‘... is about how local government bodies ensure that they are doing the right things, in the right way, for the right people in a timely inclusive, open, honest and accountable manner. It comprises the systems and processes for the direction and control of local authorities through which they account to, engage with and lead their communities.' (CIPFA, 2007).
One of the major challenges of Every Child Matters for the local public services was to have effective governance arrangements in place, and also for them to have agreed and implemented actions for the shared governance of their collective work to improve outcomes for children and young people in their area. Effective arrangements for the joint governance of local services were intended to provide a robust framework for accountability.
Another key change was that Every Child Matters placed specific responsibilities on Directors of Children’s Services and Lead Members. Some of these developments included working with Chief Officers and senior manager in Council services, and organisations in the public, private, voluntary and community sectors to put in place shared governance arrangements. Likewise the report proposed the idea of an integrated strategy. This provides a basis for deciding its priorities, profiling the use of resources (budgets and the skills and time of its people) and shaping its future services. A strategy also provides senior managers with a rationale and structure for engaging managers and practitioners in their organisation to measure their effectiveness. Every Child Matters was radical in challenging chief officers and senior managers of local public services to move from simply developing strategy for their own organisation, to working with a range of partners to develop an effective joint strategy for their collective work to improve outcomes for children, young people and families.
It was argued that if local Council services, relevant partners and other bodies were to improve outcomes for children and young people in their area, there needed to be a fundamental re-evaluation of existing service delivery processes and procedures. This could lead to changes in order that the joint delivery of services was supported by processes and procedures that are effective for local children and young people. Integrated services for children and young people were to be based on the local implementation of centrally-driven processes that are common to all disciplines in the children’s workforce. [The Department for Children, Schools and Families created the term ‘children’s workforce’ to describe anyone (whether employed or volunteers) whose work brings them into contact with children, young people and their families. The DCSF included workers and managers whose service user is an adult in a household where there are children and young people or someone working with a child in the household have concerns about the well-being and/or safety of a child/young person in the household.
Amongst others, these key processes included:
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) - a structured process for collecting information about the development, circumstances and/or behaviours of a child/young person; and, a form for recording this information – which became standard across all public services in every local area throughout England.
Improving the sharing of information between practitioners, including: the creation of Contact Point; the creation of national standards for information sharing amongst local public services; and, developing local protocols to support the sharing of information about the development, circumstances and/or behaviours of children and young people.
A theme running strongly through Every Child Matters is that improving outcomes for children and young people could only be achieved by transforming the ways in which managers and practitioners in the different public services are organised. With integrated working arrangements arguments can be made that they should start from the needs of children and young people - not the structures of local public services, their organisations, departments and teams. Public services should work with each other to provide services in ways, at times and in places that meet the needs of local children, young people and their families. Integrated, accessible and personalised services should ensure effective intervention at an early stage with children and young people – rather than at a stage when their circumstances have reached a crisis point necessitating statutory intervention.
Locating managers and practitioners from different disciplines and services in a multi-agency team (for example, Youth Offending Team, Early Intervention Support Teams), on a particular site (for example, a children's centre, community health centre or extended school) or both was intended to break down any obstacles and barriers that may exist between professional disciplines, services and teams.
Central to transforming the ways managers and practitioners work with children, young people and their families was enabling every member of the children’s workforce to gain a common core of knowledge about children and young people’s development and needs. The Children Act 2004 and Every Child Matters established every child and young person’s entitlement to make progress against the five outcomes. To emphasise the importance of these outcomes as a focus for local action, the Department for Children, Schools and Families created the Outcomes Framework - against which local public services are expected to agree their priorities, plan changes to their services, and measure their collective progress towards improving outcomes for local children and young people.
Every Child Matters was, in many respects, a positive social policy programme that was the catalyst for a radical reform of the ways services were provided for children, young people and families in England. At one level it could be thought ridiculous to consider criticising Every Child Matters however at another level, it’s for this reason that a critique of political, social and moral relations immanent in Every Child Matters needs to be developed. One such concern was the issue around the rights of the child as expressed by Middlewood and Parker (2009).
‘ We may even be lulled into believing that this agenda (Every Child Matters), alongside the , places children's rights at the heart of children's policies. But it doesn't. In essence Every Child Matters is a programme for intervention in children's lives that does not have children's rights at its heart’.
