Our children's services need an institute for excellence

What really guides our everyday activity? The most powerful influence on what I do today is simply what I did yesterday and the day before - habitual ways of working become rapidly and deeply ingrained. Thinking is much easier inside the box, using the mental scaffolding that has served me well before. The technical term for these habits is "heuristics", and they provide automatic shortcuts that often work well, sometimes fail badly, but never lead to creative solutions. There is a good pragmatic reason for the brain using these shortcuts - you can't start every single task by challenging its inner assumptions - there just isn't enough time.

It can be worth challenging the underlying issues before I jump in and repeat what I have done before in similar situations. But it's a hard, time-consuming mental effort. Worse, in children's services, as in other areas, the usual ways of doing things are held not just in many practitioners' minds, but they are crystallised in legislation, in the regulatory and inspection frameworks, and in funding arrangements.

The second most powerful influence on what I do, and it's a long way behind habit, is hard evidence of what works best. However, it's always really easy to use the "not invented here" heuristic to judge other people's work. This is the line of thinking that goes, "Our circumstances are so different that it's not worth considering", or perhaps, "We tried that back in 2005 and it didn't work then so it's not worth looking at now". We need to find better and more systematic ways of learning from experience, because the third influence on what we do is genuinely independent and original thinking, and at least for me that's rarer than hen's teeth!

Accepting that true originality is impossible to pin down, how can we improve learning and strategic improvement across children's services? Keeping up to date with what's going on is important, and publications like CYP Now are an essential read for me, and the CYP Now Awards celebrate real innovation. Organisations such as the Association of Directors of Children's Services and the Virtual Staff College provide valuable mechanisms for cross-fertilisation. Somehow, though, deep and sustainable change remains slower than we would all like.

During the decade from 1995 there was a gradual shift in thinking about children, triggered in part by some tragic cases, and in part by changing social norms. This led to the 2003 publication of Every Child Matters and then the Children Act 2004. Every Child Matters marked a paradigm shift that recast the notion of how children should be seen by professionals and society. The proof, for me, that Every Child Matters marked a real change in thinking, not just a political whim, is that while the outward manifestations have all been swept away, the underlying assumptions remain firmly in place. It is unfortunately true, though, that even this key development has not had the impact that we all hoped for. So child deaths at the hands of their parents - deliberately, by neglect, or accidentally - remain unacceptably high, and there is a continuing theme in serious case reviews that agencies didn't communicate effectively.

So, what to do? We've recently seen calls for a "national child death database" so that learning can be shared. As reported in CYP Now, "the absence of national data ... means that it is simply not possible to identify the difference between a one-off cause and an emerging trend". I argue, though, that what's needed is more than a database - we urgently need a dedicated national institute for children's services excellence, working across agencies to identify strategic and tactical improvements.

John Freeman, CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant Read his blog at cypnow.co.uk/freemansthinking