Kevin's speech to the Children's Workforce Network Conference
| There’s a wonderful story about Einstein, who reportedly didn’t speak until he was 5 years old. His mother was shocked one evening as they sat at the dinner table and, for the first time ever, he spoke up, and asked her to pass the salt. She expressed surprise that he’d never spoken before, and asked why not. His reply was ‘because, up until now, everything has been most satisfactory.’ The Ofsted Tellus2 Survey reports that the majority of young people are conscientious, community-minded, and satisfied with their lives. To the majority of children, the workforce is a more universal – and limited – world of teachers, a family doctor, and perhaps youth workers and others running activities in their communities. Like a good parent, the majority of children they don’t need – or necessarily want – professionals looking over their shoulders all the time. But they need to know that services are there for them when they need them: There when they’re ill. There to teach. There when young people, for whatever reason, can’t talk to their parents. The state is not here to replace parents (except in the most extreme circumstances), or to interfere in family life. It is there to provide the support, guidance and professional expertise that children and families need. For other children – those who are more vulnerable or who have additional needs – the state will have a much more visible role to play in their lives, and will need to be ready to act quickly both to stop problems before they start and to be able to intervene as early as possible. It is a difficult balance to strike. But it is important to get it right if we are going to provide the services that families really need. A high quality, responsive children’s workforce is essential to that aim. If we are to help children and young people discover and make the most of their talents, we need to look at all aspects of a child’s life – their attainment in school but also their health, safety, and wellbeing: We need services that are unobtrusive, that are accessible to children and families. We need more personalised services that put the child and their individual needs at the heart of planning and response. We need services that are joined up and we need services that are communicating effectively with one another to form a complete picture of a child’s circumstances and to ensure that problems are not missed. The whole Every Child Matters programme was the start of that transformation, and so far we are able to report a certain degree of success. The Children’s Workforce Network has been hugely instrumental in the progress we’ve made over the last few years. So I’m pleased to have this opportunity today to thank you, and all our partners, for the work you’ve done, and for everything you’re working to achieve for children and their families in the future. Certainly, Every Child Matters has helped us to establish the infrastructure for the better integrated working that we need that focuses on the child. We have over 2,200 children’s centres providing a whole range of services to parents, in a place that is local and easily accessible, and all under one roof. We have roughly half of children’s centres now sited in school grounds, so that when parents go up to school to talk to their child’s teacher, they can also talk to someone from health services, whether that be a nurse or doctor, a careers advisor, or a childminder. But of course, although the physical location of services is important, they’re only as good as the people running them. That’s why we need to set our sights on trying to build a world class children’s workforce, and to continue to focus on the individuals we serve, and continue to raise standards. The Children’s Plan is the next phase of Every Child Matters. It is not ‘out with the old in with the new’, but very much the next stage of the journey we began in 2004, building on everything we’ve achieved so far, and in creating the new Department for Children, Schools and Families. It maps out the route to improving children’s services over the next 10 years. And it’s really important that we have set our sights on the long term. Ministers come and go – with an all too alarming regularity from my own personal view, but it is important that the stability and security is there for everyone in this room, and for children and families across the country. The Children’s Plan sets out our vision for the 21st century school, in which schools are about much more than classrooms and textbooks, but real live learning communities that are sustainable, supported by links with local businesses, with first class facilities both for learning and other services. Not only will schools be a focal point of the community, but they have to be a place where children can discover their talents, pursue their interests, and grow into healthy young adults with every chance to achieve their full potential in later life. That means everybody working together to support young people and their families, and when we talk about the children’s workforce, I want to make it clear that I am talking about everybody who works with children and their families, whether that’s doctors, social workers, childminders, teachers, and of course government ministers. We are all in my view ‘team ECM’, and that’s a phrase I use in meetings with the children’s workforce. When it works well it makes an enormous difference to people’s lives and their communities. We’re all in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, now we just need to row at the same rhythm, trying to create a real team around the child. I recently visited Sutton Temple Primary School in Southend which had a children’s centre on site and even a small police station. The school facilities were used by other community groups after hours, and they had adopted