Lightweight guidance puts children's interests at risk

Process too often got in the way of practice – in social work, youth services and elsewhere. What’s more, a lighter touch from the centre chimes with this government’s approach towards localism and delegating decisions to communities.

However, its appetite is now showing signs of becoming dangerously voracious. Statutory guidance across all services sets essential benchmarks for good practice. But the long-awaited careers advice guidance for schools, published last week just five months before they inherit this responsibility from councils, stands at a derisory three-and-a-half pages. Face-to-face advice, it suggests, would only be used where schools deem it necessary. As today’s teenagers enter the most challenging labour market and higher education landscape for generations, professionals have branded the guidance as a "disgrace", "dismal" and "meaningless". Indeed, it is not alone in its featherweight status.

Draft guidance that is out for consultation on local authorities’ statutory duty to secure sufficient activities for young people amounts to two-and-a-half pages. It will not be too difficult to sidestep if it remains that minimal. There are also concerns that the forthcoming revisions to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance could be scaled back drastically, potentially putting child safety in jeopardy.

So we now appear to be witnessing a shift from one extreme to another – from a bloated, over-centralised system of rules and regulations under the last administration to a threadbare set-up in which local freedoms are paramount.

The aim to shorten and simplify government guidance is sound. But this is not an end in itself, merely a means of securing better lives for children and young people. Their opportunities and wellbeing must not, like the latest examples of guidance, be allowed to just blow away in the wind.

X-RAYS ON CHILD ASYLUM-SEEKERS MUST STOP

News that the UK Border Agency is trialling dental X-rays to verify the age of asylum-seeking children is deeply worrying. The UKBA claims the scheme is voluntary and open to those who have been assessed by Croydon, the pilot council, as adults. But X-rays do not hold scientific certainty. They expose tired, vulnerable claimants to medical radiation.

And they make a mockery of the agency’s duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in discharging its functions under the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009. In any case, child asylum seekers who are unaccompanied would be unable to give informed consent. This trial has no merit whatsoever and should be abandoned.

Ravi Chandiramani, editor, Children & Young People Now