News Views – February 2007

A mixture of news items, future events, sales pitches, comments and whimsies, including consultation, sex offenders, ticks on holiday, ADSS & ADCS, policing schools, managing education, measles, music, autism and raising the school leaving age

Making Consultation Real

In his column this month Chris Durkin raises a very important question. How does one empower people who are powerless? How do those in power really listen to them? How do we avoid patronising tokenism?

He quotes Jo Rowlands, “True power cannot be bestowed: it comes from within. Any notion of empowerment being ‘given’ by one group to another hides an attempt to keep control”. Certainly, tokenism does exist, and those in power may well wince when they are required to consult. The DfES is no doubt having to cope with a mound of responses to Care Matters, and one can imagine the civil servants groaning at having to manage the piles of evidence and be seen to have taken account of it, when they would probably like to just tell everyone what to do.

But while Jo is right that real power has to be experienced and come from within, we think she is wrong in saying that power cannot be bestowed. It is quite possible, for example, whether one is a politician or a senior manager, to genuinely delegate power if s/he truly believes in subsidiarity, wishing to place decision-making as near to the people affected as possible. People in power can forego their power because they believe others should have it. This need not be phoney or tokenistic.

In therapeutic care giving power to the group has been a standard aspect of practice, encouraging its members to respect each others’ views, ensuring that each person is seen as being of value, teaching social values and fostering a sense of group unity and shared values.

Indeed, the creation of groups is important in giving power to others. While one person may be too timid to speak on his/her own, it is different if that person is accompanied or represents a body of similar people. That is the importance of the National Voice for children in care, and why it is consulted.

Historically, people have fought to shift power imbalances, whether through trades unions, putsches or political parties. Their power certainly came from within. But in the field of social care, service users may well be underconfident and not have the self advocacy skills needed to make their point. It is quite appropriate then for those with the power to set up organisations or consultation processes to enable them to have a voice.

What these organisations or systems come up with may prove to be time-consuming or irritating to those in power. Tough. That’s part of the game. Consultation has to be taken seriously. The outcome may or may not be what the consultees want, but the process has to be genuine, and it can be. It is an unwarranted slur to say that handing over power is just a way of keeping control.

Sex Offenders

Annette Brooke MP, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Children, Young People and Families, recently questioned Home Secretary John Reid following revelations that the Government has failed to register hundreds of British offenders convicted abroad, and challenged him to reassure the British public that no convicted child sex offenders are working with children. “It is clearly possible that convicted child sex offendersare working with children, and I am concerned that so little is known about the situation because of Home Office blunders,” she said. “Now we hear that Ministers knew about this failure three months ago. I really must question whether this Government is committed to protecting children and vulnerable people.”
We can indulge in a little schadenfreude when we hear major politicians and senior civil servants getting their come-uppance after they have been so keen to set targets for everyone else, threatening those who fall short with dire penalties. Realistically, though, what can we expect? Systems are fallible, run by humans. There are plenty of sex offenders who are undetected, not even in the system. Of course we need to improve systems, especially when they have weaknesses, but there is a danger that people expect more than can reasonably be delivered.

Tick Alert

Elsewhere in this issue we are carrying an article sent to us by Tick Alert. With the danger of tick-borne encephalitis, it hardly sounds worth going on holiday. Apparently TBE endemic countries are: Albania, Austria, Belarus, Bosnia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. But if that list makes you feel like staying in Britain, the risk areas for ticks carrying Lyme disease in the UK include Exmoor, the New Forest, the South Downs, parts of Wiltshire and Berkshire, Thetford Forest, the Lake District, the Yorkshire moors and the Scottish Highlands.
Is nowhere safe?

The ticks can give you Lyme disease if they are carrying the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, while TBE is caused by ticks carrying flaviviruses. Symptoms of Lyme disease include acute, arthritis-like symptoms, lethargy and loss of appetite. If left untreated it can lead to severe lameness, neurological problems and even death.

So, make sure you read the article before you go on holiday.

Vale ADSS, Ave ADCS

For the last twenty-six years, the Association of Directors of Social Services has played an important and very influential role in the field of the personal social services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Although their membership was small, limited to Directors and former Directors, they have researched matters, developed sound policies, argued their case well with Government and had a real impact. It is their spokespeople (usually the Presidents) who have appeared on television, and it is former Directors who have gone on to the House of Lords (Warner, Laming, Howarth), headed large voluntary bodies (Mead) or quangos (Platt, Behan).

The move to develop children’s services in place of Social Services Departments has had the spin-off of ending the ADSS. The Directors in charge of services for adults and older people now form ADASS – the title as before but with Adults inserted – and are continuing as a sort of rump of ADSS.

