It is very good news that the House of
Lords has voted to strike out Clause 29 of the Children and Social Work Bill which many feared would give
ministers sweeping powers to exempt some local authorities from their legal
obligations to act to protect the rights of children and young people.
Of course, the clause may be re-inserted
when the Bill goes back to the Commons, but Lord Ramsbotham’s amendment is a
very welcome shot across the bows of what promised to be very bad legislation.
The government should now think again – and think very hard.
Clause 29 was under-pinned by what might
charitably be described as ‘confused thinking’; but some may prefer to call it
double talk, deception and spin. Ministers and civil servants have argued that
council children’s services departments are ‘over-regulated’. In order to
improve services, the argument goes, it is necessary to free local authorities from
regulation so that they can to innovate
and so develop better services. Ergo it
needs to be possible for regulation (legislation including parts of the
Children Act 1989) to be rolled back at the discretion of ministers to allow freedom
of action to authorities willing to innovate.
As Isabelle Trowler, the Chief Social
Worker for Children (a civil service post), argued in a recent letter [1]:
“If we don’t support this power (Clause 29)
we can no longer complain that the system is too bureaucratic and that we are
hamstrung by legislation. The title of the clause is ‘power to test a different
way of working’. It is about testing, trialling, piloting, and researching
other, better ways of delivery support to and protecting children. This is our
chance to test different ways of working to do the right thing, and we must
seize it.”
We could argue for some time about the
extent to which local authorities are “hamstrung” by legislation. My own view
is that most of the bureaucracy that hangs, like a dark cloud, over children’s
services stems not from legislation but from custom and practice. It consists
of ways of working driven by insistent demands for accountability and the
pervasive fear that no-one wants to be caught out if things go wrong. It
resides in complicated procedures and complex forms and labyrinthine assessment
checklists and associated computer systems, which have been designed to meet
the needs of managers and inspectors and auditors and central government
officials, not practitioners and service users. It resides in a culture of
management which insists that decisions are taken by laborious escalation and
that resources are controlled centrally and that professional discretion and
professional knowledge are not respected and not trusted. It stems from
attitudes that it is better to undertake an assessment than to provide a
service or that it is better to hold a series of meetings between managers and
practitioners, rather than meeting with, and listening to, a child or young person.
In short, I think there are some more
obvious culprits than legislation when it comes to deciding what is responsible
for causing bureaucracy in children’s services. My view is: don’t blame the
Children Act 1989 for bureaucracy, look nearer to home!
The other part of the government’s case for
Clause 29 concerns the issue of innovation.
‘Innovation’ is one of those words that sounds like we should all be in favour
of it; a word like ‘democracy’, ‘inventive’, ‘humanitarian’, ‘insightful’,
‘homely’, ‘comforting’. But first impressions can be misleading, not least
because, as we all know, there can be both good and bad innovations. Atomic and
chemical weapons were innovations once, as was sliced white bread, reality TV
shows and apartheid. In all probability bad innovations out-number the good
many fold.
Not only that but lots of innovations are
failures. Recent research by Beth Altringer [2] of the Harvard Business School
found innovation projects in global companies across diverse sectors failed
between 70% and 90% of the time. That makes innovation an expensive and
wasteful process.
I am not entirely against innovation, but it
is no simple remedy for services in which there are widely acknowledged quality
problems. Indeed, it is completely the wrong approach. Let me explain why.
An absolutely fundamental principle of
quality management, stemming from the work of one of the founding fathers of
the subject, William Edwards Deming [3], is that there is no point in making fundamental
changes to an operation or process to improve quality unless you understand the
causes of variation and poor quality in
the process. If we want to improve quality, we must improve the system of production and to do that we
must understand how the system works and where its failures and shortfalls
occur. The kinds of innovations which the Department for Education’s
‘Innovation Programme’ has funded are mostly what might be called interesting,
even inventive, ideas which may or may not work [4]. And those who are working
to implement them (managers, practitioners, academics) and those that fund them
(politicians and civil servants) have not based the designs on a rigorous
understanding of what causes poor quality in children’s services; they have
just said “It may be better to do it this way, let’s try”. That might be OK if
we had lots of time and resources to “let a thousand flowers blossom” [5], but
we don’t. Not only that, but blind experimenting on the live system – the
services which are actually being delivered to children and young people – is
distracting and disorientating for the people who deliver the services - and
often also for the people who receive them; the more so if the familiar
sign-posts and standards of legislation have been rolled back.
Deming also tells us that the correct
approach to higher quality and productivity is to “… improve constantly and
forever the system of production and service”. In trying to reform child
protection the government should have realised that what is required is not
innovation but improvement. Of course
an innovation may result in an
improvement, but equally it may not. Deming, on the other hand sees the true path
to improvement as only being achieved when everybody in the organisation works on a regular daily basis to understand the causes of poor quality and to accomplish
a transformation in the way in which things are done. The Japanese
manufacturers who took Deming’s philosophy forward in the 1950s instituted a
practice of continuous improvement which
is called Kaizen [6]. The idea is
that rather than large scale discontinuous changes being the route to higher
quality and productivity, what counts most are frequent small changes which
cumulate to greatly improved manufacturing or service processes. In an organisation
committed to Kaizen every worker is expected
every day to think not just about her or his job but also how her or his work,
and associated processes, can be improved. Doing the job and constantly improving
the job are simultaneous activities.
Kaizen is credited with bringing about the phenomenal transformation of
Japanese manufacturing which began after the Second World War. I doubt very
much that the government’s Innovation
Programme will be credited with any lasting improvement to children’s
services in England. Much more likely is that some new ways of working will
briefly flourish, almost certainly with mixed, or very mixed, or (most likely) no results. Meanwhile
serious service failures will continue to occur unabated and in a few years it
will all be back at square one, with another government and another minister
and another chief social worker coming up with yet another cunning wheeze.
What children and young people, and the
people who provide them with services, want and need are not ill-considered innovations.
They need services which are continuously improving; services which will always
be becoming safer and better as time goes by. Not here today and gone tomorrow flashes
in the pan – and certainly not Clause 29.
Notes
[1] A copy of this letter, dated 19th
October, has recently been shown to me. It is not clear to whom it is
addressed, but it is headed “Dear Colleagues” and I suspect that the recipients
were Directors of Children’s Services.
[3] Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the
Crisis. MIT Press.
[5] A quotation from a speech by Mao Zedong
in Peking in February 1957: "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a
hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the
arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
[6] Imai, Masaaki (1986). Kaizen: The
Key to Japan's Competitive Success. New York: Random House.
