The great listener

Roger Morgan has been listening to the views of children and airing them to the country’s big decision makers for more than a decade. However, legislation expected to be passed next year will see his post no longer exist.

Morgan seems pretty relaxed sitting in the small, barren office in the London headquarters of Ofsted, which hosts the Office of the Children’s Rights Director for England. “I am in the fascinating position of being repealed,” he laughs. “Not many people get repealed.”

The role of children’s rights director was created in 2003 and Morgan has held the position since then. But as the result of an independent review conducted by John Dunford in 2010, and the subsequent response from government, the duties of the children’s rights director will be incorporated into the role of the children’s commissioner for England within two years from now.

While Morgan supports the steps to change the children’s commissioner’s remit, he is unwavering in his belief that the role of his office has been critical for children and young people who live away from home. He is therefore adamant that those duties should be continued. “I feel very personal about the fact that those functions are needed for the children I have been working with for the past decade,” he says.

“I have been saying for a long time that you need to take into account what children say, just as you would take into account lots of different sources of input when making a decision.

“It is very easy for children in care to be treated as a minority group and not properly served. It is important that there is somebody to champion their choice and interests in decision making both nationally and locally.”

Improving children’s lives
Morgan’s remit includes doing individual casework with children who contact his office because they believe their rights are being infringed or their needs not met. Around 450 cases pass across Morgan’s desk each year, and the vast majority result in an improvement to the young person’s situation, he says.

His office also has the ability to bring children together with ministers, government officials and professionals leading reviews, such as Professor Eileen Munro’s child protection report. This makes sure that children’s opinions are taken into account when policy decisions are made.

The various reports published by Morgan’s office throughout the year track the views of young people on topics ranging from bullying to contact with siblings, as well as exploring young people’s thoughts on the standard of provision they receive.

Morgan says his office has had many tangible successes for children. For example, his reports have helped increase the frequency of social work visits to looked-after children and strengthened the ability of children in care to withhold consent for sharing information.

“If you want a policy analysis, children’s minds are very innovative,” he says. “If you have an adult and a child discussing a topic, there is a 50/50 chance that the child’s input is more intelligent than the adult’s.”

Morgan is clearly proud of the work of his office, but speaks less of the achievements of his team and more of the clear and direct way in which children communicate with him and other adults.

He describes a situation where he was invited to a consultation event with a director of children’s services and had to sit in a “question tent” where they were presented on a screen so children could ask them questions. “After a while, one girl said: ‘Why don’t you two stop acting like bloody idiots, come out and just talk to us?’,” Morgan recalls with a smirk on his face. “She was quite right of course.”

Morgan describes his brief period as a director of social services as not his “natural environment”. In the same breath, he refers to the children’s rights director position as his “dream role”.

“I have always enjoyed the fact that consulting children is actually extremely informative and rewarding, and is a forum in which you can have a really pure, unfettered policy discussion,” he says.

“Try that with officials and politicians and you hit baggage and prepositions. With children, you have fresh minds addressing the problems and there are a hell of a lot of problems that could do with fresh minds.”

Throughout a career spanning research, inspection, management and time as a government adviser, Morgan says he has “always had a personal and professional commitment to using children’s voices”, because of the fact that he has first-hand experience of children actively helping to improve policymaking, analysis of services and inspection.

Influencing improvement
“At heart, I have always been to some extent a researcher,” he adds. “But all the frustrations of being a researcher are that you keep on wanting to be a policymaker and directly influence improvement.”

Since its launch, the role of the children’s rights director has evolved, becoming independent of the children’s services inspectorate, Ofsted. Morgan says the office is now in much higher demand, with government and organisations increasingly wanting children’s views incorporated into their activities and decisions.

Recent proposals surrounding looked-after children’s contact with family members and adoption are some of the projects children are currently working on through Morgan’s office, for example.

But with the dissolution of his post and the transfer of duties to the children’s commissioner, he admits he has some anxieties about the potential erosion of the functions his office has discharged in supporting the most vulnerable children and young people.

“Of course I am sad that we are coming to the end of an era, but I can understand the logic that from the point of view of looked-after children, it doesn’t matter who is championing their rights, as long as it is powerfully done,” he says.

“As somebody who will be leaving the stage, my concern is that continuing consultation, casework and focus on children who very often and very easily get left out of policies and legislation is carried over successfully.

“If I have a fear, it is that in a larger organisation, the work for my particular groups of children might get submarined or diluted into wider and more general functions. All my functions are embodied in the legislation, but I have made it no secret that I would like to make the wording stronger on each of them, so they can be as strong as they possibly can be.”

In the time that he does have left in post, Morgan is acutely aware of the dwindling resources available to him and his team.

“It is going to be difficult. It is not only the children’s commissioner’s resources that are reducing, so are mine,” he says. “The Office of the Children’s Rights Director is part of the public sector and is therefore subject to public sector reductions. So between now and then, my present budget and probably the number of staff I have will not be the same. That is the reality of living in a time of austerity.

“My response is that we have to prioritise what we do in the next 18 months. That brings me straight back to the concern that in difficult times it is even more important that the functions that transfer are kept as a high priority. I have no grounds for fearing that they won’t be, because the government has made clear its intention that the functions carry on. But resources, wider interests and competing priorities will always threaten to erode that. It is a risk and, as with any risk, needs to be managed.”

Morgan then returns to the fundamental reason that he has relished his position as children’s rights director for so long, and why any successor of his duties should value his office’s achievements. “The wisdom of children is a natural resource that we fail to take notice of,” he says. “I could be asking children’s views about policy one day and the next day using those children’s views to influence policy with politicians. Both parts of that are very satisfying.”


Roger Morgan CV

• Morgan gained a doctorate in social work at Leicester University in 1973
• As a research fellow at the Child Treatment Research Unit in Birmingham, he examined the development and evaluation of behavioural treatments for psychological problems among children in care
• He was head of research at Kent County Council’s social services department before taking up a post as assistant director of social services in Cambridgeshire
• Morgan helped author the original national minimum standards for welfare in children’s homes, boarding schools, residential special schools and residential further education colleges
• He gained his PhD for treatment of bed-wetting in children and is president of Eric, the national charity for continence in children
• Morgan was awarded the OBE in 2001 for services to children