FULL SUBMISSION

  1.  This submission from the National Union of Teachers (NUT) focuses on several of the broad issues outlined within the terms of reference for the inquiry into Every Child Matters announced by the Education and Skills Committee. The submission focuses on the place of education respectively within integrated services; the practical implications of the duty to collaborate, including the effect of funding streams and location of staff and facilities; staff and management needs including team building, leadership and training; and the creation, management and sharing of records, including electronic databases.

FULL SERVICE/EXTENDED SCHOOLS

  2.  There is a growing recognition that schools cannot solve the problems associated with social exclusion and multiple disadvantages on their own. The resulting demands that this places on school staff have been widely acknowledged, together with the need for the availability and accessibility of specialist advice. One response to these problems has been the development of multi-agency approaches. The provision of a base within schools for outside expertise has long been one means of co-ordinating multi-agency approaches and, at the same time, creating a solution to the growing demands placed on school staff.

  3.  The National Union of Teachers has worked jointly with the Department for Education and Skills in commissioning a literature review of extended schools provision[10]. A copy of the research report "Towards Extended Schools" is enclosed. The literature review demonstrated that there are many initiatives within the broad spectrum of full service school delivery in the UK context which are characterised by a holistic approach to meeting the needs of young people and their families. There are already a variety of extended/full service schools in the UK which attempt to promote social wellbeing and to meet the needs of local populations as a means of promoting educational achievements.

  4.  The NUT/DfES research presented accounts of practitioners' experiences of the difficulties and challenges associated with full service or extended school service delivery. From individual reviews carried out as part of the literature review the following issues emerge as the difficulties and challenges associated with extended school delivery: "turf" (ownership of the infrastructure and site); governance; funding; training; controversy and reluctance; differences in aims, cultures and procedures; overload or increased workload; and impossibility (something being considered just too complicated).

  5.  Much of the literature contains insights into attempts to establish full service or extended schools that focus on the practicalities of development and implementation. The literature review reflected the limited amount of large scale and rigorous evaluation of extended schools and demonstrated that there is no one correct model or blueprint of full service or extended school service delivery. The diversity surrounding the concept emerged as its major strength and much of what has been learnt about the creation of partnerships will stand schools in good stead to take on board the Every Child Matters agenda.

  6.  The work which the NUT has carried out surrounding extended schools suggests that the common key components to complex, multi-agency collaboratives include: having clear aims and purpose; strong leadership; administrative excellence; consistent long-term funding from a variety of sources; community and parental involvement; effective publicity and communication; an appropriate designated location; and opportunities for extended curriculum and out of hours learning.

  7.  In addition, the NUT/DfES research pointed to the necessity for the development of service provision to be grown from the bottom-up. Extended school service provision cannot be imposed. School communities should be able to identify their needs for location of services and then call for financial and organisational support. Staff have to be involved in decision making. Excessive workload must not be a consequence of extended school provision. The NUT is concerned, therefore, about the proposal in the Government's "Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners" that "we want all schools to become extended schools". The imposition by Government of such responsibilities on all schools is very different from the school-led involvement which has characterised the development of this initiative to date.

  8.  Teachers must be motivated and have ownership of any major initiative of this kind, if the desired changes are to be implemented. It would also be essential to ensure that adequate resourcing is available to all schools, at least at the same levels as is available for those involved in previous pilot schemes, if schools are to be able to take on such additional responsibilities.

  9.  The NUT has welcomed the recognition of the potential for shared and community use of schools through the concept of "extended schools", in particular, the siting of health and social services in schools, which would be particularly beneficial in areas of disadvantage. Such approaches would need to be based upon a presumption of a "joined up" strategic approach at local authority level. It is also essential to ensure that schools participating in the extended schools' initiative are not subsumed into the larger community organisations which would be established and that they retain their own distinct identity.

  10.  While Children's Trusts are being established, the relationship between Trusts and schools have yet to be explored. Schools cannot simply create new services themselves. Neither can local authorities simply establish new services in schools. The evidence is that for extended schools and full service schools to be successful, it is schools which have to take the lead in initiating and developing services in co-ordination with local authorities. In short, schools themselves must own the development of services. Otherwise, those services will not be effective.

