Private sector providers of children’s services complain that procurement is bureaucratic

Children and Young People Now reports that private sector providers of children’s services, like foster care and special schools, are complaining that local authority procurement processes are expensive and bureaucratic.

Here’s the thing. It’s bad enough that statutory public services which serve the most vulnerable members of our communities are being sold off for profit. It’s dispiriting that because of this, we are seeing those services managed at arms length through contracts, rather than through local democratic processes. But now, those providers feel put upon by the procedures we surely must have if we’re to go some way to ensuring a service is being delivered effectively.

This is a slippery slope. These are our public services, paid for by us, to support ourselves.  If we continue to loosen our oversight, we will be giving away the family store.

Tears for Carolina

North Carolina has passed Amendment One. From this moment, marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic union recognised by the state.  It’s not just a rejection of same-sex marriage, it includes unmarried heterosexual partnerships. There are implications for partner health benefits, social security and women escaping domestic violence.

It has serious implications for children being raised in families not headed by a heterosexual married couple.

I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, between August 1992 and May 1993. As a visiting student, I attended a few classes but spent rather a lot of my time in the offices of B-GLAD (Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians and their Allies for Diversity). We campaigned for equality, we talked about sexual health and we wrote a newspaper, The Lambda. We went to the March on Washington in 1993, still the biggest demonstration I have ever attended.  Over that time, we made quite a stink on campus and about town.

I was optimistic that one day all of us would be able to marry the people we loved and experience the same legal protections as our peers. I came home to the UK and, after a few more years, saw that future begin to emerge. But my friends in NC haven’t seen that progress, for them the political debate has regressed.

Today, I feel immense sadness for all of them. This isn’t political theory or student politics anymore, it’s real for them, their partners and their children.

So they still have to fight. Still. After all these years. I hope they know that I am always there for them.

Spare a few minutes to watch this pastor from a church in Goldsboro who spoke on Sunday at a press conference. He sets the amendment beautifully in the context of twentieth century American political history and talks about the importance of asking the right question.

And this takes me right back to that beautiful April day in Washington DC. Such a shame that we’re still making the same arguments, asking the same questions.

The papers fret about teenage sexual activity. The answer? Compulsory SRE in school

I first worked for Brook in 1994. Even then the arguments for compulsory sex and relationships education were well rehearsed. More than that, they were backed up with evidence from across northern Europe that showed that with high-quality sex and relationships education from the age of five, focused on relationships and developing confidence and self-worth, teenagers had their first sexual experiences much later and were much less likely to experience exploitation. Add to that the provision of sexual health and contraceptive services and the result was low levels of teenage pregnancy and happy, fulfilled teenagers. Marvellous.

But, we continue to ignore this evidence and apply the tabloid rules of hysteria and hand-wringing with a side of parental and religious ‘rights’ over children’s access to SRE. Great work has been done through the teenage pregnancy strategy since 1997 and the rate has come down. In some areas the impact has been phenomenal. But now the strategy team is being deconstructed, funding lost and posts deleted all over the country. We will the see the impact of this move very soon.

Today a report for the NHS recommends that girls as young as thirteen have access to the pill without seeing a GP. Once again, the same arguments will be re-hashed. By 1995-6, we had nurse-prescribing of the pill at our Brook clinic for young people who showed that they could understand the implications of what they were doing, the so-called ‘Gillick Competence’. This is not terribly new. If you’re worried that girls as young as thirteen are having sex, then it’s time to introduce compulsory sex and relationships education.

I looked back at my blog because I knew this has been coming up regularly over the last few years. This is some of what I found there:

February 2009

Last autumn the Government announced that PSHE would become a statutory part of the National Curriculum. A review is being led to determine how this should happen. It will include education on Sex and Relationships from the age of five to sixteen. This is a welcome step in the right direction but comes too late for Alfie, a father to Maisie at the age of thirteen. I get so infuriated listening to the discussion that develops around this issue. More often than not, it is ill-informed and guided by self-appointed moral guardians in the press. Let us begin with the facts. There is an enormous, I mean really vast, amount of evidence from across Europe that shows that high-quality sex and relationships education from the age of five onwards delays young people’s first sexual experience and keeps the teenage pregnancy rate low.

There is nothing new about this. I began my career working in the field of sexual health education with young people and even then we were looking at evidence that was fifteen years old. These are long-made arguments that have been ignored over time. We should also acknowledge that the environment we subject our children to is filled with messages about sex. We made it, not them. Here again, we fail to provide them with the skills and knowledge they need to navigate a world we have created for them, not least to address the messages they experience about gender. Thirdly, children and young people have the right to an unfettered childhood and a positive transition to adulthood.

