|
Every Child Matters 
When asked what they regard as their priorities, children and young people consistently reply that they would like more ‘things to do and places to go.’
With their enhanced educational, ICT and community facilities, schools of the future will offer young people a personalised learning experience — a student-centred approach that has been successfully trialled by schools and colleges.
Better access to culture, sport and play will encourage children and young people to develop their talents and enjoy the benefits of participation. In a very real sense, Building Schools for the Future (BSF) has its roots in the Every Child Matters Agenda.
How did it all begin? In 2003, the government published a Green Paper called ‘Every Child Matters’. This was published in response to the report into the death of Victoria Climbié, the young girl who was abused, tortured, and eventually killed by her great aunt and the man with whom they lived.
The Green Paper prompted an unprecedented debate about services for children, young people and families. There was a wide consultation with people working in children's services and with parents, children and young people.
Following the consultation, the government published ‘Every Child Matters: the Next Steps’, and passed the Children Act 2004, providing the legislative spine for developing more effective and accessible services focused around the needs of children, young people and families.
Every Child Matters is a new approach to the well-being of children and young people from birth to age 19. Its five key outcomes are .
- Be healthy
- Stay safe
- Enjoy and achieve
- Make a positive contribution
- Achieve economic well-being.
The Building Schools for the Future programme is a springboard for joining up wider public-sector services, such as children’s and health services, on a single site at the heart of local communities. This is already starting to happen with Extended Schools and school clusters. Being able to build new health and community facilities significantly helps schools and local authorities deliver on Every Child Matters.
Undoubtedly, BSF is a vast change management programme with implications for broader public services, procurement models and skill sets. In order for local authorities to meet the aspirations of Every Child Matters, robust short- and long-term visions need to be in place. The visions need to be supported by frameworks and processes that ensure successful delivery.
Organisations such as Partnerships for Schools and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust advise that the programme should link to the five pillars of Every Child Matters.
This means that the organisations involved with providing services to children — from hospitals and schools to police and voluntary groups — will be teaming up in new ways, sharing information and working together, to protect children and young people from harm and help them achieve what they want in life. Children and young people will have far more say about issues that affect them as individuals and collectively.
Over the next few years, every local authority will be working with its partners, through children's trusts, to find out what works best for children and young people in its area and act on it. They will need to involve children and young people in this process, and when inspectors assess how local areas are doing they will listen especially to the views of children and young people themselves.
Culture, sport and play organisations, for example, have a unique role in promoting Every Child Matters by delivering on the five outcomes — particularly enjoying and achieving and making a positive contribution.
Social care welfare protection
The Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme aims to put in place a national framework to support the joining up of services, so that every child can achieve the five Every Child Matters’ outcomes.
The 10 key elements of the national framework are:
- The duty to co-operate to promote the well-being of children and young people
- The duty to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people
- The development of statutory local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) to replace non-statutory area child-protection committees (ACPCs)
- The appointment of local directors of children’s services
- The National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services
- The Outcomes Framework
- The development of an integrated inspection framework
- The appointment of a children's commissioner
- The development of a Common Assessment Framework
- Workforce reform to help develop skills and ensure staffing levels.
Social services play a central role in trying to improve outcomes for the most vulnerable, and a key measure of success will be achieving change through closing the gap between their outcomes and those of the majority of children and young people.
The Children Act 2004 requires local authorities to lead on integrated delivery through multi-agency children's trusts, to develop a children and young people's plan and to set up a shared database of children containing information relevant to their welfare.
Healthy eating
Local authorities will be invited to bid for extra capital to be spent on building kitchens in schools which currently have none. A £240mn cash injection will be given directly to local authorities and schools to subsidise ingredients for healthy meals after the end of the current £220mn transitional fund in 2007/08.
Cooking food on the school premises supports the government’s drive on healthy eating and in combating the childhood obesity epidemic. Funding is also available to set up a network of training schools for schools cooks. Schools will be staffed by experts in healthy cooking to boost the skills of the lunchtime workforce through tailored courses and mentoring. They are likely to be set up in schools and colleges that already have excellent food-preparation facilities, with £2mn of government funding available to upgrade them where necessary.
This investment comes on top of the capital-funding school-rebuilding programmes, Building Schools for the Future and the Primary Capital programme.
Diversity and inclusion
Building Schools for the Future is the opportunity to design in better facilities for the inclusion of pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and disabilities into mainstream schools.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 reinforces the right of pupils with special educational needs to be educated in mainstream schools.
It places new duties on education providers to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled pupils are not at a significant disadvantage. There is also a duty to plan for increased accessibility to school premises.
The 1997 Green Paper ‘Excellence for all Children’ proposed that as many pupils as possible should be educated in mainstream schools. There are many overlaps between increased community use of schools and increased inclusion.
The key effects of greater inclusion include: an increased level of pupil support, whether educational, social or medical; a greater number of para-professionals working in schools; and parents encouraged to offer support and work closely with schools.
There have been a number of initiatives that aim to improve opportunities for pupils who are not reaching their potential. Arrangements such as mentoring, counselling and house systems can not only help pupils feel more positive about their school experience but also reduce behavioural problems.
Useful websites
Every Child Matters home page
www.everychildmatters.gov.uk
Publications
www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/publications
Every Child Matters video
www.teachers.tv/video/242
Green paper
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2003/09/08/EveryChildMatters.pdf
National Literary Trust
www.literacytrust.org.uk/socialinclusion/youngpeople/greenpaper.html
National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE)
www.niace.org.uk/Organisation/advocacy/DfES/EveryChildMatters.htm |
