The world of the children 1
Kenneth Roy
The world of the children 2
Angus Skinner and others
The world of the children 3
Maggie Mellon
The world of the children 4
Bob Smith
The family: will it count for anything in the future?
Photograph by Islay McLeod
A while ago, Margaret Thatcher told us that ‘there is no such thing as society, just individuals and their families’. Nonsense, of course. But it would not be any more correct to conclude that ‘there is no such thing as families, just individuals and society’. Families are real and usually the most important thing for all of us. Above work, above money, above politics. And for children, having the support and love of their families is the most important thing of all. If any one of us were asked ‘who are the first and most important named persons in children’s lives?’, the answer would surely be ‘Their family’ or ‘Their parents’.
But proposals for a new Scottish Children and Young People’s Bill that aims to make Scotland ‘the best place to grow up in’ don’t seem to start from the reality that parents and families are the most important people in children’s lives, and are usually the best guarantors of their rights and welfare. Sadly of course a small minority of children can’t look to parents or wider family for this. But for the vast majority of children in Scotland, the reality is that parents and family are the mainstay of their rights and their wellbeing.
The proposals for the bill are mainly about professionals’ relationships with children, in particular that every child should have a ‘named person’ who is a paid public employee working in the universal health or education services. In other words the health visitor, nursery teacher or nurse, or class teacher. In reality, these professionals will almost all be working in the relatively few hours that schools, clinics and nurseries are open between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. They will have no extra powers to command housing, benefits, health services, educational provision. And there is no mention of communication with parents and families as a key part of the responsibilities of this ‘named person’.
The proposals seem to emanate from a ‘service land’ where there are no families, just children and their ‘named persons’, who as well as their particular day jobs as teachers, nursery staff and health visitors are to oversee the wellbeing and rights of every single child in Scotland, with others having a duty to report to the ‘named person’ anything that they feel might have an impact on the child’s wellbeing. I don’t know if the education and health unions have been consulted formally about this, but to receive a report about anything that might be worrying someone, you have to have time to meet with that person, to read their letter or email, to follow it up. So what of their current time will teachers now spend on this new role?
Given teachers’ usual objections to involvement with anything beyond the school gate, and to extra hours and duties, I would guess that the proposal might just be resisted – or costed at an unaffordable level.
In the real world, outside of Monday to Friday ‘service land’, it is not possible to separate children’s welfare from that of their families. Children cannot thrive where their families are living in conditions of poverty and poor health and housing, where the choice is between shoes or food, fuel or bus fares. Therefore ensuring and supporting the welfare of Scotland’s families, and giving them their necessary place, is a necessary precondition for children’s rights and children’s welfare.
The ‘named persons’ will not have control of benefits, employment, housing. Their writ will not run even in the council’s own housing department, let alone in the decisions of the building society to repossess or the DWP, or ATOS, to remove benefits and enforce long working hours.
For those who think that children’s rights are the rarified territory of the children’s commissioner’s office, a quick read of the UNCRC would be very instructive. Both the UNCRC and ECHR recognise the importance of private and family life for children and adults, and both impose duties on the state to support parents in their responsibilities, and to provide services and benefits that guarantee children’s welfare. Surely fulfilling these duties should be the aim of any new legislation at this time?
These real rights and duties are not mentioned in the consultation. Instead the focus is on ‘fuzzy’ rights – for children to be ‘heard’, to ‘participate’. All very good, but this usually translates only into ‘child friendly’ leaflets and tokenistic consultation and ‘inclusion’ in adult meetings and processes. It does not ever seem to lead to the closure of violent and careless children’s ‘residential units’, or (perish the thought) listening enough to children to make it as wrong and illegal to hit a child as it is to hit an adult.
The consultation paper seems to propose that ‘named persons’ rather than families should fill the gap between the child and the state. Policies such as Getting It Right For Every Child, while laudable in intent, are not helped by seeming to conceive of children as separate from their families, and of professionals as being of equal importance as families.
This is not really a children’s rights approach at all. It is instead rather a confirmation of the rights of services and professionals to determine how the needs and well-being of children are to be understood, and, importantly, to ration the resources to meet these. The proposals are built on the ‘same old, same old’ failing public services that ‘do to’ children, and leave families out in the cold. This represents rather a wasted opportunity.
So, what should we have instead of these proposals? Firstly, we could impose a duty on public bodies to support families in their care of children. This would not only endorse the importance of the family to children’s welfare, but give it some practical application across the whole range of publicly-funded bodies. Currently, these bodies have responsibilities for different ‘bits’ of our lives but none for supporting that most long-lasting, flexible and entirely human institution – the family.
This duty would be accompanied by a duty to report on how children, young people and their families have been included in decisions that have been made about their lives, and importantly included in resource allocation. Family conferences, family plans, working agreements between professionals and families actively work in practice to encourage and support responsibility, not dependence. They strengthen families in difficulty by promoting shared decision-making and control. They build on strengths in the whole family rather than on the weaknesses of individuals.
Secondly, very local community planning, involving children and young people as well as adults. This would be accompanied by devolved resources to develop the kind of services that they need and want – breakfast clubs, respite care, family aides, befrienders, food groups, book clubs. That is, most of the resources that are currently committed at a high level should be devolved. The rising numbers in care, and the rising costs of this, have squeezed out the prevention that needs to be at the heart of the system. Only local-level resourcing can solve this. Real community planning can only happen in the context of a new construction of public service. That is that public services are created by working with people in creating the services that they need and want.
When the importance of supporting families and recognising their invaluable, irreplaceable role is raised, this is often met with uneasy objections that some parents are very bad, that some families are hopeless, or on the other hand that not everyone has a family, or wants one. Yes, there will be children whose families, with all the right supports, cannot or will not be able to guarantee their rights and welfare. But these are a very small minority of children. So let us not base legislation and policy for every child on the assumption that because some families fail, children’s or indeed anyone’s wellbeing can only be guaranteed by counting their families out.
Maggie Mellon is a freelance writer, speaker and social
services consultant
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