  11.  Alongside the "Every Child Matters" agenda, the Government has proposed that local authorities develop a "single conversation" with schools. While there are strong arguments for streamlining the quality assurance role of local authorities, the single conversation has yet to factor in the potential for supporting schools in working with each other or defining the services to which schools should be entitled.

EVERY SCHOOL MATTERS

  12.  Social class still has a powerful influence on the achievements of young people. To their credit the Government has recognised this. There needs, however, to be proper joined up thinking, to use a familiar phrase, on how initiatives in communities to tackle and social and economic deprivation can link up to initiatives which tackle such deprivation in educational achievements.

  13.  The greatest potential for such joined up thinking lies in the widely welcomed "Every Child Matters" agenda which recognises and sustains the idea that every school is at the centre of its community. It is an approach which is equally important for urban and rural communities.

  14.  If every child does matter, then it is essential that the Government recognises that this is what schools already seek to carry out in practice every single day. Schools recognise the need to meet all the needs of children as a basis for increasing educational opportunities. Schools already recognise the need to encourage and involve families and communities in meeting their own needs and the needs of their children. Schools have long recognised the centrality of multi-agency working or collaboration in addressing the multiple and interlinked problems of children and their families.

  15.  Given the centrality of schools to the engagement of each child with the universal services set up to support young people, it is clear that the school is key to the delivery of the new national agenda for children and young people. The NUT believes it is important to recognise that many schools have already embraced this agenda through local initiatives, and others have been doing so for many years. Implementation of the Every Child Matters agenda should focus on identifying and reducing the barriers which hamper the attempts of schools to achieve a seamless service for children between school and the other services.

  16.  Tensions exist between the implementation of a number of existing policies agendas within schools and the Government must focus on the practical barriers, in terms of funding streams, training, overload of workload concerns, competing priorities and pressures, the lack of skilled cross disciplinary professionals and the overloaded curriculum.

  17.  The NUT is concerned that a gap appears to be developing between the framework for the inspection of schools and the broad requirements on education in the Every Child Matters agenda. A New Relationship with Schools suggests that future school inspections will cover: quality of education provided; educational standards; spiritual; moral, social and cultural development.

  18.  In addition school inspections will also have to cover the five outcomes for children and young people set out in Every Child Matters. The NUT is concerned about the balance of priorities which head teachers and governors are likely to infer from the emerging framework. On the one hand the Government is urging local authorities to make arrangements for schools to play a greater role in respect of the requirements of Every Child Matters, but with the other hand it is encouraging schools to concentrate their efforts on other aspects of their work.

  19.  This tension is certainly apparent in the New Relationship with Schools initiative, in particular, the establishment of School Improvement Partners (SIPs) to undertake school improvement support functions which are currently the domain of LEA personnel. The assertion which is used by Government to justify the establishment of SIPs, that existing relationships between schools and LEA link advisers lack "sharpness and professional credibility", disregards the evidence from Ofsted that school improvement is consistently satisfactory or better in the vast majority of LEAs. Support for school improvement for individual schools must be set in the wider context of local community characteristics and also include developments arising from "Every Child Matters". For this reason, strong links between schools and LEAs, through advisors and other LEA personnel, are vital if schools are to continue to focus on raising standards whilst at the same time address the wider remit of Every Child Matters.

  20.  The NUT's concerns about the balance of priorities applies equally to the inspection of local education authorities. The operational arrangements for inspection proposed by Ofsted, through Joint Area Reviews, would support the holistic approach to children's services required by the Children Bill and "Every Child Matters". The proposed set of outcomes inspection should consider appear to be more balanced and liable to give a more accurate picture of local service provision than current performance indicators, which are concerned almost exclusively with educational attainment as defined by performance in National Curriculum tests and GCSE examinations.

  21.  "Education and training", however, represents only one out of the five "Every Child Matters" outcomes. As a result, the importance of local authorities' school improvement functions could be lost in the new inspection arrangements. The draft inspection criteria for Joint Area Reviews which were circulated in May this year indicate, for example, that there are several areas of LEA work which may not be directly reviewed, such as support for school leadership and management, governors and teachers' CPD. The NUT believes that it is vital that information on the quality of local authorities' support for school improvement is not lost as a result of addressing the Every Child Matters agenda.

