Every child matters
The touchy-feely title of Minister for Children, Young People and Families belies the nature of a ministerial job charged with delivering profound changes to schools and fulfilling one of this Government’s most ambitious and wide-reaching agendas.
ECM brings together schools, social services, health, youth justice and other agencies to deliver a coordinated package of services for children. Headteachers have identified ECM as the most significant challenge they face. While many are concerned about the increased workload, others fear teaching and learning will be sidelined as social service priorities are allowed to predominate.
Beverley Hughes, who took over as Minister for Children after the 2005 General Election, admits that its development so far has been uneven.
“While it is variable across the country, I genuinely have been really impressed with the progress made. Every area has a director of children’s services in place now and many of those have come from an education background.”
Most areas have created either a children’s trust or a local children and young people’s strategic partnership as a platform for changing the ways services are structured and agencies relate to each other, she says. She highlights Portsmouth’s ‘cluster’ approach as one potential model for how Every Child Matters might look in practice.
“Every single school there now is an extended school. They’re progressing really well with their children’s centre programme with centres very often on school sites. What was exceptional about Portsmouth…was the fact that they’re basing their model on communities so that schools are working in clusters.
“Each community has a partnership board consisting of headteachers, social services, all the agencies, police and two or three of those boards were actually chaired by the headteacher of the school at the centre of the cluster. I thought that was just fantastic.”
The Government has allocated £840 million to ECM in 2005-08 and Portsmouth is using some of its share to pay for each of the clusters to have a coordinator to take the day-to-day strain of running the partnership off the headteacher. This frees them up to concentrate on leadership and building the momentum to make the partnerships work, says Hughes.
“All the headteachers, whether or not they were chairing boards, spoke very positively of the benefits in terms of pupil levels of attainment, identifying early issues for pupils and students and having the agencies on one site to help resolve some of those barriers to learning. They were all very positive about the impact on the children and the families.”
While corporate re-organisations are admirable, it’s vital that the culture - as well as the structure - is addressed, Hughes insists.
changing mindsets and that is always going to take longer. But there is some really great progress in many areas and those who are a bit further along are enthusiastic about the benefits they can see of more integrated working with schools at the hub.”
ECM was set up in response to a systemic failure to protect a very vulnerable child (see box) and the impression is often that it targets the poor, the disadvantaged and under-achievers. Not so, says Hughes. It is intended to raise the quality of life and maximise the opportunities of every child, irrespective of background or circumstances.
circumstances. “I reject absolutely any suggestion that the Every Child Matters approach is really only relevant for disadvantaged kids. If you are going to improve outcomes for all children, it isn’t only disadvantaged ones who have barriers for learning. Their barriers may be more evident, more ‘in your face’, but many middle-class kids suffer bereavement, are into drugs, have parents who separate.
“Many experience a range of problems - maybe temporarily and less systemically than disadvantaged children - but, nonetheless, they do experience significant issues which are a barrier to learning for them, for a period at least. If through early identification and early intervention we can help them to overcome their problems, then that’s just as applicable to better-off kids as it is to disadvantaged kids.”
One of the agenda’s stated outcomes focuses on safety. The vast majority of harm to children - whether through physical, mental or sexual abuse or neglect - happens in the home. Nevertheless, the perception of ‘stranger danger’ has expanded massively since the 1980s, driven by high-profile cases of child abuse, abduction and murder.
This has led to a campaign in some parts of the media for the UK to introduce ‘Sara’s Law’, an equivalent to Megan’s Law in the US, which - in some states - gives parents access to information on registered sex offenders in their area. The NSPCC and other children’s charities and campaigners are opposed to the law, arguing that the fear of exposure would drive convicted paedophiles underground, preventing the authorities from tracking them.
The issue has bubbled under for some time and emerged again earlier this year when Home Office junior minister Gerry Sutcliffe was sent to the US to study how Megan’s Law had been working since it was introduced in 1997.
As minister for prisons and probation at the Home Office in 2003, Beverley Hughes rejected the idea of introducing the law in this country. She now says she is willing to look at the research but she’s still keen to stress that existing arrangements for monitoring known sex offenders are highly effective.
“The only benchmark for any change in the current arrangements must be that we can be sure that it would be an enhancement of the ability of the agencies to keep children safe from predatory paedophiles. And that’s what Gerry Sutcliffe has gone to America primarily to find out,” she says
Currently, every area has its own multi-agency protection panel (MAPA), a combination of police, probation, education, social services and other agencies which meets when a registered sex offender moves to the neighbourhood. Schools are informed if an offender is going to be located in a hostel in the area.
Hughes says: “My evidence from ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers] is that these arrangements are working. I’m certainly prepared to look at the evidence because I understand, as a parent, the absolute urge to know if there’s a particular cause of concern in the area.
“But we have to weigh up the evidence of whether giving that information out more widely means better protection for children or whether it actually weakens protection because [offenders] are not prepared to cooperate with monitoring.”
Information gathered by Sutcliffe in the US will be studied but there will be no quick decision, says Hughes.
“I’m quite sure that if there’s any proposal to change, we would have to have a very wide consultation with interested parties, with schools, with parents with the police, to evaluate the evidence and make a judgment. That’s what I would be arguing for at the very least - that we have a wide consultation and the widest consideration of all the evidence.”
There is a further, potentially more insidious, threat to children’s safety these days emanating from the Internet.
from the Internet. Police who track Internet paedophiles report that children using online chatrooms are routinely ‘approached’ after 20 minutes by an ‘online predator’ purporting to be another child.
In the week of our interview, the case emerged of a Canadian man charged with multiple counts of child pornography who, after befriending them online, allegedly coerced more than 100 young girls - some as young as nine - to pose nude on the Internet via webcam. Several of his victims lived in Kent.
Some headteachers are concerned about how online safety fits into the Every Child Matters agenda, given the difficulty of policing children’s Internet use, whether at school or elsewhere.
Hughes says the Government’s interagency Internet group has done much work on safety, for example, to ensure chatrooms are properly moderated but thinks more could be done in terms of teaching children what constitutes safe behaviour online.
“I do think that in the context of PSHE teaching, we perhaps need to make sure that teachers are alive to the issues around helping children to stay safe [on the Internet]. I’ve just seen some guidance which includes a focus on sexual exploitation within the PSHE curriculum. It was really talking about sexual exploitation in a very narrow sense - in terms of potential for exploitation through prostitution - but I’ve asked for that to be developed a bit further to take account of some of these issues of the Internet.”