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UK

ADCS Conference: Michalska urges return to Every Child Matters principles

The government must support local authorities to rejuvenate early help services in line with the principles of Labour's Every Child Matters policy, the president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) has said.

ADCS president Alsion Michalska said "the past can illuminate the present" in terms of early intervention policy.

In 2010, under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, use of the term "Every Child Matters" was banned within the DfE. But speaking at the annual ADCS conference in Manchester, ADCS president Alison Michalska said she would welcome a return to the principles of the initiative.

She warned that cuts in central government funding since 2010, combined with rising demand, meant children's services departments are "enduring relentless pressure". She said this has resulted, in some places, in early help and preventative services being severely reduced in order to protect vital statutory services.

"The most effective way [to support families] is to prioritise and therefore resource, universalist, preventative children's services," she said. "Some may think this a backwards step, harking back to the days of Every Child Matters. Well, the past can illuminate the present, every child does matter.

"We do need government to work with us to throw the juggernaut into reverse before our children's services become wholly reactive, specialist, blue-light services funded on a fraying shoestring."

Michalska said priority action is necessary across government, so that resources for children are "marshalled with a view to achieving a cross-party, long-term, coherent, strategic whole-system approach to helping early everywhere".

She warned that, if this does not happen, the so-called funding gap between what children's services require and what they receive – which the Local Government Association predicts will be £2bn by 2020, will "continue to increase as the pressures facing children's services deepen".

"I know that government will want to do the right thing by children. ADCS urges government to think big, think system-wide and think prevention. Let's be absolutely clear, there can be no challenge more pressing than that of achieving the optimum balance between preventive and reactive services – prevention or protection – and between services for children living at home and those that do not or cannot be at home."

"There are more children in our society than at any time before and yet they are at risk of being short-changed as the focus of attention, understandably has turned to the consequences of our ageing population," she said.

"It is our duty to ensure that society prioritises its future citizens and that no child is left behind."

By Neil Puffett

7 July 2017

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/cyp/news/2003914/adcs-conference-michalska-urges-return-to-every-child-matters-principles

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