ROLE OF THE SCHOOL IN THE LOCAL COMMUNITY

  22.  The NUT agrees that in an increasingly diverse and mobile society, schools are the glue that holds communities together. The NUT believes that it is important to recognise that schools cannot however solve all the problems associated with vulnerable children. It cannot be assumed that by bringing together social care and education services joint working between a range of traditionally distinct professionals will simply fall into place. This requires significant cultural change and training and engagement of cohorts of staff who already work in high pressure and acutely time pressured environments. Professionals are being asked to work in a different way, to work collaboratively and to use different information systems and possibly work in different locations. This can not happen overnight.

  23.  The provision of a base within schools for outside expertise is one way of coordinating multi-agency approaches and at the same time creating a solution to the growing demands placed on school staff. However, this must not obscure the fact that many of the specialist support services such as educational psychologist services and speech and language therapy services are chronically understaffed and that children referred by schools regularly remain on long waiting lists. Practical barriers such as staff shortages and recruiting and retaining highly skilled and experienced professionals hamper multi-agency approaches.

  24.  The Every Child Matters agenda has raised the question of how schools should be accountable to their communities, and how they can be part of a whole system which meets children's diverse needs. The local authority, which is responsible for children services, will play a crucial role in serving the communities children. The NUT does not believe that schools should be among the list of bodies in the Children Bill under a duty to cooperate over children services. Schools and teachers have far too may statutory duties already and the NUT does not agree that there is any need to add a further duty. It is a proposal to create a vaguely drawn and largely unenforceable statutory duty, writing on to the statutory book something that every good teacher has always done.

  25.  The Government should consider what measures it should be taking to ensure that independent schools are fully involved in the provision of integrated children services, and to ensure that Academies are fully involved in the provision of integrated children services.

SCHOOL AUTONOMY AND DIVERSITY OF TYPE OF SCHOOL

  26.  One of the elements of the current Government's approach to offering choice to parents has been to advocate more autonomy for individual schools and greater diversity among schools. Although schools, particularly secondary schools, value the greater autonomy that is seen to accompany success in academic results, and the freedom to develop their own unique ethos, one universal aspect of every school should be its role in the delivery of integrated children services. It is essential to the success of the new agenda that schools work as public services, and work together with families and local communities to ensure that the whole system meets the needs of all children. This is also the only way in which the Government's twin aims of social inclusion and community cohesion can be achieved.

  27.  The Government needs to ensure that Academy schools, faith schools, specialist schools and schools which control their admissions set out their plans on how they will meet the needs of all pupils in their local area with regard to children's services.

  28.  Though local authorities can lead change, they can only drive it with the active engagement of communities, schools, colleges and the full range of other service providers. For councils to be able to lead learning locally, it is important that they are able to challenge all schools about their services and hold them to account for what they deliver.

  29.  Schools' forums for advising local authorities on funding schools are a growing success. The NUT recommends that local authorities should establish local education advisory forums, which would advise local authorities on the development of the "Every Child Matters" agenda, including on the development of extended and full service schools. Education advisory forums would be responsible also for providing advice on the development of a single conversation with schools and its relationship with the quality assurance of other local authority services.

  30.  If local authorities are to co-ordinate with and provide effective support to schools, then education forums should have the status to be effective. Their membership should include representatives of parent, teacher and governor organisations and could be chaired by lead members of children's services. It is essential, in this context that local authorities retain second-tier officers for education and social services in order that schools can be confident that when initiatives are introduced and agreed, they can be implemented successfully.

  31.  Initiatives for the development of extended and full service schools should come from schools themselves. Audits should be conducted of additional services needed at school-level by schools in conjunction with local authorities. With financial and logistical support from local authorities, schools would make proposals for developments. With funding support from Government, local authorities would be required to cost developments and guarantee funding, including capital funding.

ADMISSIONS AND LOCAL SCHOOLS

  32.  One of the major elements of the Government's approach is an increasing emphasis on parental choice of school. In addition, several categories of school such as specialist schools, academy schools and faith schools select some or all of their pupils. The Government has been less than successful in its policy to limit selection and to promote parental preference. Parents do not necessarily want a wide choice of schools they want a choice of "good" schools. The House of Commons Select Education and Skill's report on "School Admissions" (July 2004) emphasised the importance of the availability of good local schools over "choice" of schools.