On the children’s front, a new organisation has been set up out of the children’s part of ADSS and Confed, a professional bodies for senior managers in education services. They will form the ADCS, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, and their remit will cover education, social work and social care services for children and young people.

In addition to the new focus, there is a further difference. Whereas ADSS was for Directors only, ADCS will include other senior managers as well as Directors. This will have the advantages enjoyed by ADSS’s counterpart in Scotland, the Association of Directors of Social Work, that there will be a larger membership, more income and more people to call on to undertake the Association’s work. The possible drawbacks are that formulating Association policy may be more diffuse, and the Association may not have such a sharp bite. Let’s hope ADCS gets stuck in quickly, while it has the chance to influence the new structures and processes. After all, we hear too little from other groups of professionals in this field.

Did You See? …..

Police and Drugs

…..the piece in the Daily Mail (17 January 2007, p. 33) in which Norfolk County Council ordered its teachers to exclude police sniffer dogs from schools because it was not clear what action might be taken if they were successful in nosing out some illicit substance?

The most important issue here is not who can order what, since the story suggests some sort of power struggle by correspondence between the Police and the County Council (which should have been sorted out behind the scenes), but how we can best encourage children to internalise the behaviours and attitudes which will help them best in life, which is a process called education.

They need a debate as to the best way to encourage children adopt a sensible attitude to drugs. Spelling out a zero tolerance approach could help, but it could also simply antagonise the children being sniffed by the dogs. Some schools have police permanently on the premises, and since 15-25 is a high-risk period for offending, this targeting might lead to positive relationships and greater understanding of order and law by children, if it is done properly.

Managing Education

….. the Price Waterhouse report which advocates the introduction of people with business experience to run schools? Clearly, a head teacher needs to manage many aspects of school life – budgets, appointing staff, community links etc. as well as the academic side – but something has gone wrong if education has to be treated primarily as a business.

In the old days, heads (and managers in other services) had a budget to work to, but financial systems were not so complex that the business side had to dominate. Teaching is a school’s primary function, and teaching should come first. The person in charge should know what teaching is about, and if running the budget requires a high degree of specialism, there needs to be a finance officer accountable to the head, or the system for funding schools needs to be simplified.

The same goes for other services. The number of Government funding streams is now so complex that a major saving could be made by simplifying them and chopping out all the time wasted on bidding for funds and on Government administration. Maybe we need to pay some consultants to tell the Government.

Measles

….. the report in the Lancetabout Measles deaths? They dropped by 60 per cent from 873,000 to 354,000 between 1999 and 2005 worldwide, according to figures reported from the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. This is really good news. In the UK, people do not think of measles as being serious, but the disease is a killer. Parents who forget to arrange to have their children protected should remember its impact worldwide.

Music

….. that Howard Goodall, the composer, is to tour schools as part of a £10 million campaign to encourage singing? We have no doubt that this is a good thing in all sorts of ways – physiologically in helping develop breathing, as a group activity, as a way of creating, of achieving, of expressing feelings, and of gaining self-confidence.

But have you ever thought what a strange activity singing is? What role does singing represent in evolutionary terms? What function does it perform? What does it communicate? What do people suffer if they do not sing? Perhaps someone’s already done a PhD on this, but if so we’ve not seen it.

Autism

….. the article about the cartoon DVD being sent to families with autistic children (Mail, 10 January 2007, p. 33)? Apparently, autistic children have difficulty reading people’s faces and determining their emotions, and since they find them confusing, they avoid looking at people. The DVD has fifteen five-minutes episodes, each focusing on different emotions, which are expressed on the front of trains or trucks. The trial was successful, and the idea sounds brilliant. Hats off to the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University  – and to Stephen Fry, who did the narration.

School Leaving Age

….. that Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Education, is thinking of raising the school leaving age to 18 by 2013? It was last raised (to 16) in 1972. (If it keeps going up like this, presumably, people will stay at school all their lives by 2200, even if the number of centenarians rises.) Alan Johnson wants young people to be in college, or undertaking apprenticeships, or in training, and will be bringing out a Green Paper in the Spring.

Before the last change there was a big campaign for ROSLA (the raising of the school leaving age). We think that there should be a LOSLA campaign. While we are happy that young people should have all the opportunities which the Secretary of State outlines, we think that there is a percentage of young people who are uninterested or disaffected, and insisting on their participation in schooling will be unproductive – or indeed counterproductive – for them and result in a wearisome  battle for the teachers. Better to let these young people work for a while and learn what skills they need, so that they can see the point of taking up the educational opportunities.

From the Case Files

She looks very fit and quite fat in the face – I do hope she is not pregnant.
A modern equivalent of the birth of the goddess Athene, who sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus?

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