Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
Reading the special Every Child Matters pull-out in Society Guardian yesterday one quote really stood out from the page. It was a headteacher who said 'Every Child Matters is everything that we’ve ever believed in’.
First, it reminded me what an achievement it was to put together a peice of legislation that has generated such widespread support. And second, i think it is enormously revealing about the challenges of implementing the ideas behind the leglislation.
The reason i think it is so revealing is that many professionals are still having enormous trouble coming to terms with the practical ramifications of new ways of working.
Many professional practices are deeply ingrained, rooted in years of training and experience. They are difficult to change. As a result, there is often a gap between the (genuine) support for Every Child Matters at a philosophical level and the changes in practice that will be required to achieve this on the ground.
And this is expecially true if people can’t see the link between the broad aims that they support and the changes that they are being asked to make to their practice. It seems that even widely supported programmes of reform can easily be overridden by the power of professional identities.
So what to do? The response is often to look for holes in the legislation: does everyone have a duty to cooperate? Are all the incentives and accountabilities in place? These strategies clearly have their part to play, but if we understand the problem (and therefore solution) to be one rooted in professional identities, rather than professional motivations, then perhaps that leads to a new emphasis.
There is a sentence in the national evaluation of Surestart that i keep returning to which says 'Agencies are more likely to collaborate with other initiatives if they believe that the efforts of both organsiations are contributing to meeting not only the same targets, but that those targets are seen to be meaningful'.
So the new emphasis (i think, at least) needs to be on the role that professionals can play as partners in reform, and the possibilities that can emerge for collaboration, based on clear sets of outcomes agreed at the local level. This is where the opportunity lies to connect ieals with real outcomes, with practice.
This is something that Demos has been working on for the last year, and is continuing to explore at the moment If you're interested in following it up, there are some links to various pieces of work below:
The Demos collection on professionalism is here.
An article that I wrote (as part of this project) on ‘local professionalism’ is here.
And the project we have underway on collaboration here.
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