"The existence of an excellent but distant or oversubscribed specialist school is no comfort to parents who deem the only school available to them to be good enough. Current policy aims to reward those schools that are academically successful and in so doing penalises those that are not."

  33.  The NUT has made its opposition clear to selection by aptitude as well as ability. The effort of partial selection procedures should be considered carefully so that the needs of all children in a locality are taken into account.

  34.  Successfully engaging schools with the children's services agenda is central to achieving its objectives, particularly given the degree of autonomy they now enjoy. There is a specific issue to be addressed in the inherent contradiction between aspects of the well-established "standards agenda" and the more recent emphasis on inclusion and community cohesion and now the focus on children's services.

  35.  Many head teachers argue that the pressure to delivery on targets, and to look out for their school's position in performance tables, makes it difficult to give the same priority to inclusion and community cohesion issues, let alone to embrace closer relationships with a broader range of services—where in some cases, such relationships may not anyway be wholly positive.

  36.  A number of authorities have made a lot of progress through excellence clusters and extended schools programmes, but it is essential to try and create and promote an authority-wide vision. To this end, the NUT recommends that the Government should review the extent to which present arrangements act as an incentive for schools to behave in line with changing aims and objectives; the NUT would argue that some significant adjustments are necessary. The Government must harmonise its policies and priorities.

  37.  A growing number of children do not attend their local school, with children travelling further to school as they move through the system. The NUT believes that Government policy should place greater emphasis on encouraging schools to recruit pupils from their local area. The Government must ensure fair admissions and shared responsibility between schools for inclusion and community cohesion. If not, attainment gaps, including between different ethnic groups, will widen further and there will be an even greater rise in the number of excluded pupils with SEN.

SCHOOL FUNDING

  38.  Accountability of funding remains a crucial consideration and this is a key concern. The recent Audit Commission study on education funding published in July 2004 states: "A minimum funding guarantee for schools and transitional funding for councils do not tackle areas of greatest need and represent inefficient use of resources".

  39.  Best value reviews, jointly led by education and social services, can be a useful starting point for developing a more integrated approach to structuring services for children and young people. A joint review can help foster closer working and produce a evidence base to steer the authority's approach to co-ordination and integration.

  40.  The disaggregation of budgets has been a major issue in authorities that have embarked on departmental restructuring. Disaggregation has exposed the chronic under funding of children's social care, which in the past had been subsidised by adult social care. It has been necessary to put more money into children's social care to make up for the shortfall.

  41.  Budget management has proved difficult in authorities that have embarked on restructuring since children's services budgets are highly volatile and demand driven. Authorities have had to grapple with the issue of how to protect school spending in the widest sense when budgets are integrated. Protection of the schools budget offers important reassurance to schools and the NUT believes such protection is essential in order to stabilise school budgets.

  42.  In the context of new local authority responsibilities for vulnerable children, each local authority should appoint lead professionals whose role it would be to provide advice to schools and take action where necessary when a vulnerable child has been identified. The proposed Children's Services Grant should be sufficient to fund the appointment of lead professionals.

THE SCHOOL WORKFORCE

  43.  The NUT believes that even in schools where numbers of staff and job titles remain unchanged, there will need to be an explicit focus within some roles on the liaison with other agencies. The Government will need to consider these issues explicitly and give a lead nationally on how schools are to be expected to support their staff and to recognise and organise additional responsibilities in terms of management allowances, non-contact time, and training.

  44.  The NUT recommends that the Government should consider and learn from the existing pressures on special educational needs coordinators in schools as an indicator of the pressures on staff whose role contains a focus on liaison with other agencies. The NUT carried out a survey of its special educational needs co-ordination (SENCO) members in 2003 and a copy of the survey is enclosed for the information of the Committee.

  45.  There are important implications for the training of school staff, management teams and head teachers flowing from the increasing range of staff based on the school site developing health and social services. One of the consistent themes in the NUT survey of SENCOs was the inadequacy of training provided for SENCOs, in terms of their own personal development, their management of other colleagues within the school, and their coordination and liaison with outside agencies.

