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Resilience prevails amid Osborne's bleak choices

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, December 11, 2012
  • | CYP Now
Like a piercing, bitter English winter, Chancellor George Osbourne's "autumn statement" was eye-wateringly harsh. It is, without doubt, children and young people growing up in the most deprived households who are being asked to bear the brunt.

Riot response requires long-term solutions, not knee-jerk policies

    Opinion
  • Monday, August 22, 2011
  • | CYP Now
The violence across English cities this month triggered its own riot - of condemnation, debate and knee-jerk policy pronouncements. In the days that followed the first outbreak in Tottenham, an exercise in national soul searching took place through the media. Yours truly, for one, did the breakfast TV paper review on Sky News.

Embarrassing custody rates require creative solutions

    Opinion
  • Monday, July 25, 2011
  • | CYP Now
The high number of young people held in youth custody in England and Wales has been a cause of national embarrassment. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has quite rightly raised concerns at the levels of young people held in our youth jails in its recent reports. Despite impressive reductions in recent years, more than 2,000 under-18s were in custody in May.

Tragic deaths in custody point to a system in need of reform

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, May 3, 2011
  • | CYP Now
Five young people in custody died in the space of just 33 days during March and April. The tragedies mark an exceptionally horrific spell in the youth prison system. To put it in context, no more than five teenagers have died in custody during any entire year since 2005, when the figure was nine.

Progress in joint working must go on

    Opinion
  • Monday, November 22, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The decision last week to strip the Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC) of government funding will inevitably raise concerns that any genuine "development" of the workforce will stall. A plan for how the Department for Education intends to take forward the quango's work is yet to be articulated.

Abolition of YJB is difficult to justify

    Opinion
  • Monday, October 18, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The government's decision to scrap the Youth Justice Board (YJB) in last week's "bonfire of the quangos" is bewildering. In recent years, since the welcome demise of New Labour's Respect agenda, the YJB has helped to reduce first-time entrants to the criminal justice system and the youth custody population has come down.

Shhh... Every Child Matters lives on

    Opinion
  • Monday, August 9, 2010
  • | CYP Now
Watch out, the language police are about. An internal Department for Education memo lists 30 terms the government wants consigned to history, and the words that should be used in their place. Many relate directly to children's services.

Hidden costs of payment-by-results

    Opinion
  • Monday, July 5, 2010
  • | CYP Now
We are in an age of austerity where outcomes are critical. So it is difficult to take issue in raw principle with the government's desire to commission more public services on a payment-by-results basis.

Can good services remain standing?

    Opinion
  • Monday, June 21, 2010
  • | CYP Now
Like the suffocating drone of vuvuzelas, cuts continue to dominate the atmosphere in the children's services arena and in public services more generally.

Editorial: A backward step for youth justice

    Opinion
  • Monday, May 24, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The new government's decision to give the Ministry of Justice sole responsibility for youth justice in England and Wales is massively misguided. It ends a three-year spell where responsibility was shared with the former Department for Children, Schools and Families. During that time, as it happens, the youth prison population declined from 2,927 in March 2007 to 2,207 in March 2010.

Sector must influence the coalition

    Opinion
  • Monday, May 17, 2010
  • | CYP Now
They say that a week is a long time in politics. Quite. As predicted in these pages for many months, the new Tory Secretary of State Michael Gove has renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) as the Department for Education.

Election result prolongs uncertainty

    Opinion
  • Monday, May 10, 2010
  • | CYP Now
At the time of writing -- on the historically uncertain afternoon of Friday 7 May -- the Conservatives were about to enter into negotiations with the Liberal Democrats about helping them to form a government.

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