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Memorandum submitted by Dr Margy Whalley, Director of Research, Training and Development, Pen Green Research Base, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families
1. Summary
· Integrated centres for children and their families have the capacity to transform children's life chance if they have:
- a shared philosophy and a principled approach to practice - a multi disciplinary team with most disciplines represented and with strong connections to other agencies - shared leadership and management and consistent ways of working - co-constructed the services on the basis of the expressed needs of the local community and engaged with parents and children as partners in the children's centre 'project'.
· Integrated centres for children and their families can only effectively engage with those minoritised families who have traditionally found it hardest to use public sector services; if professionals are willing and able to significantly change their professional practice.
· When staff in integrated centres are encouraged and enabled to work collaboratively and develop communities of enquiry then best practice can be identified and practitioners will become much more accountable. We have to harness the energy and commitment of children centre leaders, their teams and the families that use them to drive forward practice and achieve better outcomes for children and their families.
· Currently there is a paucity of knowledge about
what constitutes 'best practice' in children's centres. I would challenge whether 'children's centres'
is indeed the right name for the service that we are debating today. There is not a strong, or clear enough conceptualization
of what actually constitutes what I would describe as a centre for children and
their families. As the children's centre
programme has gone to scale the spread across the county has been enormous and
the timescales cruel. Rigid
standardization of services would have been inappropriate and unsustainable
since children's centres must respond to local context; indeed children's
centre should be shaped, designed, governed, driven and evaluated by local
users. However, a model of service
delivery based on a notional 'core offer' has become highly problematic. Children's centres are about much more than a
core offer, they are about making a difference for every child. At local authority level there seems to be no
shared understanding or ownership of the explicit emancipatory vision guiding
the children's centre project. This has
resulted in an often overly bureaucratic control of children's centres and the
adoption of mechanistic rather than empowering leadership and management
processes. Children's centre leaders are
finding it hard to realize the primary task of their children's centre because
there is a limited understanding and ownership of the children's centre project
within local authorities (see Diagram 1 - Primary Task).[1] Children's centres could become the
cornerstone of local government developments as we move toward locally flexible
and responsive area based teams. The
2. Introduction
There are many highly
successful children's centres in
3. We have to achieve a clear definition of the primary task of all children's centres. We must recognize the fact that it takes well qualified, effectively supervised and supported staff to deliver children's centre services. The different professional heritages of staff working in children's centres remains a strength but these professionals whilst retaining a sense of guardianship over their own professional discipline and an awareness of what they can uniquely bring to the centre in terms of their health, psychology, midwifery, childcare, play work, social work or educational background must also be able to work seamlessly with other professionals. Whatever the historical starting point of the children's centre there will for example need to be a strong social work presence able to support volunteer and family support staff who home visit families in challenging circumstances. There will also need to be a strong teacher presence to provide a pedagogical lead and support for EYP's, NNEB's and Early Years Educators with NVQ3. All professionals working in children's centres must be able to challenge and critique their own practice. When there is too much change, too many top down contradictory developments, when targets are imposed and unrealistic and when there is a lack of philosophical coherence then entrenched patterns of professional behaviors return and what appears from the outside to be an integrated service is in fact a service full of cracks and dissonances.
4. A characteristic of effective children's centres is that staff do understand that they need to build the capacity of children, families and community to achieve outcomes for themselves. Children's centres need to be about harnessing the communities energy for change and parents deep commitment to ensuring that their children have a better deal. Children's centres are about supporting parents and children to become effective public service users. This requires a huge shift in professional practice.
· If children's centre staff are to be able to encourage users to shape, govern, deliver, research and evaluate services then they have to be very secure in their own professionalism. This way of working challenges the power relationships between citizens and professionals; it requires professionals to give up some of their power. Currently systems of supervision, mentoring and coaching are not well embedded in children's centres. Social work departments and psychiatric services are traditionally stronger on supervision and mentoring, education services have much less awareness of the need for regular monthly supervision of all staff. We need community social workers and family support workers in our children's centres who can effectively co-construct a CAF without disempowering a vulnerable family. We need teachers and early years educators who can share knowledge with parents and recognize parent's role as their child's first and most consistent educator, educators who acknowledge the importance of the learning that goes on at home. To do all of this work well is highly challenging and highly stressful and supervision should be an entitlement for all staff. If it was consistently offered it would radically improve practice in children's centres.
