Do they still want us to ‘work together'?

The consultation on the slimmed-down version of the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance is causing quite a furore across the sector. Directors of children’s services, health professionals and voluntary sector organisations are up in arms about the implications of the new guidance. But I have a feeling that much of the sector’s anger is missing the point, and unlikely to cause the government to rethink.

The idea of simplifying the safeguarding guidance seems such a good idea in principle. Any of us who saw the way in which the guidance grew over the past two decades has sympathy with the need to reduce the volume. Indeed, we all pleaded for it to be cut. Professor Eileen Munro was pushing at an open door when she argued that social workers and other professionals feel ground down by excessive bureaucracy and need to be trusted more to make their own local decisions.

But reducing the number of pages in principle is always easier than doing it in practice. One person’s “bureaucracy” is ?another person’s “necessary safeguards”.

I recall an exercise started by the last government, about 10 years ago, to “cut down on red tape”. Some fresh-faced very clever young people emerged from Number 10 one day to investigate special educational needs. They were aghast at the bureaucracy involved in assessing individual children, drawing up a statement of special needs and following anti-discrimination legislation that entitled disabled children to be treated equally in schools. Those protections for children and families, hard fought over many years, were all seen as unnecessary bureaucracy, and some shocking proposals started circulating to deregulate special needs provision. Fortunately, ministers at the time understood the risks of following the daft ideas of some ideological young things, and those ideas were consigned to the dustbin.

This time around, the drive to cut red tape is combined with the overwhelming imperative to save money, and the new ideologues have greater influence. Those ministers who do understand the importance of special protection for the most vulnerable have been overruled by more senior figures committed to simplification and fragmentation. Experts on the advisory group brought together to inform the drafting of this “working together” guidance were disappointed to find that their many suggestions were almost universally ignored in the draft now being consulted upon.

The concerns fall into three main headings. First, the guidance is less clear about just where responsibilities will lie for safeguarding in the brave new world. The health structures do not yet seem to place responsibility for discharging safeguarding duties anywhere. The new arrangements for academies and free schools, increasingly deregulated and less engaged with local authorities, suggest much looser ways in the future of following up safeguarding concerns within schools. Ofsted unannounced inspections of early support measures do not give them access to academies or free schools. As social enterprises, private providers and voluntary agencies are expected to play a greater future role in service delivery, their apparent absence from the guidance is worrying.

Second, the guidance places much less emphasis on information sharing. One of the first acts of the coalition government was to cancel ContactPoint; although every child abuse inquiry of recent years has highlighted failures to share information, the likelihood is that these challenges will continue into the future.

Third, and most important, the guidance no longer seems to present an overall narrative of a whole system working together to safeguard children. Instead, the narrative is of separate agencies, separate professions, encouraged (and indeed required at times) to work together, but with their individuality and their potential for competition emphasised.

It is this last concern that is at the heart of the problem. Criticising this government for wanting to deregulate children’s services, and for being antsy about integrated services, is like criticising a dog for barking. This draft guidance is not about cutting the number of pages from 200 to 60. It is about dismantling a system of shared responsibility for children’s safety and replacing it with an ill-defined free-for-all.

Sir Paul Ennals is the former chair of the Children’s Workforce Development Council