Norman’s argument expresses the concern that intervention is the main purpose of Every Child Matters, Norman calls for the Government to adopt The UN convention for the Rights of the child. Although the UK signed up to the Convention, action has been restricted, Norman writes ‘but , effectively a public statement that its commitment to the principles were limited in certain areas’ Understanding the failure for the approach to adopt the UN convention for the Rights of the Child is a major flaw with the strategy and shows its limitation.
One other immediate, practical concern is that the Children Act 2004 and Every Child Matters relates only to the 150 local authority areas in England – no parallel legislation has been put before the Northern Ireland or Welsh Assemblies, nor the Scottish Parliament. This raises various issues, including the potentially damaging effect to young people from the other UK countries creating a democratic deficit. Another sub concern is that to English young people and families who move between England and other areas of the United Kingdom who could experience different laws, different entitlements and differing service delivery arrangements. Whilst this absence of parallel legislation could be taken to indicate that the issues of intervention and governance still exist in Northern Ireland the position of Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland was created in 2003 (and with greater authority and more extensive powers) some years before the post of Children’s Commissioner for England was established by the Children Act 2004.
Another concern which is central to the Every Child Matters way of thinking is a re-enforcement and continuation of a focus on visible ‘symptoms’ in the lives of children, young people and families. This shallow focus precludes any critical dialogue about the structural inequalities in England from which such ‘symptoms’ can emerge. In taking a shallow focus on such ‘symptoms’, attention at both national and local level is diverted away from deep and widening health inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged communities in England (Department of Health, 2008). Yet, as Wilkinson (1996) argues, ‘it is from deeper inequalities in socially divided societies that negative physical and psycho-social health emerges for children and young people and also for their parents/carers’. Understanding the shallow nature questions need to be answered around the ‘invisibility’ factors within all aspects of children and young people’s lives within the five outcomes. For example, the whole question of spirituality is not mentioned anywhere in the outcomes framework.
A further set of questions surround the extent to which the processes and procedures associated with the Every Child Matters agenda seriously invade and undermine the rights of children to privacy set out under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The concern with 'joined-up services', monitoring the behaviours of children and young people, and to the sharing of information has led to both to the construction of databases that often unknown to them, contain intimate material on a scale that has been deemed disproportionate by the Information Commissioner; and to the ability of a wide range of people to access that information. In addition, it has drawn a range of practitioners (including many informal educators) into the formal surveillance process. Children and young people are being denied spaces to explore feelings, experiences and worries away from the gaze of the state. A visit by a young person to a third sector advice agency to talk about sensitive behaviours can trigger police intervention. The loss of this space is significant and children could become concerned about invasions of their privacy, and that they would be reluctant to use 'sensitive services' – and may turn away from ‘official’ agencies and rely more heavily on other sources of help and information (Hilton & Mills, 2006).
In Conclusion, Every Child Matters is, in some ways, a refreshing and radical reform in the ways public services are expected to work with children, young people and families. However on the other hand it also to some extent offers a sweeping vision about children and young people’s entitlements whilst delegating full accountability for the delivery of the services that enable children, young people and their parents/carers to local public services. What cannot be rejected however is the importance of the document to get agencies who work with groups of young people to develop more effective ways of working together and creating an arena of more accountability. In the construction of Every Child Matters as a favoured way of thinking, politicians and civil servants have aggressively projected individual collective and national anxieties and insecurities onto diverse, dynamic, complex and uncertain fields of practice where managers and practitioners work closely with many of England’s most vulnerable, troubled and troublesome children, young people and families.
Bibliography
The full text of the Children Act 2004 at
References to texts/materials
CIPFA (2007) Delivering Good Governance in Local Government, London, Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy.
Department of Health (2002) Safeguarding Children. A Joint Chief Inspectors' Report on arrangements to safeguard children. London: Department of Health. [. Accessed May 26th 2009].
Department of Health (2008) , Tackling health inequalities: 2007 Status Report on the Programme for Action, London, Department of Health.
Hilton, Z and Mills, C. (2006) ‘I think it’s about trust’: The views of young people on information sharing. London: NSPCC. [. Accessed May 23th 2009].
Lownsbrough H and O’Leary D, 2005, The Leadership Imperative: Reforming children’s services from the ground up, Sage Publications, London,
Middlewood, D and Parker, R (2009), Leading and Managing Extended Schools: Ensuring Every Child Matter, Sage Publications, London,
Wilkinson R.G. (1996) Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality, Routledge, London.