Comment: What a Tory-Lib Dem pact could mean for children's and youth policy

There will have been plenty of horse-trading around the best measures to revive the economy and repair the political system. But what about the two parties' respective plans for children, young people and families?

David Laws, the right-leaning Lib Dem chief spokesman for children, has been one of his party's principal figures in the negotiations. Crucially, he has a good relationship with his Tory counterpart Michael Gove, who is likely to be named education secretary provided the Conservatives can form a government — although Laws himself could land the post if the Lib Dems are offered cabinet posts as part of a formal coalition.

Laws described Gove in an interview in March with CYP Now as "the most charming, courteous member of the Tory shadow cabinet" and "someone who is well-educated, thoughtful and seems to have a passion for some of the education brief." Labour's Ed Balls, by contrast would "cross the street to pick a fight".

While the level of detail of the discussions is of course unknown, all debates over children's and youth policy need to be considered against the cavernous shadow of public spending cuts.

Here are some of their areas of consensus and conflict.


AREAS OF CONSENSUS

Child poverty

All parties are committed in principle to eradicate child poverty by 2020. The education system provides one of the key mechanisms by which to achieve this for both Tories and Lib Dems. In his initial public wooing of the Lib Dems on Friday afternoon, David Cameron cited the "pupil premium" as a key policy on which they could agree. This would act as an incentive by directing payments to state schools for each pupil from a disadvantaged background whom they admit. The scale of the commitment will be a matter for debate — the Lib Dems earmarked £2.5bn to fund the policy in their manifesto, £1.5bn of which would come from tax rises for the highest earners.

Families and parenting

The parties are united in their desire to extend shared parental leave when a child is born and therefore in their conviction that the love and care that children receive in their early life is of critical importance. They also both believe in extending the right to flexible working for all parents.

Child protection

Both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems want to publish in full the serious case reviews when a child dies as a result of abuse or neglect.

They both also want to scrap the ContactPoint information sharing database. While the Tories say they would replace it with a signposting system for "genuinely vulnerable children", the Lib Dems say they would use the savings from its abolition to offer administrative and technical support to social workers.

Early years and childcare

Both parties are sceptical about the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum for under-fives. The Conservatives have said that while retaining it, they want to cut the bureaucracy it involves, while the Lib Dems favour a slimmed-down curriculum.

Youth justice

Both parties propose various early intervention schemes to divert at-risk young people from offending behaviour as well as rehabilitation schemes to prevent reoffending. There is common ground over dealing with drug addiction. The Tories want to give courts the power to use abstinence-based drug rehabilitation orders to help offenders give up drugs while the Lib Dems also want to focus more resources to treatment services. There is a shared acceptance that the surge in convictions and imprisonment of young people during Labour's reign has been both acutely expensive and ineffective, and that more effort needs to be channelled into preventing young people from offending.



AREAS OF CONFLICT

Joint working

Here, the Tories want some degree of retreat, while the Lib Dems want to go the other way and bring in plans to deepen integrated working.

The Conservatives regard Labour's Every Child Matters reforms as fine in principle but they regard the joint working arrangements that it has brought about as overly bureaucratic in practice. So they want to repeal the obligations on local areas to have children's trusts in place and for local authorities to publish children and young people's plans.

The Lib Dems by contrast want to strengthen joint working arrangements so that housing authorities have a duty to co-operate in children's trusts, which would compel housing professionals and planners to consider the interests and welfare of children in their decision making. They also propose that practitioners have secondments in other areas of children's services, so that for example, a children's social worker gains experience of the challenges of being a youth worker and vice versa.

Youth services

The Conservatives' flagship policy for young people is the National Citizen Service for 16-year-olds, a two-month outward bound and residential scheme. Apart from that, the Tories have little to say about supporting young people through positive activities. They have expressed deep scepticism about the effectiveness of local authority youth services and want more youth programmes to be run by the voluntary sector.

The Lib Dems' commitment to young people might lack a showy policy but does appear more comprehensive. They adopted a youth policy document, Free to be Young as official party policy in the spring. They want to merge funding for out-of-school activities for young people into one easy-to-access fund and guarantee youth projects their money; set up a cross-departmental young people's committee to inform youth issues in government; and make youth services a statutory responsibility of local authorities.

Families and parenting

The Conservatives' proposal to reward marriage in the tax system is likely to sit uneasily with a party that is meant to be inherently "liberal" in its instinct and uncomfortable about an endorsement and incentive of one form of family life above another.

Schools

Aside from their shared support for the pupil premium, it is unclear how much the Lib Dems would be willing to support Michael Gove's radical proposals for state-funded schools to be allowed freedom from local authorities and for more academies to be established. Indeed, the Lib Dems want to replace academies with so-called "sponsor-managed schools" that would still be accountable to local authorities. In his interview with CYP Now in March, Laws labelled most of Tory education policy as "dotty."

Sure Start children's centres

The Conservatives want Sure Start to revert to its original purpose of targeting disadvantaged families. This prompted Labour before and during the election campaign to pronounce that there would be a drastic retreat in availability of Sure Start services under a Tory government.

But while the Tories plan to redirect funds from Sure Start outreach workers to create an extra 4,200 health visitors, the Lib Dems favour focusing resources on improving outreach services. They do not appear to share the Tories' scepticism about the effectiveness of outreach workers.

Sex and relationships education

Put simply, the Lib Dems, like Labour, want sex and relationships education to be compulsory in schools. The Tories don't.

Asylum-seeking children

The Lib Dems are alone among the main political parties in promising an end to the detention of asylum seeking children.