and reach thousands of daily visitors
Listen to thisUK
The Kids Company story is again gaining headlines, but it is still being treated in isolation, as a special case of waste and poor governance. Some connections are being made with the wider third sector. But while there seems to be recognition that the resources Kids Company received might have been better shared with other charities, there is a much more important link that still has to be made. This is between government support for Kids Company and developments in child protection policy more generally.
This story really starts with the Baby Peter tragedy in 2007 and the setting up of the Social Work Task Force and then the Social Work Reform Board. These two initiatives highlighted how managerialism and the over-bureaucratisation of social work restricted the time that practitioners could spend with service users. Both pressed instead for a stronger voice for social workers (resulting in the now-closed College of Social Work) better standards, regulation, working conditions and career structure, a better system of education and recruitment and a new supported and assessed year in practice.
The election of the coalition government in 2010 and then the Conservatives in 2015, however, resulted in a radical shift in policy emphasis. A new set of initiatives and organisations emerged. These have been based on three key principles: the outsourcing of services, the development of commercial models of practice and the establishment a new layer of “elite” training routes. All have been contentious; all have come in for criticism for their limited evidence base.
Thus the government has shown particular interest in private organisations such as KPMG and Morning Lane Associates. The latter is the company co-founded by Isabelle Trowler , chief social worker for children and families, which markets the Hackney “reclaiming social work” model (Trowler no longer has a financial interest in the company). They will be delivering the new accreditation and assessment scheme for the advanced child and family practitioner status and the revision of the professional capabilities framework, shaping social work learning and practice.
Yet questions are increasingly being asked about the Hackney model, which significantly no longer operates in Hackney. The new pathways into the profession, such as Frontline and Think Ahead , emphasise the importance of recruiting students from Russell Group universities with high-grade degrees, rather than the shared experience, listening skills and human qualities that service users and carers particularly seem to value.
These developments have had the strong backing of David Cameron, and Michael Gove. They reflect their distrust of statutory social work and preference for market over state intervention. Significantly, these are the same government ministers who have been key supporters of Kids Company.
Kids Company, and particularly its chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh , have been resolutely critical of statutory child protection social work, arguing that Kids Company “essentially mops up the mess social services fail to deal with”. In 2014, they campaigned with the London Evening Standard and with the backing of Community Care to set up an independent taskforce to tackle the child protection “crisis” seeking a greater role in the outsourcing of statutory child care and child protection services.
In the light of Kids Company’s rapid collapse, we may wonder what the results would have been for many vulnerable children if this had happened. The debacle also raises enormous questions about the judgement of the politicians who presided over it, in relation to social work and child protection policy more generally. Are they any more likely to get this right? Is Kids Company the reality behind their rhetoric of cost-effectiveness and efficiency savings? While they made grants to the charity against the advice of their experts, they were refusing the College of Social Work a grant, which resulted in its forced closure and the further weakening of social work.
Numerous inquiries are taking place over Kids Company. We have now had reports from two of them, both of which raise worrying issues about its day to day working and, perhaps more importantly, the nature of government oversight of an organisation that received massive amounts of state and charitable funding. However, none of these inquiries focuses particularly on the services and support that Kids Company offered children and young people. How well did its theories and practice actually work? And none focuses on the relation with wider social work and child protection policy. How well, in the real world of increasing poverty and inequality, are the new neoliberal models of social work likely to work?
What is now needed is an independent public inquiry that takes evidence from both service users and practitioners to find out more about the work Kids Company actually did, to look at its strengths as well as weaknesses and how well its ideas worked. And we need to look at the broader implications this has for the restructuring of social work, education and child protection services that the government is now pursuing. We need to know what confidence can be placed in this major reform. The Kids Company disaster is another reminder that the rights and needs of vulnerable children are far too important to be left to the preferences of politicians – of whatever party.
Peter Beresford
20 November 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/nov/20/kids-company-politicans-social-work