THE CHILDREN BILL AND INFORMATION SHARING

  46.  The NUT is committed to the protection of children's rights. These rights relate not only to protection from harm, abuse and neglect but also to the right of privacy and the right of protection for family life. The Children Bill, as a Bill which deals with the sharing of information, should seek to balance these rights.

  47.  If there is to be a central database containing information about children, the NUT believes that it will be effectively useless unless adequate resources and training are allocated to those who will have guardianship of the information sources. Similarly, the NUT believes that unless some attempt is made to address the complexities that are likely to arise when dealing with multiple databases with differing levels of access, there is real danger that the information sharing structure will be unworkable. The death of Victoria Climbie was not due to an inability to share data but due to over worked and under staffed teams of professionals. No database can solve these problems. In fact, the creation of a database could be counter-productive, in becoming a panacea for all ills.

  48.  The NUT has a particular concern at the lack of parliamentary scrutiny that will be afforded to the data sharing provisions in the Children Bill. The Children Bill, when it becomes law, should comply with existing data protection and human rights' regimes. Only full parliamentary debate will allow proper consideration of the information sharing proposals in the Children Bill, so that the correct balance can be found.

  49.  The Green Paper gave relatively detailed descriptions of the Government's intention to set up individual files on each child in England and Wales. Each file would contain detailed information which would be accessible to a wide range of public bodies. The NUT appreciates that the Government's intention is to improve child protection by creating a framework for information sharing. Tragic deaths, such as that of Victoria Climbié, must be avoided at all costs.

  50.  The NUT, however, is concerned about a lack of balance. The Green Paper contained an apparent presumption that all data would be shared, with little consideration given to differing levels of access of the varying public bodies listed. Not only does this raise privacy issues, but it also creates a practical concern that so much information would be flowing to so many sources that children genuinely at risk might not be identified.

PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

  51.  The NUT is concerned that the "Every Child Matters" agenda does not appear to acknowledge the extent to which domestic violence is a key feature in the majority of child protection cases and that this has specific implications for all future strategic planning. No post or body proposed by the Children Bill has the needs of such children specifically under its remit despite the fact that domestic violence features in nearly three quarters of cases where children are on the child protection register.

  52.  The DfES claims that the Children Bill is putting in place a stronger statutory and multi-agency framework to protect all children from harm. The NUT believes, however, that local safeguarding bodies will not necessarily address the needs of children witnessing domestic violence unless explicitly reminded and required to do so. The NUT believes that safeguarding boards should have access to a domestic violence specialist and should support schools in ensuring that domestic violence is addressed through the National Curriculum.

  53.  The Children Bill, currently going through Parliament, is missing a vital opportunity to rectify a situation where the needs of children living in households where domestic violence has occurred, or is occurring, are picked up. The NUT believes that the needs of children who witness domestic violence should become a specific responsibility of the new directors of children's services and the safeguarding boards which the Children Bill proposes to introduce.

ORGANISATIONAL CHALLENGES

  54.  The NUT believes that the integration on children's services should start with the needs of the child and the family, with clearly defined outcomes. The preferred model should build on partnership working that already exists at LEA and school level and assume that if any structural changes are needed they will emerge from the agreed outcomes.

  55.  The NUT believes that a bottom-up approach is vital. Imposing structural change is not the only effective way to achieve more joined up working and better outcomes for children and young people. Each authority will choose a different starting point. The complex organisational changes being advanced by the Government present considerable staffing and organisational management challenges at both school and LEA level. Authorities and schools should not feel pressurised into focusing on departmental organisational only when there are in fact a raft of changes required to develop a more integrated approach to the way services are delivered.

  56.  The NUT would like to see practical changes achieved by focusing on vision and values, on a clear set of intended outcomes and on putting in place the processes needed to work towards these at differing paces. Significant change in focus is needed to successfully implement the approach of Every Child Matters, whether or not local authority departmental structures are merged. The process must be a collaborative one based on proper consultation across all disciplines and clear messages from Government about meeting the five objectives for children and young people set out in ECM.

  57.  Despite the cultural barriers, a common agenda can be developed around the needs of the child since this is a vision that all the different professionals including teachers already share. It will be essential to set up adequate joint training and staff development processes, in particular induction training. A major issue posed by more integrated working is the need for a bigger supply of people who can work across boundaries.

November 2004