Opinion

Editorial: It's all consultations, pilots and pathfinders

1 min read Editorial
"Some practitioners are saying it will change again next year so let's not worry about it too much," Alison Archibald, the early years training manager at the London Borough of Richmond, told an early years conference last week (see p1).

Her sentiments are far from unusual. Every week it seems that more shiny new initiatives, consultations and pilots rain down on the sector and the children, young people and families it works with.

It's an almost religious obsession with the new. Youth services consult and consult. Children's services pilot, trailblaze and pathfind. Inspectors continually tweak and reshape assessments. And all the time central government pumps out announcements, paperwork and strategies as if it had a case of policy diarrhoea.

Of course there are huge gaps in the support we currently offer our children and young people. We only need look at Unicef's now legendary 2007 report, which branded the UK the worst place to grow up in the Western world, to know that. But are these endless pilots, strategies and consultations really helping? The work that would really make the difference and stop the UK from being the sick parent of the developed world is too often lost under this onslaught of the new.

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