalf of all children or whether
there were specific groups that should have priority. If so, which
are they going to be for you?
Maggie Atkinson: The remit within
the job description indicates that the vulnerable have a particular
place in the work of the Children's Commissioner, so it is written
into the job profile that those in care, those in young offenders
institutions, those who are in need, those who are disabled, Travellers
and Gypsies, immigration and asylum-seeker children have more
of the share of the commissioner's time and energy.
Q43 Helen Southworth: I thought
it was very laudable that you wanted to speak to all 11 million
children. That was great, although I was not sure how you were
going to do it.
Maggie Atkinson: Picking up what
your colleague was asking me about earlier, the possibility of
using youth assemblies, youth councils, school councils networks
and the UK Youth Parliament as sounding boards for some of the
broader issues that I was talking about earlier has to be the
mechanism that the Children's Commissioner uses.
Q44 Helen Southworth: For engaging?
Maggie Atkinson: For engaging
with those who are less in need, less vulnerable. Unless the commissioner
gets to the generality of the 11 million in the UK, her role is
going to be either misunderstood or not known at all by most of
our children and young people, and that would be a great shame.
Q45 Helen Southworth: How are
you going to protect within that process, bearing it in mind that
your predecessor said he didn't have sufficient resources to undertake
the work that he was doing? How are you going to protect? What
mechanisms are you going to use for each of those children that
you've said are written into the job description?
Maggie Atkinson: I've not had
a very close look at the accounts, so I don't know what the balance
of spending actually is on each group of children and young people,
but what I do know is that the organisation now has an ever stronger
staff team of about 27 or 28 staff, who are organised in policy
teams. Some of the posts in those teams are still being recruited.
As a manager or leader in any organisation, however small or large,
you have to use a distributed mechanism to enable your policy
leads to get on and lead on that area of policy while being accountable
to you as the holder of the post. It's about how well you use
those resources rather than whether you need a sudden hike in
them in straitened financial times.
Q46 Helen Southworth: Can I ask
you specifically about a group of children who have a very special
place within the state, as it were? As Graham was saying, they
are very entrenched within it. They are those children for whom
the state is parent. What are you going to do to ensure that every
one of those children knows you exist and can access you—not
necessarily a policy lead somewhere, but you—that you're
going to hear what they say, that you're going to speak about
it and, if you don't get the right kind of response, that you're
not going to do what you referred to before, which is to explain
sometimes why the system is saying no? You're not going to tell
them why the system's right and they're wrong; you're actually
going to tell the system what they are saying and make it listen.
Maggie Atkinson: The Children
and Young Persons Act 2008, which was given Royal Assent last
November, puts in place in every locality the expectation of two
things. The first is a children in care council, which is their
organisation and speaks about their issues, both to their own
locality and to the Children's Rights Director for England within
Ofsted. I would want to work alongside that development—the
children in care councils in every locality—to enable them
to write to me as well as to him. The second thing is that every
locality has to write, with them, a children in care pledge, which
is about what the system is promising to them. They have to be
its co-authors. What I would want is to have sight of all 150
of them and to be enabled to talk either with representative groups
from the children in care councils, whether it's one from each
or two from each, or an annual event, so that I'm actually talking
directly with them. That's something that Al's been pretty good
at. It is not necessarily countrywide, but those are the things
that you need to do as Children's Commissioner.
Q47 Helen Southworth: So when
are you going to do it, then? In which month of the next 12 months
is it going to happen?
Maggie Atkinson: I think it has
to be an early priority. If appointed, I don't take up the post
until 1 March, as you know, but I think within the first three
months, there has to be a check on how far children in care councils
and care pledges have got and what's being done about them. I'd
want a discussion with the Children's Rights Director at Ofsted,
without fettering either his position or mine, because they've
got an awful lot of that data, but it should be possible to find
at least a touchstone as to where we're at by, I would think,
the autumn of 2010.
Chairman: Maggie Atkinson, thank you
very much for your time with us this afternoon. We've valued your
responses to our questions, and we're going to ask you and everyone
in the public gallery to withdraw now. We are having a very short
private session before we move on to the home schooling session,
which will follow immediately after a five-minute break.
Maggie Atkinson: Thank you, Chairman.
| 
