When fragmented systems fragment children – and how we change it
By Beck Crowhurst
Drawing on her experience as a Headteacher, Beck Crowhurst, Centre for the Children’s Workforce’s Director of Education, asks: What if the child, not the service, was the organising principle of the whole system? This article is based on a Keynote Speech Beck gave at Education Lab in Vienna earlier this year.
“That image became the ‘Why’ that got me out of bed, or the moment’s pause when making a decision that impacted a child or a family.”
When you are 14 years old, you think you understand the world. When I was 14, I thought the rules were the same for everyone.
Until, that is, the day I was called on by a teacher to answer a question in English class. I got the question right, but the next thing I knew, the girl behind me – let’s call her Kerry – smacked me round the back of the head as hard as she could.
When I turned around in shock, the teacher told me off. And I was furious. Because I was a good student, focused on my own path, my own success, and this girl didn’t care about the same things I cared about.
That weekend, I saw Kerry at our local town’s carnival. She was sitting on the top of a bus shelter with her Dad, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag – and whatever it was they were smoking – back and forth between them.
And it was this small moment that changed the way I thought about things.
I realised that while I was worrying about exam results and university entrance requirements, she was navigating a completely different world. The inequality wasn't just in our different grades or our performance in the classroom; it was in the details of her Saturday afternoon compared to mine.
That image of Kerry sat on top of the bus shelter, that story stayed with me. It followed me into my career when I became a teacher. It became the "Why" that got me out of bed, or the moment’s pause when making a decision that impacted a child or a family.
“I realised I was seeing a fragmented system that was producing fragmented children: children who are known to many services, but not as whole individuals.”
Fast forward to my years as a Headteacher in the UK at a school in a part of London where there were significant levels of deprivation.
By then, having been a teacher for over ten years, I knew that inequality existed. What I now saw was how pervasive and widespread it was, and how fragmented our system’s response was.
I realised I was seeing a fragmented system that was producing fragmented children: children who are known to many services, but not as whole individuals. In this system, a child is a "pupil" to the teacher, a "case" to the social worker, a "patient" to the therapist, and a "statistic" to the government.
I realised I was seeing really incredible, well-meaning people working themselves to exhaustion in separate rooms. The school was trying its best, social services were overstretched, and the police were intervening too late. We were all working really hard for the same child, but we were not working together.
And I realised that ‘Hero Leadership’ – the idea that one school or one person could save a child – was a lie. And not only that – it was dangerous. It led to burnout, it led to professionals becoming jaded and negative, it left the child falling in between the cracks.
I began to see that educational inequality isn’t a failure of poor schooling; it is a failure of coordination. It is the result of professional silos that treat a child’s life like a series of unrelated problems to be solved by different departments.
“When we work as a whole system we work in service of the whole child.”
But what if the child, not the service, was the organising principle of the whole system?
Right now, we have schools, social care, counselling, policing, justice and health all working with children every day, but not working together in a way that can best support children and young people when they are in crisis.
In short: we have built systems that serve the institution, not the child. We ask things like ‘How can this child fit into our school's behavior policy?’ or ‘Does this family meet the threshold for this specific service?’
At the Centre for the Children’s Workforce, we want to try and flip that script.
We believe that when we make the child the organising principle, these silos will begin to be seen in a different way. We stop asking what the service needs or what targets they need to reach, and start asking what the individual child and their family needs to thrive.
This requires us to see ourselves not as teachers or social workers first, but all as members of The Children’s Workforce. When we work as a whole system we work in service of the whole child.
“Let’s stop asking what the service needs or what targets they need to reach, and start asking what the individual child and their family needs to thrive.”
This isn't just a nice idea. It is quite a radical shift in identity.
Already in schools, we don’t credit Early Years providers with GCSE and A Level results – and this means going even further than that. It means recognising that the success of the teacher is interdependent with the success of the social worker. And that these are both interdependent with the success of the CAMHS counsellor and the Pediatrician and so on.
It means seeing ourselves as one ecosystem. And, importantly, one ecosystem with shared goals for our children, shared ways of working together and a shared language to discuss problems.
Because if one part of the workforce is undervalued or disconnected, the whole child suffers. When the workforce works as a whole, it works in service of the whole child.
For some children, like Kerry, a fragmented childhood leads to a lifetime of challenge. When one part of the workforce is undervalued or disconnected, those fragmented children suffer. If the workforce was working as a whole around her, perhaps our paths would not have been so different.
So let’s change it – for kids like Kerry.