November 2009

Today the Government has announced that Sex and Relationships education will be compulsory within PSHE from September 2011. Parents will have the right to withdraw their children from this curriculum time up to the age of fifteen, this has dropped from nineteen years old under current law.

So the Government has decided to stand up and defend the right of young people to information about sex and relationships unfettered by their parents views, but only once they are fifteen years old. A quick glance at teenage pregnancy and other data illustrates that many young people in Britain are sexually active much earlier than their fifteenth birthday and that some at fifteen will already be parents. A quick glance around the shelves of any newsagent or supermarket shows you why young people need to have a place to explore these issues very early in their adolescence.

Young people need time and a place in which they can learn facts about their bodies, their biology and themselves. The prevention of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease is a health issue, young people need access to information. Crucially they need to learn and think about sexual feelings, sexuality, relationships and how to manage those unfamiliar but overwhelming adult feelings that are starting to emerge.

How are we preparing young people for healthy adult relationships of all kinds if we allow parents to refuse their children the experience of exploring these issues in a safe, supportive, learning environment?

The Government argues that only one tenth of one percent of parents have removed their children from sex education in science lessons so far, mostly for religious reasons. They seem to imply that maintaining the right to withdraw children is acceptable because only a small number will bother to do it. I disagree. The hysteria that will follow this announcement will inevitably focus on ‘homosexuality and abortion being taught in lessons,’ and may very well encourage parents to withdraw their children. And even if it doesn’t, just having the right to withdraw sends out the wrong message: it says that parents are right to be suspicious, to be concerned. It’s not a positive position.

And then this in April 2010, just before the election

If you want an idea of the damage that will be done to the prospects of young people in and out of schools in the event of a Tory win, look no further than to the actions of the Conservative Party last night. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, refused to support individual tuition for young people struggling with learning, the implementation of a new primary curriculum and most egregiously, the implementation of compulsory PSHE – including sex and relationships education – even with the right of parents to withdraw their children up to the age of fifteen.

When I wrote about the announcement on PSHE I was cross that parents were still being allowed to withdraw their offspring up to fifteen and that faith schools would still be free to teach PSHE within the “context of the values of their faith”, whatever that means. It was clear that an accommodation had been reached with parents’ and faith groups to ensure wider support for the measures. In a response to a hectoring tweet I sent the Secretary of State, he indicated as much to me – that more radical steps would be difficult to achieve.

Now even this hammered-out political compromise has been up-ended by the man who would like to be your next Education Secretary. Mark me, this is not a man who is interested in schools as part of Children’s Services, despite the positive impact of the Children Act 2004. He is interested in Schooling: the filling of impressionable young minds with facts, the instilling of discipline with force if necessary and the exclusion of children with special educational needs and behavioural problems to the backwaters of separate schooling and Pupil Referral Units. Don’t believe me? Think he sounds reasonable when he talks about parent-founded schools? Then I direct you to his speech last July at the RSA. I think you will find it informative.

No, last night Michael Gove flexed his political muscles well in advance of receiving a mandate and it was a disgraceful act, illustrating the shape of things to come if he does indeed find himself in the big chair at Sanctuary House. Young people – desperately in need of information, support and the opportunity to explore the personal and complex issues associated with the journey to adulthood – will be worse off if it comes to pass.

 And so it has.

You have a duty to be curious

I had an interesting chat with Marie Huxtable yesterday morning. Marie is a senior educational psychologist and involved in Living Theory action research, alongside Jack Whitehead.

To quote Jack’s site, “In a living educational theory approach to action research, individuals hold their lives to account by producing explanations of their educational influences in their own learning in enquiries of the kind, ‘How am I improving what I am doing?’ They do this in contexts where they are seeking to live the values they use to give life meaning and purpose as fully as they can.”

There are lots of things that are particularly striking about this whole approach but our wide-ranging discussion caused me to focus on the importance of having a space in which to be reflective and articulate our learning and understanding to improve our practice. Where Marie’s interest is the classroom, I was thinking about implications in my field of youth work and young people’s social care.

I am a naturally curious person. I like to learn, to explore ideas and see how they chime with my views, philosophies and values. Whenever I’m learning about something new in whatever field, I’m thinking about how I can use this new knowledge or way of thinking in my work. Inevitably, and this has always been the case, I am a reflective practitioner.

I think because this has been my habit, I’ve always assumed that it is true of most people that I come across through my work, especially those involved in supporting the learning and development of others. It’s very human work, why wouldn’t you be curious enough to interrogate it and ask what else you can contribute to it? But I have learned over the years that I’m often wrong. Very many of us in these influential roles, fail to develop our own broader learning or a sense of ourselves in the wider world, not just in the context of our everyday concerns. Not only that, we assume this pose while exhorting those we teach or support to be good learners and citizens: curious, interested and engaged.

