A STRONG CARD IN BLAIR'S RESHUFFLE

The children and youth portfolio within the Government appeared to be grinding to a halt following John Denham's resignation over Iraq. Now it has resurfaced in the hands of Margaret Hodge. This is to be welcomed not simply because it severs the link with the Home Office, whose ministers previously carried the responsibility despite the administrative position of the Children and Young People's Unit within the Department for Education and Skills and of the de facto "Ministry for Youth" (according to social policy academic Bob Coles), the Social Exclusion Unit, within the Cabinet Office.

It is also to be welcomed because Margaret Hodge has a strong track record on disengagement and exclusion. Before she joined the Government, she was the chair of the House of Commons Education Committee, which, in 1998, produced its report on Disaffected Children. Despite the awful title, the report contained a powerful analysis of the vulnerability of certain groups of young people and a strong indictment of the failure of services to extend appropriate support. Disaffected Children was an important stalking horse for the Social Exclusion Unit's celebrated Policy Action Team on Young People.

Hodge becomes minister for children (and young people) outside of school, covering the youth service, Connexions, early years, the Sure Start programme, family law, teenage pregnancies, careers and children at risk. With this expanded brief, which takes in responsibilities previously distributed across the Home Office, the Lord Chancellor's Department, and the Department of Health, as well as Education, there is now a sense of coherence in the political administration of children's services. Margaret Hodge will be leading on the green paper on children at risk. She has promised "far reaching reforms" that will engender some panic among professionals. But she has a reputation for gritty determination and a commitment to the improvement of services, despite (still) being tarred with the chaos of Islington, which she oversaw in her former life in local government. We should try to lay those skeletons of a decade ago to rest and celebrate the chance for joined-up activity.

Sitting within education, Hodge will be better able, and want to ensure that her "out of school" responsibilities dovetail effectively with mainstream educational schooling policy. This has to be better than the potpourri of disconnected policy activity directed at children and young people in an ad hoc fashion that prevailed previously across a host of government departments. Let us hope that the focus is firmly on inclusion, learning and development, rather than on knee-jerk punitive reactions.