The Next Decade for the Children’s Workforce
By Ned Younger
Bringing greater coherence to a fragmented children’s workforce can be done from the ground up. Doing so requires facing three challenges over the next decade. Ned Younger, Managing Director of the Centre for the Children’s Workforce outlines these challenges, and where they take us.
A version of this piece was originally posted by the Confederation of School Trusts.
The Coherence Principle
If you were asked to design a system of care and development for children in England from scratch, I’m willing to bet that one of your design principles would be about coherence.
You would want every professional or volunteer in a child’s life – whether it was a teacher, health visitor, youth worker, social worker, or trusted adult – to see themselves as part of one shared endeavour, with a common accountability for that child’s wellbeing. And you would want each of them to bring something distinct: clearly defined responsibility, deep specialist expertise.
Part of the reason I’m confident making that bet is how consistently the people who work with babies, children and young people talk about the lived reality being the exact opposite. The parent telling the same story to four different professionals in one term, the dysfunctional meetings between different professions, the support that stops at a service boundary or an age threshold.
Like many systemic issues, this fragmentation is both the unintended consequence of many credible, well-intentioned interventions building up over time, and the result of those interventions being shaped through the eyes of the institutions that deliver them, rather than the people they exist to serve.
Coherence as A Long-Term Ambition
The recognition of this fragmentation and its impacts is longstanding, as is the desire to do something about it.
In fact, the ambition to combine the professions and services around children into something more coherent goes back well over a century, to at least the 'Children's Charter’ of 1889.
But while this ambition is deeply engrained, what has proved brittle is the machinery built to deliver it nationally.
The call for more integrated, cross-sector or multi-disciplinary working has historically come in response to crisis, often a safeguarding tragedy. Every Child Matters – the high-water mark of "the children's workforce" as a governing national idea – stemmed directly from the death of Victoria Climbié in 2000.
But maybe for this reason, these national moments have produced institutions that, funded centrally and ultimately dependent on political sponsorship, don’t last over the long term.
The Children's Workforce Development Council, which is to my understanding the only national body ever created to develop this workforce as a whole, lasted less than a decade before being abolished in 2012 in the Bonfire of the Quangos.
So, while central organisations have faltered, two things have endured:
Statutory obligations. The Children Act 2004's duty to cooperate, and the Children's Commissioner it created, both still stand, even as the funded machinery built alongside them was dismantled.
Practitioner-led innovation that has grown locally and spread by imitation. For example the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) approach was never legislated for or centrally funded, but is now near-universal across the country.
Three Challenges to Coherence for the Children’s Workforce
As we build the Centre for the Children’s Workforce, our ambition is to be part of the second tradition, invested in building the capacity for coherence to grow from the ground.
For ourselves and the many others in that space, we think there are three challenges to meet if we are to see sustained change across the system.
The challenge of identity
How can the people working with children come to see themselves as a workforce united by a shared endeavour?
There are, by our broad estimates, around two million people working with babies, children and young people in England, but no shared picture of who they are, and no identity that brings them together.
One part of this challenge is about data and understanding: what is this workforce and how does it interact, nationally and locally?
From the initial mapping work that we have done (which we’ll be publishing later this year – subscribe to hear about it first), statutory services are highly visible in the national data, while youth work and the broader voluntary and community sector is much harder to see.
Then there is a missing collective identity; the need to develop a common story that practitioners can see themselves in, and which enables better connection and collaboration.
The challenge of professional pathways
Can people working with babies, children and young people be supported to grow across the silos, not just within them?
While the ambition to do this work is often general, routes to qualify and progress run almost entirely up the spine of a single profession.
If the professions around children are formed entirely separately, we shouldn't be surprised when they struggle to work as one.
The challenge is to build routes with a shared foundation and genuine movement between disciplines, while deepening rather than diluting what makes each profession distinct.
The challenge of place
Can the children’s workforce of a place be a coherent force in the health of the community?
The history in this space would suggest that the real work of coherence happens where the professionals around the same children can meet, plan and act together in a place.
The challenge is to create the local conditions, whether that’s through leadership, relationships, shared understanding, or convening spaces, in which collaboration becomes ordinary, generative practice.
The Next Decade for the Children’s Workforce
Our feeling is that the next decade represents an unusual opportunity to close the gap between the system we would all design and the system children actually experience.
Despite plenty of challenges, there are positive signs, too.
There remains a wave of place-based energy across policy and practice.
There is also a growing recognition – from Whitehall to the frontline – that fragmentation is a key problem to solve as we respond to an increasingly complex world.
Meanwhile, many school trusts are already maturing into civic institutions with a very broad perspective on what they can offer their communities in service of children and their families. And they have the durability this work has elsewhere lacked: roots in (or at least routes into) specific places and communities, real convening power, and sustained, often multi-year relationships, with children and families through their schools.
My colleague James Townsend and CST’s Leora Cruddas make this case in their recent update to The Partnership Dividend, describing trusts as institutions with "the longevity, permanence, and durability" to anchor long-term support for children and families while more fickle political winds may shift and change.
None of this makes School Trusts the sole answer to the fragmentation challenge. But it does position them as a different kind of participant – and one with the opportunity to show real leadership around it, especially when national political leadership changes, or the current energy gets absorbed into another agenda.
In this spirit, we will be at the Confederation of School Trusts Annual Conference this October, running a participatory futures session. We’ll be exploring the systems of care we want to build around children by 2036, the children's workforce necessary to deliver it, and the work necessary to get there.
We'd love you to be part of that conversation. You can sign up to the session here, or follow our work via Linkedin.