The All Party Parliamentary Group for Children has held two meetings in November:
- Tuesday 20 November: The Children’s Workforce: An Overview With speakers Jane Haywood, Chief Executive, Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC), and Hilary Barnard, Consultant, Children’s Workforce Network (CWN)
- Tuesday 26 November: Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Tuesday 20 November: The Children’s Workforce: An Overview
Jane Haywood, Chief Executive, Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC), said that the CWDC had been set up to lead reform in three key ways – as a Sector Skills council to set standards; to lead work at a local, regional and national level to develop the work force in new ways; and as a delivery and funding body for programmes that develop the workforce. The children’s workforce is a very complicated workforce, and developing joint working properly is critical to developing it to meet children’s needs.
Their work has a role to play in addressing issues of child protection; exclusion, poverty and children’s outcomes; youth crime; and school standards and achievement. CWDC is able to look at where the cracks are in services and try to start correcting them. First, they need to get services to work more effectively together, as early intervention can make a huge difference, and initiatives such as Surestart provide them with lessons in what can make a difference.
Every Child Matters means that they are trying to design services where the children and families are at the core. CWDC is developing a Common Induction Standard for the whole children’s workforce, which will include developing a common language of terminology used in the sector. They are also developing an Integrated Qualification Framework to make sure that certain key issues are at the core of qualifications to make sure that everyone is working in a child-centred, multi-agency way.
They are working to develop leadership at all levels of an organisation, so that all staff have to confidence and the abilities they need. They are also listening to children and young people and their families to help shape what they are doing. They want all parts of the workforce to see themselves as having the same ultimate aims and they should all share an understanding of what it is like to be a child and be able to see things from the child’s perspective.
One of the problems services face is that they are still dealing with crises instead of early intervention and prevention. The sector needs to ‘keep the faith’ on Every Child Matters – it is complex and difficult to implement, but Jane Haywood believes that it will deliver for children and young people. Politicians and the sector needs to give the new framework time and the chance to work, and not give up on it after six months and move onto a new initiative.
She said that it is not right that the people who work with the most disadvantaged – foster carers – have the least access to training and support. She believes that the minimum qualification for anyone in the children’s workforce should be about level 3. There need to be qualifications that the workforce can access in bite-sized chunks, as at the moment there is too much emphasis on qualifications in one big chunk (such as degrees). There need to be more flexible qualifications available, as have been developed in youth work.
Hilary Barnard, Consultant, Children’s Workforce Network (CWN), said that CWN was established in 2004 with a clear vision of engaging quite a wide range of organisations that work with the children’s workforce to work together better, and it now has eleven national members. They have six main work strands and areas of partnership for their members. They are all working together to have the Integrated Qualification Framework set up by 2010. They are also gathering good practice examples of where integrated working is working well, especially in terms of cross-sector and agencies working in different ways.
Hilary said that there are two further areas they are working to address: the mobility of the workforce – the challenge of people being able to work across barriers in the children’s workforce; and thought leadership. They are also looking at issues of regulation and registration.
The CWN is committed to engaging with a wider cross-section of the workforce, and are working on developing their contacts and dialogue with their 400 members, which include 46 higher education organisations, and a range of health and justice bodies, and all of this dialogue is being fed into the Strategic Action Plan.
Tuesday 26 November: Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Ed Balls said that the new Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) was the first time that all children and young people’s issues have been brought together in one department. Co-ordinating the variety of issues across several departments had not worked too well or delivered the outcomes for children and young people in the past, and so they have now been brought together.
He said that in his view this change reflects two factors. First, they have raised standards in schools over the last ten years, but the pace of improvement has slowed, because the last 25% of children are harder to reach. It is not just what happens in the classroom that needs addressing; there is a need to focus on the whole child outside of the classroom as well in order to address the barriers they face. The link between parenting and underachievement is still very strong. Focusing on all the factors affecting a child’s life is very important if they are to improve children’s life chances and to improve their attainment.
They were developing and consulting on the Government’s Children’s Plan, and thousands of children and families around the country had already given their comments about the plan, including through policy groups chaired by both politicians and experts, and are themed around age groups – 0 to 7, 8 to 13, and 14 to 19 year olds. They are also looking at how to bridge between age groups, and are trying to think in terms of a whole children’s workforce instead of looking at separate parts.
There are three issues that have started to emerge from their consultations so far:
- the relationship between schools and parents and building links between them;
- the way that children and young people are talked about in a negative way and helping them to navigate through the challenges of childhood today to be able to take advantage of the opportunities out there for them; and
- the 8 to 13 transition period between being a child and a teenager which is problematic but not currently being addressed – there needs to be effective support for all young people.
He emphasised the importance of early intervention and prevention. Too often, the youth justice system just becomes a solution used for the problems of an area, without dealing with the root causes. They want to support schools to do this and it will be an important part of the Children’s Plan. Ed Balls finished by saying how important it is to target support to the families who need it.
Forthcoming meetings of the APPGC are:
- Tuesday 15th January: The Children’s Workforce: Health Tuesday 15th Jan, 5-6pm
- Tuesday 29th January: Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill. Speaker: James Plaskitt MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Department of Work and Pensions. Tuesday 29th Jan, 5-6pm:
Please contact Sally Cole, Clerk to the APPGC on 020 7843 1907 or by email to [email protected]:
- To be added to the email mailing list to receive minutes and invitations to meetings
- For copies of minutes from any of the meetings
- For any further information about the Group