the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning programme, which was really having an impact on promoting better relationships between staff and pupils. They had a real awareness of others, and an open and tolerant environment. The ethos of the school was one of collaboration, openness and respect. It was a community of learning where the job of nurturing children was not just done by the school staff, but by other children’s services too. And rather than being more work, the traditional school staff has found that it’s actually lightened their load by bringing more professionals on board, and by giving pupils themselves the skills and confidence to work out their problems and work well together, before staff have to get involved. That’s the culture change that I believe is crucial to improving children’s services in the future. It’s not an easy task by any means. Over the coming months we will be publishing the Children’s Workforce Action Plan, which will outline where we go from here to achieve the vision we have outlined in the Children’s Plan. But I think that, having published the Children’s Plan, and half way through the Integrated Qualifications Framework process, this is a timely opportunity to reflect on where we are and where we want to be. There are three things that I want to see from the children’s workforce over the coming years: in terms of rapid response, working together, and raising quality. Firstly, team ECM, in a way needs to be a rapid response unit. We need to prevent problems before they get too big and reach children and families quickly when problems emerge, to stop them spiralling into more serious issues. We have renewed our commitment in the Children’s Plan to identify early those children who need additional support. Children’s Trusts are vital to that work, and we will certainly be looking at how we can better support Children’s Trusts in their early intervention role. Secondly, we do need team ECM to talk to each other, share information. That works in two ways: obviously, they need to share information about children to make sure that services are joined up. And staff should also share their skills and talents and experience with one another, so we can spread good practice across traditional boundaries for everyone to benefit. Government can help with that, but the people on the frontline are the ones doing the job, working with children, talking to families. You know where the challenges are and find ways to overcome them. We are all a valuable resource to each other. And thirdly, team ECM must be a world class workforce. We need to raise the quality and status of the profession. Working with children to improve their lives and help them make the most of their talents and see them grow up into healthy and successful adults is clearly one of the most important things we can be involved in. Reflecting on my time as a teacher, I think I worked too much in my professional silo – where the classroom was my kingdom and what happened outside it was perhaps, a little bit, someone else’s business. I think people recognise that professionals in the children’s services care deeply about what they do and that they’re committed to this agenda. But I also know that it can be a very difficult profession because it’s so absorbing, and we all want to do the very best that we can for the children we work with. So we need to make sure that the children’s workforce is not just an attractive profession to join, but also offers quality training, the opportunities and chance for progression, to keep people involved. We need to challenge some of the perceptions about certain jobs. We need to make sure that the children’s workforce as a whole is on an equal standing with other professions, and that roles within the children’s workforce are seen as being of equal status. No one role, whatever it is, whether it’s a social worker, teacher, youth worker or playworker – should be seen as being of more importance than any other. We need to make sure that there’s more transferability of job skills, so that professionals can move around different jobs within the children’s workforce without having to constantly redo the same basic training. And we need to ensure that people get the skills they need to be able to function in newly emerging roles too.That is why the Integrated Qualifications Framework, which this event has been designed to discuss, is so important, because it will offer employees a comprehensive set of skills that will enable them to progress in their careers, to move jobs within the children’s workforce with greater ease and, most importantly, to do their jobs day to day to the best of their ability. At the halfway point, this is a timely opportunity to reflect on where we are. And, having completed the consultation, we’re making excellent progress. Now comes the hard bit – testing the qualifications. Like Every Child Matters, it’s only part of the way through. And again, it is not about starting over again, we’re not reinventing the wheel now we’ve published the Children’s Plan, but about building on the successes of the consultation and past progress, to develop the qualifications that will really benefit those working with children. So I want to ask you to keep your nerve and stick with it, because I firmly believe it will make a difference. We have come quite a long way, and as we said in the Children’s Plan, it is the commitment and dedication of those, such as yourselves here today, who work with children that has been at the heart of that improvement.
We now need to build on the excellent work that already exists. By working together, responding to problems quickly, and with the right skills and high standards of quality, our children’s workforce can be world class, and this country can become the best place in the world for children to grow up.
Thank you. |
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