My line to social workers, foster carers and others involved in supporting young people as they prepare to leave care has been, “you have a duty to be curious”. I phrased it this way simply because these hardworking people are overloaded with statutory duties relating to their charges, so this seemed like a nice one to add.

What I was urging was for those closest to young people to model curiosity, to take an interest in learning, to show that learning was not something that always took place in a classroom, that finding out new things could teach you about yourself and your place in the world.

So if it’s not a personal habit, how do we ensure that professionals working with young people have the opportunity to learn, explore and reflect as part of their roles? Usually, particularly in social care, these opportunities will be delivered through supervision and training days. Supervision will almost certainly be filled with addressing difficult casework rather than personal development or reflection.

Training days are interesting. My experience is that participants often expect to be told something new, rather than to experience an opportunity to reflect on their practice, in a less directive way. This tells us a lot about adults thinking about training as they experienced school – someone stands at the front and tells you something, you learn it. However, if a session goes well, evaluation forms will say, “it was good to get the chance to reflect on my work”, even if that wasn’t what they were expecting at the outset.

So perhaps we need to create those curious and reflective habits more explicitly at work? We should be clear that reflection and exploration of practice, asking questions about what we do and how we do it, is still critical to our doing it well and that spending time doing these things will improve our practice.

This is a big issue and I’ve been thinking about it a lot in different ways over the last few years. Now that I’m freelance, I want to write about it in more depth. So these are first thoughts, I want to take the time to unpick them.

If we stop learning, we are hardly living..

I have always been curious about the world. When I was very young, I loved science and astronomy books. I wanted to understand how the universe worked and I was overwhelmed by a romantic wonder at its complexity.

Before everyone realised that I couldn’t add up, my mother assumed that I would be an astro-physicist. But, eventually, we were all resigned to the life I would have: craning my neck on a dark night and holding my breath at the majesty of it all.

I still hold my breath and I still want to understand. It’s lucky for me that the internet provides me with endless sources of new stuff to know, that science on television has learned a visual language that can explain some of the most complex aspects of our universe.

I’ve learned more in the last few years about physics and chemistry than I ever learned in school and I also know that physics in school is way better now than it was for me. I was never told that I was made of stars, that understanding forces with weights and pulleys could help me understand space-time. I wish I’d learned that then.

But never mind, it’s important to me that I’m still learning and I’m always interested in learning something new. Understanding something.

Today I spent the morning with brilliant and interesting people who wanted to share their ideas and knowledge with me. The internet has done this to us. We’ve realised that we can talk to each other, that there are others out there: the geeks, the nerds, the info-philes, the artists, the creatives, the thinkers, the dreamers. We can find each other with a hashtag.

And then this afternoon, my brother-in-law shared this on Facebook:

It made me really emotional. It reminded me that awe, wonder, curiosity and the desire to learn and understand, are the other forces that connect us to each other and bind us to the universe we share.

If you work with vulnerable young people, watch this…

This morning, my partner showed me a fantastic TED video. The speaker is Dr. Brené Brown, a research scientist in social work. She talks about the years she’s spent trying to understand some of our most complex human emotions, through the collection of qualitative data – our stories.

She has some really interesting things to say about vulnerability and our avoidance of it at all costs. It really struck a chord with me after an interesting conversation during the training I was running yesterday. We talked about how some care leavers are quick to throw the emotional shutters down because they don’t want to open up, mostly because it’s too hard and there’s no trust. I think Dr. Brown has a lot to say to us and them. If we can open up and embrace our vulnerability, we can be happier.

It’s worth 18 minutes of your time. Really.

Running #training tomorrow…It’s all about the preparation

I’ve been finishing my planning for the training course I’m running tomorrow. I’m very particular before a course and part of the detailed preparation I do is about having a clear narrative in my head for the day.

I think about the key message I want delegates to leave with and I do my best to thread it through every activity and all of the discussion.

I go through all the activities and handouts and make detailed notes for the presentation sections. I won’t use these notes but the act of making them is a way of rehearsing what I’m going to say.

In fact all the preparation I do is, in part, rehearsal. I find myself imagining the group, the training room, the first few things I’m going to say. I start to put myself there in my head so that when I arrive tomorrow morning, I’m already comfortable.

These are the methods I’ve learned over the years and they are the techniques I rely on to enable me to deliver a course flexibly, responsively and with humour. I can look like I’m freewheeling and going with the flow, even disappearing off on tangents. But the only reason I can do that is because I am prepared. Totally prepared.