Let's adapt our language to 'tell it like it is'

A few days later I read this from Rebecca Solnit: "To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt - or important or possible - and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story… There are so many ways to tell a lie… language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them."

These women have inspired me to stop using language that points us in the wrong direction and distorts our debates about doing the best for children, young people and families. Here are three terms I intend to stop using from now.

The first is "efficiency savings" as a euphemism for funding cuts and doing "more for less". This doesn't just make the cuts sound less draconian, or government spending decisions more purposeful. Efficiency has a meaning that is not to do with money; in public and charitable services efficiency should mean responding promptly and effectively to everyone's needs with the minimum of bureaucracy, without wasting people's time and efforts. Right across the sector cuts are making our services, and the fraught job of delivering them, more inefficient, more bureaucratic. "Efficiency savings" is one of the ways that our sector's language lies.

Second, on my hit list is "innovation". Innovation has become a managerial fetish while too rarely doing anything truly innovative. I don't believe it's right to encourage widespread professional experimentation in the lives of real families. It is improvement, not innovation, that we should be nurturing across all services. The prized status of the word - if not the fact of - innovation implies it's not good enough to be good at your profession; if you're not innovating you are part of the problem the innovators are trying to solve! Human nature hasn't changed, and nor has childhood. Children need safety, love and learning, fun and friendship. Families need homes, stable incomes, loving relationships, supportive community networks. None of those needs is new and meeting them is not an innovation.

Third, is "early intervention". It presents a big challenge for me as I've used it throughout my career, but recently I've come to find it increasingly misleading and divisive. It's come to be misused as a "false binary" for categorising people's needs, as well as implying we've already spent too much money on children who depend on our services for survival, when we could get better value for our money by spending it on more children in less acute need. But it is never "too late" to make a positive difference in a child's life, and no one of any age, in any society, was ever helped "too early".

I've offered my top three, but do share your suggestions at #EveryWordMatters.

• Kathy Evans is chief executive of Children England