Early intervention isn't just for the early years
by Louise Bazalgette
Since the riots took place in summer last year, politicians, journalists, academics and other commentators have all been searching for explanations. One of the most popular conclusions was that the parents were to blame for bringing up their children without the necessary self-discipline and values. Why didn’t their children have the will-power to stay away from the affected areas and to resist looting or the values to tell them that it was wrong to devastate local businesses?
All of this speculation brought the issue of parenting back to the forefront of the Coalition Government’s agenda and in October 2011 David Cameron appointed Louise Casey to lead the government’s response to the riots, focusing particularly on creating new packages of support to correct poor parenting in the estimated 120,000 ‘problem families’ (first identified as targets of the Labour government’s Family Intervention Programme) and tackling antisocial behaviour.
However, the Coalition’s approach to supporting better parenting has not only targeted those families already labelled as a ‘problem’. As early as May 2010, the Coalition’s programme for government made clear their shared commitment to ‘early intervention’ to support vulnerable families through Sure Start and health visiting. Since then a number of high profile independent reviews commissioned by the government, led by Graham Allen, Frank Field and Eileen Munro have emphasised the huge importance of providing early help to support parents in their job of bringing up healthy, happy children with all of the social, emotional and language skills that they will need once they start school if they are to thrive.
Many of these ideas have been adopted enthusiastically by the Government. The 2011 DfE policy document ‘Supporting Families in the Foundation Years’, which focuses on the needs of children in the first five years of life, observes:
Graham Allen’s work has shown the need for a more consistent approach to early intervention for the neediest families, including getting early extra support to disadvantaged children and their families. We need to promote effective, evidence-based early intervention so that families receive the right help as soon as possible.
However, despite their professed enthusiasm for this concept of ‘early intervention’, there remains a major gap in the Coalition Government’s thinking around parenting. As we observed in The Home Front, our report on parenting that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched in January last year, the early intervention principle does not only apply to the ‘early years’. It means intervening to offer help and support to parents as soon as it is needed at any point in childhood, before problems are allowed to escalate. It is right that the Government should investigate how we can support children as early as possible in their lives but not to the exclusion of other age groups. It is a startling omission that the Government currently has no strategy for supporting the parents of school-age children who do not meet the threshold for receiving help from social services.
The Government’s response to the Munro review of child protection, published in July last year, recognised the need for better coordination of an ‘early help offer to children, young people and families’. It even went so far as to observe that this help should be available ‘when a problem first arises at any stage in life … Evidence shows that preventative services do more to reduce abuse and neglect than reactive services’. However, the examples this document gives for how such help might be provided revolve around Children’s Centres and youth services for teenagers, with nothing proposed for the 8-10 years of childhood that stretch out in-between.
As the universal service that reaches all children aged 5 and over, schools are the obvious route for providing support to parents of school-age children who are experiencing problems. However, Michael Gove’s 2010 education white paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ was silent on the subject of schools’ role in supporting parents in their parenting role, referring instead only to the importance that parents should have a choice of school, and to a school’s duty to provide information to parents. This is a significant omission and an issue that has subsequently been highlighted by Ofsted’s evidence to Frank Field’s review on Poverty and Life Chances, which observed that ‘more remains to be done to convince some schools that parental engagement is central to their core purpose of raising attainment’.
Failure to intervene to improve parenting for school-age children also has clear implications for the numbers of children entering care. It was reported today that record numbers of children are being taken into care, with neglectful parenting being particularly responsible for this rise. Last year 27,310 children were taken into care and of these, 60 per cent were aged 5 or older. It is clear that poor parenting is not an issue that only affects children aged 0-5, therefore ‘early help’ parenting support services delivered solely through health visitors and Children’s Centres will be wholly insufficient given the large number of older children who remain at risk of parental neglect and low attainment. The Coalition Government needs a strategy for providing ‘early help’ services to struggling parents at any stage in their children’s childhood, and the obvious role for schools in supporting parents cannot continue to be ignored.
David Hume 37
Don't you just love middle class moral conceit/certainty that their views are the truth? Louise Bazalgette asks "Why didn’t their children have the will-power to stay away from the affected areas and to resist looting or the values to tell them that it was wrong to devastate local businesses"? Maybe dear Louise they do not hold your middle class regard for property and its attendant moral sanctities.
If you own property or are likely to then you probably think its possession is important. If you do not and are unlikely to, then you
are more prone not to kneel down and worship the ownership of property. To believe that parents who have little and are unlikely to can or even want to instil in their children such worship is shockingly naive and myopic. Why would they? Why should they? They do not live in your warped certainties Louise.
This myopia blinds middle class do gooders like Louise here and most of the academic/ivory tower thinkers in Demos and other Tory think tanks to laughable assertions. Talk about their living in a make believe world. Maybe if Louise and her like actually experienced the life of those she morally castigates, she might, just might, come to understand the total conceit and immoral nonsense she utters.
PS
You might also consider the moral contradiction of teaching children
Christianity. They see those preaching 'go give all that you have to the poor' in practice doing, as they always have, the very opposite. A Church avaricious for property. A head of the Cof E living in vast wealth acreting ever more for her family. A Tory government peopled by millionaires cutting aid to disabled children. Tory bankers paying themselves obscene money for bringing the world's economy to its knees. Morality? How can children work out the hypocrisy of your twee middle class morality?
Mark Macho
Louise, the children cannot figure out the values you so dearly love.
Britain loves health but drinks itself silly. You tell the children to
be peaceful but the country is almost always at war. You talk
about property owning democracy but many hard working people
of all ages who have jobs cannot afford a house of which there is a shortage. You tell them to get an education but increasingly leave the attendant financial worries to them.
All this while trying to get them to
have a look at the Gospels which tell them to 'love their enemies,
do good to those who hate you...' and What does it profit a person
to gain the whole world and lose his soul?' You believe in equality and
democracy and make sure everyone shells out for Monarchs who are already billionaires. We say money is not everything but find the poor sad or ridiculous and vote for wealthy people as clever and good. Inherit and you have social status though you have done nothing. Inherit nothing and you are more or less invisible.
Will and Harry are on TV nightly , a constant focus of national attention just for being born.
Children cannot figure it all out. They are too honest. In truth
it does not make sense. It holds mutually contradictory values
and it only hangs together for hypocrites or people who are not very bright. And if you think life is a game of chance why bother with government except to load the dice?
David Vinter
David Hume 37-----you don't value houses, go live in a tent! And try growing your own food.
David Vinter
Would I be wrong in thinking that we have today, parents who by their limited experience of what might be called the higher levels of culture, science, music, reading, even TV programmes, and knowledge of how the world 'works' that they have no concept of just how far ahead are some children of school age.
After all where might my family be had my reading been limited to the Sun or Daily Sport? It seems that a very poor education takes more than one generation for a child to climb the ladder of asking
WHY often enough! And of course getting the correct answer!