Don’t mock the middle ground

Many things irritate people working in the front line of children’s services. Some are organisational chores, others are a part of doing a difficult job. But in the run-up to the General Election, two other sources of frustration have arisen – misunderstanding of the task by political campaigners seeking to impress and denigration of the whole service by outsiders who have little else to say.

The first concerns those who either oversimplify or overcomplicate what is needed to care for separated children. The simplifiers proffer easy answers to complex problems, so for law and order it’s more police on the streets, for the NHS it’s bring back matrons. These have a superficial attraction: after all, we were all brought up in families so we can all parent. Why bother with training carers? My aunt went even further and opined that doctors couldn’t cure an illness unless they had had it themselves. Similarly, I recall the discussion of an early survey by a local authority which found that the number of children in its care was the same as for the adults employed, leading one pragmatist to suggest the obvious, ‘Why don’t we each take a child home?’

The complicators adopt the opposite approach and make what seems a fundamentally straightforward task unbelievably complicated. They either propound UN-type mission statements about what children should get or confound what has to be done with output-dominated procedures. The former produces proclamations with which few would disagree but have little idea how to implement, while the latter makes it almost impossible to reach a decision. Indeed, the articles in this edition identify umpteen factors that should be considered when selecting and supporting a child’s placement. So, although principles and practice directives are important for setting ideals, how reasonable is it to expect anyone to cope with them, let alone overcome the practicalities of satisfying them all?

Missing from all these debates is any sensible discussion about the middle ground. Yes, service responsibilities can be reduced to basics and, yes, we can aspire to worthy ambitions and, yes, we can get wound up about issues like identity and rights at the expense of the child’s need for commitment and security. What matters, however, is that all these perspectives are ultimately dysfunctional. Child care professionals have too easily allowed themselves to be battered in this game of political ping-pong and still lack a robust professional organisation capable of explaining the futility of oversimplification and the suffocating effects of excessive bureaucracy.

The second frustration arises from external assessments. These can be useful if they are sensitive to realities, recommend reforms, harness resources and expose misconduct, incompetence or fraud. It is therefore encouraging when officials from a completely different background acknowledge the difficulty of the work and the risks of failure. Last November, the National Audit Office scrutinised services for children in care in its role as guardian of the public purse and reached the worrying conclusion that:

The numbers of children getting the right placement first time has not improved since 2009. Over the past five years, where data are available, improvements in outcomes have been, at best, mixed. Their learning and development needs, if not successfully tackled, can result in significant and avoidable detriment to themselves, and increased costs and risks to local authorities and the taxpayer in the long term. ¹

So far so good, at least these people understand and are sympathetic; but it’s what happens next that matters. What irritates welfare workers is when well-paid outsiders appear, usually from London, make their criticisms and then buzz off, knowing they will probably never have to meet or even think about a deprived child again. It is as if nothing need follow once the appraisal is over. ‘If you’re so bloomin’ good, come and do the job yourself’ is the understandable response from those left to carry the can. But this defensive reaction does little to improve things for anyone, least of all the children for whom the service is intended. ²

While there is nothing new in bewailing the deficiencies of the care system, its failings tend to diminish when viewed in the context of the social and economic difficulties currently facing young people from poor backgrounds in the UK. The prospects for grossly disadvantaged youngsters have always been grim but I sense they are not getting better. The conditions I witnessed as a child in Black Country factories were shocking but there were compensations – cohesive communities, local extended families, shared child care, older relatives finding jobs for school leavers and paternalistic employers who provided an array of cultural, leisure and care facilities. One such firm famous for its caring regime is now part of a multi-national that recently warned its workers to ‘change their behaviour and attitude or leave the job’ ³ followed by an announcement of extensive job cuts. ⁴ I am unsure therefore whether, for the poorest people in society, improvements in wages and working conditions have compensated for what has been lost, particularly for girls.

A long-term view of children’s services paints a more optimistic picture in terms of better matching needs, wishes and services and eliminating abusive practices. ⁵ However, this has been achieved incrementally by considered debate, careful experiment and sophisticated evaluation, led by pioneering individuals and innovating agencies. This middle ground is easy to mock and is pretty dull, but in the end it is what wins once the flashing lights have popped, the bureaucrats taken their pensions and the scrutineers decamped.