SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

—    The children's agenda needs to be promoted and pursued as an essential element of the education standards agenda, and not a diversion from it.

—    Teachers are keenly interested in and committed to the general well-being and development of the children and young people with whom they work, as well as in their educational attainment.

—    Clarity is needed as to the specific expertise that each profession within the children's workforce is best placed to contribute, because effective inter-professional working is predicated on clear professional identities and roles.

—    The implementation of structures to support the children's agenda needs to be informed by, and to avoid destabilising, good practice where it exists.

—    It is important to exploit the potential of the children's agenda to support recruitment, progression, diversification and retention across the children's workforce, as without good staff the aspirations set out in Every Child Matters will not be realised.

INTRODUCTION

  1.  The General Teaching Council for England (GTC) is the independent professional body for the teaching profession. Its main duties are to regulate the teaching profession and to advise the Secretary of State on a range of issues that concern teaching and learning. The Council acts in the public interest to contribute to raising the standards of teaching and learning.

2.  The GTC has co-hosted one inter-professional event with the General Social Care Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council, and is shortly to host another such event as part of a shared commitment to providing opportunities for the sort of professional dialogue that will support effective collaborative working. Practitioners from social work, education, and children's health services explored what it means to work collaboratively and what barriers and opportunities exist for developing multi-agency working focused on the needs of the child. The views of the participants in this meeting have informed this memorandum along with the GTC's response to the Green Paper Every Child Matters. This submission set out to reflect those of the Select Committee's themes of inquiry that the GTC feels best placed to inform at this point.

A VALUES BASE FOR THE CHILDREN'S AGENDA—TO UNDERPIN CULTURAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

3.  The GTC warmly endorses the Government's stated aim to "put children at the heart of our policies, and to organise services around their needs." (Every Child Matters). It is consonant with teachers' own view of their professional role, as captured in the GTC's code of professional values and practice.

Teachers have high expectations for all pupils, helping them progress regardless of their personal circumstances and different needs and backgrounds. They work to make sure that pupils develop intellectually and personally, and to safeguard pupils' general health, safety and well-being.

Teachers recognise that the well-being and development of pupils often depend on working in partnership with different professionals . . . They respect the skills, expertise, and contributions of these colleagues and partners and are concerned to build productive working relationships with them in the interests of pupils.

Extracts from the GTC Code of Professional Values and Practice, 2001

  4.  Our early cross-professional dialogue has reinforced the importance of shared and understood objectives for children and young people, informed by their own aspirations and those of their families and carers. The GTC believes that Every Child Matters sets out a positive basis for such aspirations, and this needs to be embedded in the forthcoming common core of knowledge and understanding for the children's workforce.

5.  Every Child Matters has provided the impetus for a series of significant structural changes within services for children and young people: the establishment of new posts, including the children's commissioner and directors of children's services; and new institutions, such as extended schools, integrated children's services and children's centres. The GTC understands the importance of getting the structures right but cautions against relying on structural change to deliver cultural change on its own. Those leading the children's agenda nationally and locally need to have regard to the communication of the agenda to the staff involved, in order to promote the opportunities for enhanced professional practice, and to mitigate the fears staff may have. At present much energy nationally and locally is focused on preparing for and implementing structural change. If early attention can be given to constructive dialogue with and between the staff affected there is more chance that the desired outcomes for children and young people will be realised. The understanding and support of the staff concerned is not an end in itself but one means to the ends set out in the Green Paper.

THE PLACE OF EDUCATION WITHIN INTEGRATED SERVICES

6.  The education service has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the children's agenda by virtue of being a universal service. Appropriately trained education professionals are well placed to identify risk or diagnose need at an early stage, due to their regular contact with children and young people, and to the opportunities they have for observing peer groups and discerning differential patterns of development or behaviour.

7.  The education service has been closely focused on what is referred to as the standards agenda. People who enter teaching do so to improve the life chances of pupils through learning, and the profession is committed to pursuing improvements in pupil learning. However, there has been a persistent concern that the wider goals for young people set out in Every Child Matters, implying a wider role for schools and teachers, are at risk if schools are held to account in a narrow way for educational outcomes. This risk informs the GTC's comments, below, about inspection and other forms of accountability.

TRAINING, DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT NEEDS

8.  The GTC asserts that effective multi-agency working is based on collaboration between professionals who are:

—    equipped to be effective in their own specific roles;

—    clear about the unique contribution, and the boundaries, of their expertise;

—    well-informed about the role and expertise of other practitioners working with children and young people; and

—    supported by common frameworks—based on shared values—that shape and inform practice.

