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Backbeat

Do children's services serve education

The government’s decision to merge local authority education and children’s social services departments was well intentioned but schools are losing out, argues Demitri Coryton.

There is something particularly horrific about adults murdering children, especially when the adult is the child’s parent or carer. On the few occasions when this happens, there is often massive media coverage and the cry goes up: “This must never happen again”. Inevitably, it does.

After the death of Victoria Climbié and the first Laming report that followed it, the usual hue and cry did result in change. The Children Act 2004 led to the merger of local authority education and children’s social services into children’s services departments led by a statutory director of children’s services. This has had a major impact on schools and education as well as social services, though increasingly it is being asked whether this was so beneficial for schools.

The core of the Laming report was the need for the services involving children to work better together. The aim was to move away from the silo mentality common in services that are very different

in their ethos and methods of working, to say nothing of pay. Laming was right and his concept of Every Child Matters was enthusiastically welcomed in schools. Teachers knew who the problem children and families were and welcomed the opportunity to work with colleagues in other areas of the public service to help children more effectively.

Yet what we have ended up with is a top-down approach creating a major bureaucratic upheaval, which some local authorities have managed successfully while others continue to struggle. Birmingham, Cornwall, Doncaster, Essex, Haringey, Surrey and Warrington are just a few of those that ran into serious trouble. Note these are not small inner-city authorities whose high levels of poverty and diseconomies of scale might lead you to think they would be the ones most in difficulties. It is a broad cross-section, including big counties like Essex and Surrey.

As Ofsted’s development director for social care, John Goldup, said recently, where authorities were struggling they tended to do both education and child protection badly. The added management challenge of running a large department doing quite different things simply made it more difficult to do either side of children’s services well.

By concentrating on child protection some senior council officers have been distracted from what is happening in education. This is not surprising. For a director of children’s services (DCS), if one child dies on their watch their career could be over. The example of Sharon Shoesmith, DCS in Haringey at the time of the Baby Peter case, praised one minute and fired the next, haunts many DCSs.

On the other hand, if schools are not getting the best support it will be a long while before a DCS is forced out. And schools aren’t getting the best support. A poll last year found two thirds of secondary school leaders thought the quality of support from their local authority had got worse since the creation of children’s services departments. Only 4 per cent thought it had improved.

Nobody questions the need for all those who work with children to work better together, although this includes a range of services, such as health and police – far wider than those within local authority children’s services. This does not require them to work together in one organisational department.

Education has lost out in government changes at national and local level, submerged within children and family departments whose policy needs are different. Whoever forms the next government should think again about these changes. What happens to the small number of children at risk matters, but so does the education of the vast majority who will never be at risk – and that would be best served by dedicated education departments at national and local level.

Demitri Coryton is editor of Education Journal. www.educationpublishing.com