Labour works to plug policy holes with general election a year away
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
An overarching vision for children and young people, an improvement body for schools and children's services, and a revamp of neglect laws are some of the areas the Labour Party needs to address over the next 12 months.
On 30 March 2015, parliament will be dissolved, battle lines will be drawn and the general election campaign will get under way.
In the 12 months until then, focus within the children and young people's sector will increasingly turn to what the Labour Party plans to do if it returns to power after five years in opposition.
After a slow start as Labour leader, Ed Miliband has, over the past 18 months, overseen the development of a number of children and young people-specific policies that have been largely well received.
Principal among these are two headline-grabbing early years initiatives - extending free childcare for threeand four-year-olds from 15 to 25 hours and introducing a primary childcare guarantee, giving parents access to wraparound care via schools from 8am to 6pm.
In terms of youth policy, Labour has already pledged to make youth services statutory, wants to shift responsibility for youth policy back to the Department for Education from the Cabinet Office and will give the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds from 2020.
Meanwhile, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has outlined his intention to introduce single budgets across children's health and early intervention, and Labour is also understood to be working on ideas to improve conditions for children's social workers.
Kathy Evans, chief executive of Children England, says many of the policies announced so far chime with the desires of its members in the voluntary sector.
A recent survey of their views found that, alongside votes at 16, another two Labour policy proposals – axing the so-called bedroom tax and creating a "middle tier" to scrutinise schools – were among their top aspirations.
The future for children
But Evans says they also expressed a desire for a clear idea of what the future for children should be. "Probably the biggest thing that comes out strongly from our members is the hope that there will be a vision for children under which all of these things can fall," she says.
"Why isn't there a 10-year strategy for improving, supporting and nurturing children, so all these things start to fit together?
"Labour did do fairly well with that with the five (Every Child Matters) outcomes when they were in office before."
For Sir Paul Ennals, former chair of the Children's Workforce Development Council, one of the most significant policy development areas will be the outcome of former Education Secretary David Blunkett's review of a proposed middle tier between schools and central government.
Labour has already said it is in favour of a middle tier to oversee standards and intervene when schools underperform, but has not said whether this role should be handed to local authorities or another organisation. Ennals says the proposed structure could also have major implications for the way children's services are organised under a Labour government.
"It is not just potentially a model for schools," he says.
"If you believe in integration, which the Labour Party through its intention to integrate health and social care seems to, it would suggest that child protection needs to be thought about alongside mechanisms to look at schools.
"Schools are still the biggest budget item within the children's sector and we need to work out what we are going to do about the structures to support them before getting to the details of changing things about social care and health.
"To what extent will the review recommend using local authorities as the middle tier, or will it propose a different kind of middle tier?
"The result of that question will determine where the focus will lie in supporting and joining up children's services as a whole."
Shadow children's minister Steve McCabe concedes that his party still has "quite a way to go" on its children and young people's policy, but says it is working on a number of areas. Labour is "furthest down the road" with its childcare offer for working parents, while the party's national policy forum is also developing its approach to children's centres, he says.
"We are trying to build on what we tried to do last time around with Sure Start, but are more focused on trying to engage with the mother before birth, and taking the child through to age five.
"That is really about having a focus on developmental goals and milestones so you can see the child is making reasonable progress, and open the door for early intervention whether that is because of some developmental needs the child has or some problems at home.
"We are pretty clear that Sure Start was a very good idea, but we didn't embed it sufficiently in communities and, as a result, it was fairly easy for the present government to cut it.
"It would have been better with an outcomes focus on developmental goals - which is a very easy thing to measure and you can see how health visitors, children's centre staff, nursery nurses and specialists such as speech therapists need to work together."
Inspection role
Another area Labour is looking at is the role of Ofsted in relation to children's services and specifically whether it, or another entity, should have an improvement function.
"Ofsted has an inspection role in relation to children's services that is quite limited to seeing if something is satisfactory," McCabe says.
"It doesn't give a very good definition of what 'good enough' is or what the improvement schedule should be. It would suggest that there is something in the middle that is missing.
"Where is the improvement role in all of this?"
He says Labour is also considering updating the law on neglect to give practitioners across all sectors a clearer idea of when they must intervene if they have suspicions. He also wants to end the use of unnecessary out-of-authority placements of children in residential care.
But what chance of an overarching narrative linking all the policy areas together?
McCabe says Labour has been doing "a lot of work to make it happen", but cannot guarantee it will emerge prior to the general election.
"I can't say that it will all be done and dusted because I don't know if that will be the case," he says.
"Every Child Matters was probably the best framework created in the last 40 years for actually trying to tell professionals what their responsibilities were and how we could have a vision for children. We think it was ditched rather prematurely.
"We want to pick the best elements of that approach and reinvent them for where we are going in the years ahead."
EDUCATION:
Tristram Hunt shadow education secretary
Kevin Brennan shadow schools minister
Steve McCabe shadow children's minister
Rushanara Ali shadow youth minister
Lucy Powell shadow childcare minister
JUSTICE:
Dan Jarvis shadow youth justice minister
HEALTH:
Andy Burnham shadow health secretary
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