Gove under fire for disregarding youth policy at his department

The future of national youth policy is in a precarious state. During a select committee hearing last month, former children’s minister Tim Loughton warned that his time at the Department for Education was spent struggling to prevent the children and families agenda being obscured by a narrowing focus on education reform.

A week later, Education Secretary Michael Gove confirmed the worst fears of many in the sector, by proclaiming that youth policy is not a priority for central government, but rather a matter for local authorities.

Having lost his ministerial position in the government reshuffle last September, Loughton has been accused of bitterness by Whitehall sources.

Loughton admits he is “completely on the outside” of current DfE decisions and has not spoken to Gove since the reshuffle. “As to why that’s not happened, I’m not the right person to ask,” he says.

But he insists that his unease about the future of services for young people is the sole reason behind his speaking out. “Without a push at the centre, it will lose impetus,” he warns.

Speaking to CYP Now at his Westminster office, Loughton argues that the department started shifting its focus towards education and away from children and families as soon as he took up his post in May 2010. “When we joined the department, there was a separate youth division with a director general,” he says. “This was then merged into a children and young people division.”

He says staff were redeployed to other areas, leading to an erosion of expertise. “Of all the different divisions I was responsible for, we had some really good people in charge of the youth department,” he says. “I lost them all. They were only there for five minutes.”

Loughton adds that special advisers and policy advisers were subject to a “one-way street” in the department, meaning they were moved away from children and families policy towards education.

Academies overspend
He explains that while it was a “struggle” to get funding for children and families work, the academies programme overspent by £1bn in the first two years of the coalition government. It is a point he believes is illustrated by the fact that a single minister was appointed to replace him and his former colleague Sarah Teather.

“It’s a huge job for Edward Timpson to do,” Loughton says. “It suggests that children and families is not as important in the department as it used to be, and the major focus continues to be put on schools, academies and curriculum reform. It has become mutually exclusive.”

Lisa Harker, head of the strategy unit at the NSPCC, argues that the entire ethos of the DfE has changed since the coalition government came to power. In the past, she says officials employed a cosy, “big-tent approach” to consulting professionals across the children and young people’s sector on various policies.

“There is now a much more formal approach to consultation with the sector,” she says. “It isn’t clear what the DfE’s ambition is for children beyond the goal of higher educational attainment. That lack of clear ambition makes it difficult to interpret the policy decisions that have been made.” 

Loughton unveiled his Positive for Youth policy statement – dubbed the government’s “new vision for young people and youth services” – in December 2011.

A one-year-on review was due at the end of 2012, but is yet to materialise.

“My worry is that people will become disillusioned that it was little more than a nice piece of work – a glossy brochure – and hasn’t come to much,” he says.

“It was always my determination that it should be an evolving, living piece of work that people could identify with.”

Loughton has attempted to press the issue. He urged the government to commit to reviewing the policy at last year’s Conservative Party conference. He has also tabled parliamentary questions to highlight his concerns. One of his questions led to the revelation last month that Gove has not visited a single youth project during his time in government.

Youth policy downgraded
Susanne Rauprich, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS), shares the concerns about Positive for Youth.

The government has confirmed that officials are working on the one-year-on report. But Rauprich says she believes youth policy is being downgraded as part of wider DfE reforms, which will see about 1,000 staff made redundant by 2015 as part of ?an efficiency drive.

Since September’s reshuffle, she says the department has been communicating less with NCVYS. She adds that a number of the organisation’s key contacts within the department have moved on at an “unusual speed and scale”. 

But Rauprich says the diminishing status of youth policy within the DfE need not be a problem if other government departments are willing to pick up the slack.

“Youth policy is not just the responsibility of the DfE, but also the Cabinet Office, Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Ministry of Justice and Department of Health,” she says. “What has been easy in the past is that we had someone [in Loughton] who facilitated cross-sector engagement. That is the key issue. The government as a whole needs a policy focus somewhere for young people.”

NCVYS recently organised a meeting between youth sector representatives and Liberal Democrat MP Don Foster, who ?is a junior minister at the DCLG.

Although not raised directly at the meeting, Foster’s interest in youth affairs has sparked rumours that the DCLG could provide a new home for youth policy, given current priorities at the DfE. “He’s certainly very interested in young people and the DCLG already has a lot of responsibilities around youth,” says Rauprich.

While the DCLG declines to comment, the suggestion chimes with Gove’s recent statement on youth policy being a local authority responsibility. He was unequivocal when he told the education select committee: “Youth policy is a priority for local government and not central government.”

Urgent clarification
The statement unsurprisingly prompted outcry among youth organisations. A letter signed by the heads of nearly 140 youth organisations including NCVYS, the National Youth Agency and the Scout Association, called for “urgent clarification” of his remarks.

A second letter from 15 other organisations called for greater investment in youth services. The National Scrutiny Group, which is made up of 15 young people from across England and funded by the DfE, has also said it will put Gove’s remarks to children’s minister Edward Timpson at a meeting later this month.

Whatever happens next, Rauprich warns that youth policy could suffer if handed over to local authorities without any funding or support. “They won’t see it as so much of a priority during these times of conflicting resources,” she says.

A DfE spokeswoman strongly denies suggestions that the children and families agenda has been downgraded at the expense of education, arguing that such claims are “utterly unfounded”.

“While the departmental review will see the whole department reduce in size, it is certainly not the case that children and families will suffer any disproportionate reductions,” she says.


CHILDREN AND FAMILIES POLICY AT THE DfE

The education select committee published an inquiry into governance and leadership at the DfE in November 2012.

As part of this, members of the committee visited the offices of the department. They warned that a disproportionate number of staff were occupied in dealing with schools matters.

“Our own visit to the department made clear the significantly different staffing levels between, for example, academies development and family policy,” the report said.

“Non-schools areas of the department’s remit are also revealed, by an organisation chart sent to us by the permanent secretary’s office, to benefit from less senior staff input than their schools counter-parts.”

The report also noted that since the reshuffle, children’s policy had largely become the responsibility of one junior children’s minister, where it was previously shared between two.

The committee recommended that the DfE appoint a non-executive board member with specific knowledge of children and families issues, and said cross-government working on issues such as youth crime and child safeguarding must be improved.

They also urged the DfE to “maintain focus on the critical children’s policy agenda, and to ensure these areas receive adequate ministerial and senior official attention”.

Meanwhile, an internal review of operations at the DfE conducted between June and October 2012 set ?a target to cut 1,000 jobs at the department by 2015.

The review also announced plans to make more efficiency savings by reducing administrative spending at the Whitehall department by 50 per cent by 2015.

The review said the department would reduce the number of sites it operates from 12 to six, while changing the way staff work in order to focus “ruthlessly on ministerial priorities”.

It added that the 12-fold increase in academies and free schools between May 2010 and September 2012 was delivered by just a four-fold increase ?in staff.