How, and to what extent, does Every Child Matters represent a radical departure from previous childcare policy in Britain?

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How, and to what extent, does Every Child Matters represent a radical departure from previous childcare policy in Britain?

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Every Child Matters was an English government paper that has grown into a wide-ranging and influential strategy for work with children and young people. Every Child Matters can be seen as a simple, bold, inspirational statement of policy for children and young people. It was created as a government response to a report by Joint Chief Inspectors and the findings of a public inquiry chaired by Lord Laming. As a result, the government published and launched Every Child Matters, a Green Paper, that set out proposals for addressing the concerns raised in both reports. The publication also included a range of circumstances that occurred in families and impacted on the lives of children and young people in England. Wide cross-party support in both Houses of Parliament meant the report quickly became transformed into the Children Act 2004. This report was seen as a radical change, it was ‘one of the most significant changes in local children’s services in living memory’ (Lownsborough and O’Leary, 2005, p.11. To what extent this is the case will be debated throughout this essay.

The original Green Paper proposed that local public services should focus on four key themes in their joint development of services that would enable children and young people in their area to make progress against five key outcomes defined by Section 10 of the Children Act 2004. It named the public services that were required to promote for children and young people in their area. Section 10 requires public services to ensure children and young people, summarized to: Be Healthy, Stay Safe, Enjoy and Achieve, Make a Positive Contribution, and Achieve Economic Well-Being.

The four themes identified in the report were that:

  • Families and carers are the most crucial influence on children's lives. Services should be provided that enable families and carers to effectively support their children.
  • Interventions with children and young people should take place before their circumstances and/or behaviours reach a crisis point necessitating statutory intervention.
  • The underlying problem of weak accountability and poor relationships between agencies and establishments identified by Lord Laming during the Climbié Inquiry needed urgent resolution.
  • All those working with children and young people should feel valued, and receive the training and support they need to carry out their work competently and confidently.

The challenge which Every Child Matters brought for local public services was to develop and implement policy and practice arrangements that would enable all children and young people in their area to make progress against the five outcomes. Improving outcomes for children and young people in each area, it was thought, would depend on effective shared analyses of local circumstances - and would be achieved by delivering integrated services, and introducing work processes that are common across partner agencies within a framework of integrated strategy and governance. CIPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance) provide the following definition of governance it:

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‘... 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 ...

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