9.  These assertions have clear implications for training and development. First, there must continue to be a strong focus on "role-specific" professional development within the professions represented in the children's workforce. Teachers need to be effective in their own professional context in order to add value to multi-agency work. Further, they need to understand which interventions are consonant with their responsibilities, roles, and training, and where they are advised to refer issues to other professionals or services.

10.  Second, teachers and other school staff need early opportunities to understand the roles and practices of other professionals and services. This opportunity needs to be provided during the formative professional phase, but might be best addressed after initial teacher training, during early professional practice. Opportunities for inter-professional training and development might enhance mutual understanding of roles and practices, and the development of skills to support multi-agency working and effective working with children, parents and carers.

11.  Third, practitioners working in a multi-professional context need to espouse common aspirations for children and young people that are pursued through common processes. The DfES work on the common core and the common assessment framework should contribute to this end. Practitioners across the children's workforce will need timely training in the use of new procedures such as the common assessment framework.

12.  The Council is conscious that school staff, other than teachers, play a key role in information gate keeping and in support for pupils with specific needs. All school staff will need training to raise awareness of new expectations placed on schools as well as specific training for the individual members of staff assuming key roles.

13.  The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) has already embarked on potentially exciting work to capture the leadership and management demands of extended schools, and integrated children's centres. This work rightly emphasises the need for leaders with advanced skills in co-ordinating services including those beyond their own professional sphere, and being entrepreneurial and innovative in identifying human, material and financial resources that support wide objectives for children and young people.

14.  The GTC would further emphasise the need to retain and sustain expert leadership of teaching and learning within educational institutions, as those institutions take on a wider focus.

15.  The GTC is represented on the Children's Workforce Network, and will be pursuing through this and other channels its interest in the opportunities presented by the children's agenda for innovations in career development for staff in the children's workforce. If properly exploited, such opportunities may assist with the recruitment, progression and retention challenges faced across the children's workforce. Much has been said about the potential of the common core of skills and knowledge to support transfer between professions. The GTC anticipates that the common core is more likely to support mobility at entry level—ie providing a common grounding for those entering the children's workforce via any sphere—and to support the creation as appropriate of `hybrid' roles in contexts such as extended schools, rather than anticipating much growth in the wholesale transfer of `fully-fledged' professionals from one sphere of the children's workforce to another.

  16.  Beyond the passage of the Bill, the GTC intends to work further with other professional bodies representing the children's workforce to identify the development needs that will support the aspirations for children and young people set out in Every Child Matters.

INSPECTION

17.  The GTC would like to address the wider question of how to assure the quality of children's services, to which inspection is one part of the answer.

  18.  Key to the success of the children's agenda is the integration and rationalisation of standards, targets, plans, funding and accountability frameworks across a range of services and professions with distinctive cultures and practices, such that what emerges captures what is important about service-specific outcomes and cross-cutting objectives for children and young people. It is imperative that potential tensions between service-specific and integrated service objectives are resolved in the interests of children and those working with them. For example, schools experience some tensions between expectations placed upon them—which they embrace—about social inclusion, and a system of public accountability that focuses primarily on the educational attainment of pupils. In the area of post-16 education there are considerable challenges in establishing the seamless service intended in the Children Bill. There can be difficulties around funding, prescribed frameworks and targets placed upon the learning institution and professionals involved.

  19.  The GTC recommends a stronger strategic focus on the development and alignment of standards frameworks to support practice across the children's workforce. It appears that there is not yet a vision for the extent to which reform within sectors should include extending standards frameworks to entry and intermediate level practitioners, let alone a vision for the children's workforce as a whole. In teaching, for example, standards have been devised for higher level teaching assistants (HLTAs) but there are other staff directly involved in teaching who are not working within a framework set by occupational standards. Is the aspiration to extend the reach of professionalism—with the rights and responsibilities conveyed by the term—to new levels of practice within the children's workforce, or to create a workforce with a cadre of professionals operating within a wider occupational group? The merits and demerits of each approach have not been explored with stakeholders.

20.  Central government also needs to have regard to the processes by which it manages and accounts for its delivery in relation to the children's agenda.

INFORMATION-SHARING AND RECORDING

  21.  Practitioners who took part in our cross-professional seminar were emphatic about the importance of clear guidance across integrated children's services on information sharing and recording. A lack of clarity persists within services about disclosure to children, young people, parents and careers, which suggests it is likely that procedures or understanding vary between services as well. The proposed common assessment framework is potentially an important structure on which to build common practice. It will be most effective if there is consistency and specificity in the use of language on the part of the diverse professionals who may be recording information in the context of its operation. The development of this shared language should not be left to chance.

22.  Professional bodies play a key role in codifying conduct through the development and publication of professional codes. These may need to reflect new inter-professional standards around information sharing.

November 2004