5. Children's centres have the capacity to impact on children, families and communities at many levels. They can impact on:
- children's learning and development - family support - parents involvement in their children's learning - parental advocacy - community engagement - governance - citizenship - inter agency engagement - partnership working - the development of a professional outcomes orientation - the development of the organization as a learning community
· They will only have an impact in all these domains if leaders and staff in children's centres are offered training and support in developing an effective approach to evaluation: ideally an approach to organisational evaluation that starts with locally negotiated outcomes as well as central government and local government targets. Staff in children's centres need to be encouraged to develop their capacity to be self evaluators. This process began with the Early Excellence Centres but under Surestart the model of evaluation was much more remote. Children's centre staff need to see themselves as researchers of their own practice and they need time and resources to build up a practitioner knowledge base. Models of robust self evaluation are central to children's centre development and an unhealthy dependence on narrow Ofsted judgments will not support continuous quality improvement. Staff in chidren's centres need to be research active; challenging their own practice and determining with users the relevance and accessibility of the children's centre services. Parents also need to have a voice in the research and evaluation process so that they can identify their critical concerns. Parents are not just clients passively receiving dollops of the welfare state instead they need to be equal and active partners in developing and reviewing the effectiveness of what's on offer. Hannon describes practitioner led change as the key to self sustaining and rapid improvement. I want every children's centre worker to be able to answer the following questions:
· I can be more effective if ......... · What difference am I making? · I can be more efficient if ....
6. There must be recognition at all levels that work in children's centre is complex. We need to move beyond current practice, as reported by the audit commission, where many parents use just one activity in the children's centre such as the childcare provision. We need to develop a mature model where parents in their own time and their own way move through the centre using a range of different services across time as their family needs change. To achieve this children's centre staff, like school staff, must have non contact time to dialogue with parents and with each other.
· Labeling families as 'hard to reach' is singularly unhelpful. Services are often hard for some parents to access and staff in children's centres cannot assume that the starting point for any parents will be using the children's centre building. Some families have to be home visited for 3 years before they even reach the centre and this home visiting is a highly specialist service that is currently crudely described under the umbrella of 'outreach'. Home visiting is 'outreach' in the sense that it requires staff to reach out to families and engage with parents where they are most comfortable.
7. If children's centres are to effectively engage with non traditional users such as fathers then they may need to run their services in different times and in different ways. Children's centre leaders are already aware that a radical solution to engaging with some fathers (fathers being one of the most minoritised groups in children's centres) is through a more efficient use of public sector buildings, contracting staff to deliver services over a 7 day week rather than a 5 day week and engaging fathers in designing and delivering services on Saturday's and Sundays.
8. Children's centres need to harness parents deep commitment to ensuring that their children have a better deal than they themselves received. Children's centres are not yet effectively engaging with parents as co educators. Indeed the plethora of parenting programmes, designed and developed in the main for work with families on the threshold of statutory intervention, may have been counter productive. What we need are well qualified early years educators who can engage with parents respectfully and share knowledge about children's development and learning effectively. Early Years educators with minimal qualifications and training, low levels of supervision and support will not be able to engage with parents in this way. We know from the work of Feinstein and Blanden that developing parents aspirations and encouraging parents to develop their advocacy skills is critical if we are to narrow the gap on achievement. Rather than continue to create a workforce of paraprofessional 'parent educators' and fund a panoply of US or Australian made parent programmes designed for a very particular purpose we need to offer effective CPD to all early educators who engage with parents on a daily basis. In this way we will be able to involve parents in their children's learning and development.
9. Conclusion
What children's centres should do has been, I think, poorly defined by the core offer. This has led for example, to an easy adoption to quick wins such as Baby Massage in almost every children's centre setting. What is really wanted if we are to consider the needs of infants and young parents, 20% of whom may be suffering from PND, is a deep and profound understanding on the part of the children's centre multi disciplinary team as to how to develop an infant and adult mental health strategy within the centre. Baby massage, when it is effectively carried out, reduces cortisol levels and increases seratonin would form a small but significant part of such a service. Baby massage on it's own may well have little impact. Mothers with severe PND at our children's centre have reported attending baby massage sessions without any awareness of actually being 'present' in the room. To meet the expressed needs of this group of mothers required an integrated response from our CPN, early childhood educator, social worker, psychotherapist and a support group consisting of mothers experiencing similar difficulties. This is just one example of the kind of integrated working that goes on mornings, afternoons and weekends in a children's centre 48 weeks a year.
· Children's centre work is complex and needs to be comprehensive if it is to make a difference. This requires skilled staff and a deep understanding of the change processes involved. If children's centres are to effectively engage with minoritised groups in society, travelers, those with English as an additional language, those who are labeled because they use drugs and alcohol then they will need to have confident and competent practitioners leading the practice. Commissioning a services is fairly easy, co locating a service is relatively unproblematic but co-constructing with parents the development of services and collaborating in multi professional groups with parents in the delivery of services is a real challenge.
· Children's centres have been described as the jewel in the crown of public sector services, the glue that holds fragile communities together. Children's centres are so much more than simply child care or a menu of activities. They merit enquiries such as this. They need to be taken seriously. I want to avoid grandiosity but I also want to say that the children's centre that I work in is a vibrant one stop shop. It provides a relatively seamless service to families it has become the university of the workplace and it is well embedded in a rich, vibrant and vocal community and it has a transformational agenda ..... it has taken 28 years to develop.
October 2009 [1] Not published on the Committee's website. |