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 to see themselves as part of one shared endeavour, with common accountability for that child's wellbeing combined with specific responsibilities and 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.
The recognition of this fragmentation and its impacts is longstanding, going back to at least the 'Children's Charter’ of 1889, as is the desire to do something about it. But while the ambition is deeply engrained, the machinery built to deliver it nationally has been brittle.
The call for more integrated working has historically come in response to crisis; Every child matters for example, the high-water mark of "the children's workforce" as a national idea, stemmed directly from the death of Victoria Climbié in 2000.
Perhaps for this reason, the institutions these moments have produced have been relatively short-lived - like the Children's Workforce Development Council, which is to my understanding the only national body ever created to develop this workforce as a whole.
What has endured in support of this agenda is twofold: statutory obligations, like the Children Act 2004's duty to cooperate and the Children's Commissioner it created, both still standing even as the machinery built alongside them was dismantled. And practitioner-led innovation, for example the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub approach, which was never legislated for but is now near-universal.
As we build the Centre for the Children’s Workforce, our ambition is to be part of the second tradition, building the capacity for coherence to grow in place. We see three challenges for that work:
- The first is identity: how can the roughly two million people working with babies, children and young people in England come to see themselves as one workforce? Today there is no shared picture of who they are, and no common story for them to find themselves in.
- The second is professional pathways: can people develop across the professional silos, not just within them? If the professions around children are formed entirely separately, we shouldn't be surprised when they struggle to work as one.
- And the third is a challenge of place: can this workforce be organised in a place so that it meets the specific demands of its communities? If the work of coherence happens where people come together effectively, how can that collaboration become ordinary practice?
For us at the Centre, trusts are central to the response to these challenges.
This is partly because the coherence agenda has historically lacked exactly what trusts have: durable institutional bases, routes into specific places and communities, convening power, and sustained, often multi-year relationships, with children and families.
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. And as they share in their paper it is already visible in practice, for example in Honicknowle, where five schools across two trusts and the local authority operate as a single community anchor with a multi-agency hub at its heart.
None of this suggests trusts are the sole answer to a complex, longstanding challenge, but it does position them as a different kind of participant in it, with the opportunity to show real leadership.
As a result, 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.
We have a new wave of place-based energy across policy and practice, trusts maturing into civic institutions with the durability this work has always lacked, and a growing recognition, from Whitehall to the frontline, that fragmentation is a key problem to solve as we respond to an increasingly complex world.
But if the story of this agenda tells us anything, it is that these windows of opportunity close. Political leadership changes, energy gets absorbed into another agenda or crisis, the organising machinery gets dismantled, and the moment passes, leaving another generation of children at risk of falling into the gaps between services.
So at the CST Annual Conference this October, we'd like to invite you into a version of the bet I made at the beginning of this piece: a participatory futures session on the systems of care we want to build around children by 2036, the workforce needed to deliver them, and the work it will take to get there. We'd love you to be part of that conversation.
- Ned Younger is Managing Director of the Centre for the Children’s Workforce
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
