In 2016 the government promised that funding
of up to £20 million would be available in England within the year for a new
‘What Works Centre’, with the stated aim of “…making sure social workers across
the country are able to learn from the very best examples of frontline social
work with children and families”. To date the new centre has not been launched and
there seems to be very little public information about what progress has been
made.
Andy Elvin, the chief executive of the
Adolescent and Children's Trust, seems to know something about what is going
on. He writes this month in the Guardian that 2017 will see the launch of the
What Works Centre which he says will roll out successful work from one local
authority to others and establish common models of service across child
protection and children’s social work. He concludes: “It is neither acceptable
nor sustainable for us to continue to have such variations in systems and
approaches; we must settle on a small number of evidence-based systems and make
sure they are rolled out across the UK.”
I am not entirely opposed to a ‘what works
centre’. Indeed, it may be quite a good idea. But I begin to get a little
worried when I hear the strong normative tone of Elvin’s conclusion which seems
wedded to a prescriptive top-down approach in which, I imagine, it is proposed
that some group of clever people will sift the available evidence and then
select that ‘small number’ of ‘evidence-based’ systems which are to be imposed
nationally.
The result of that kind of elitism is most
likely to be that ‘what works on paper’ rapidly becomes ‘what doesn’t work in
practice’.
