The Transformation of Children's Services

Examining and debating the complexities of inter/professional working

Joan Forbes, Cate Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415618496
• eBook ISBN: 9781136735981
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Can we imagine different ways of working together to secure better outcomes for children and families? What are the complex issues that underlie the apparently simple call for 'joined-up' services?

Children's services in many countries around the world are being transformed as part of the call for 'joined-up working for joined-up solutions'. Social, health and educational policy discourses are driven by the idea that 'effective' inter/professional, interagency collaboration is crucial in determining whether service delivery to children and families will succeed or fail. However, the rapid turn from previous inter/professional practices of liaison, consultancy, cooperation and collaboration to more radical and wholescale service integration and sector transformation has not been accompanied either by a well considered research agenda of hard questions nor close scrutiny of its effects and consequences.

The book asks a series of searching and challenging questions:

• What are the complex issues involved in children's sector transformation for all those involved – young people, practitioners, leaders and managers, policy makers?
• How can the 'silos' in which professionals have traditionally been prepared for practice be broken down?
• What are the orthodoxies that surround 'joined-up' working and in what ways should they be challenged?

Written by authors from across the wide range of professional, policy and disciplinary groups involved in this new cross-cutting area of policy and practice, this book provides a critical analysis of the complexities of children's services transformations. The research in this collection addresses the range of discursive, policy and organizational developments associated with the transformation of children's services, providing an important and timely analysis of their complexities and is essential reading for all those working in the complex spaces of children's services.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introducing the Complexities of Inter/Professional Working

Joan Forbes and Cate Watson

Introduction

This book is premised on the idea that children’s services transformations, currently happening in the UK and many other countries around the globe, are inherently and inescapably characterized by complexity. The title of this book is therefore likely to resonate forcefully with those concerned with such transformations. Clearly, an urgent need exists to uncover and examine these complexities in order to understand better the nature of current transformations. Further, new ways of conceptualizing children’s services policy and practice are vital if transformations are to bring benefits to children, young people and their families. This volume explores the view that complexities are inherent in the assumptions underlying both current and proposed future policy and practice in interdisciplinary and transprofessional working across children’s services, and, importantly, are produced as an effect of the current professional preparation of practitioners and leaders across the different sectors involved in children’s public services. The aim of this volume is therefore to provide a series of alternative perspectives that respect and draw on the diverse knowledges, skills and experiences of those from across the professions involved, in order to examine and encourage debate around the complexities of inter/professional working.

Children’s sector transformation, and concomitant remodelling of the sector workforce, has constituted an important and significant recent example of ‘travelling policy’ across the globe (Lindblad and Popkewitz 2004). Policy imperatives have initiated major service redesign initiatives across children’s public services including, for example, recent important work in the UK countries and in the US around full-service schools, extended children’s services and children’s workforce remodelling. In the United States the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (US Congress 2002) initiated and supported a raft of key reforms around service redesign; and in England a programme of reform of children’s services was instituted, driven by the Children Act 2004, usually referred to as the Every Child Matters agenda (HM Treasury 2003; DfES 2005; DCSF 2008). In Scotland, Getting it Right for Every Child (SE 2005) recommends a unified approach to children’s services; and in Wales, A Fair Future for our Children (WAG 2005) advocates a similar strategy. In Northern Ireland, a strategy for an integrated service agenda for children and young people has been developed around an Extended Schools initiative and implemented in the context of a substantial review of education and public administration (DE 2005; OFMDFM 2006); while Eire has developed a parallel agenda driven by the Giving Children an Even Break policy (IE 2001). In these and other polities globally, the redesign of children’s services policy and governance has been characterized by the idea that ‘effective’ inter/professional interagency collaboration is crucial in determining whether services to children and families will succeed or fail.

What holds these different programmes and agendas together is a widely shared and almost unquestioned belief that interagency collaboration is a very good thing and that more of it is needed. Inter/professional practice appears to be a holy grail, thought capable of delivering ‘effectiveness’ and ‘excellence’ in even the most challenging of circumstances (Brown 2009; Pugh 2009). Moving beyond better co-ordinated services and greater co-operation has, however, proved problematic. Evaluative reports into children’s services redesign have suggested that practitioners find it difficult to translate the concepts of collaboration and partnership into practice (Sammons et al. 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Allan, Mannion and Duffield 2004; Whitty and Campbell 2004). Practitioners have been described as allowing little crossfertilization (Power et al. 2003), being ‘relatively entrenched in their attitudes’ and having ‘not deviated or altered their way of doing things that much’ (Sammons et al. 2003a: 71). That these problems stubbornly persist despite repeated injunctions to collaborate suggests the need for a critical examination of the changing discourses concerning co-practice in the children’s sector in policy, and of the effects of any new recommendations for closer or integrated practice.

The debate presented in this book around the new and different kinds of theoretical and conceptual frameworks that are required to adequately take account of the complexities in transformation is therefore timely. Critical examination of the many intertwined components of transformation is urgently needed to consider implications for: inter/transprofessional workforce ‘remodelling’; new work relations; and children’s services locations. Questioning the preparation of practitioners and, crucially, the role of leadership and management in integrated children’s services, is also vital. This collection therefore fulfils a critical need to analyse the impact of the transformation of children’s services on professional identities and changing knowledge, practice and power relations; and to present new analytics that can more fully grasp and make sense of the fluid, uncertain and less predictable kinds of professional relationships necessitated by, and emerging as a result of, the integration of children’s services.

The book arises out of an ESRC-funded seminar series entitled The effects of professionals’ human and cultural capital for interprofessional social capital: Exploring professional identities, knowledges and learning for inter-practitioner relationships and interprofessional practice in schools and children’s services, held at the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Strathclyde during 2008–9. The seminars aimed to explore a number of important questions arising from new professional relations in moves towards children’s services integration in the UK and globally. Important themes addressed in this collection therefore include:

• policy, theory and discourses surrounding inter/professional practice;
• the formation of professional identities and their impact on inter/professional practice;
• the role of early professional training and socialization into professional norms, values and roles;
• the effects of the complex relationships between professionals’ identities, knowledge and practice in the development of practitioners’ social and other capitals;
• critical questioning of the assumptions that underlie current and future practice in schools and children’s services to uncover and question what now needs to change or be done differently if future services to children and young people are to be made better.

The core theme for the book is transformations in children’s services, in particular in relation to the role played by schools and the education service in the children’s sector nexus. Within this core theme the book falls into three main sections. The first two examine respectively the complexities of inter/professional working and preparation for practice, while the third questions current orthodoxies surrounding notions of collaborative working. A major strength of this collection is the range of contributors – from health, social work and education – and a corresponding wide range of theoretical perspectives which aim to open up and stimulate debate across, and within, disciplines and professions. The book balances theoretical chapters with contributions which draw on empirical work and practice. It draws on specific case studies, recognizing that the global field for children’s services transformations makes the cases studied relevant to the wider UK context and beyond. Mindful that examinations and debates concerning current transformations in children’s sector services are of global interest and concern, the book includes contributions of significant interest to an international audience from academics and children’s public sector practitioners from across the UK countries and the USA.

Following the introduction, Part II is entitled Policy, theory, discourse: the complexities of collaborative working. This sets out and examines the policy context/s within which calls for ‘joined-up’ working are located. Andrew Cooper’s chapter identifies a number of critical current challenges for those working in the children’s public sector and the implications of these are taken up in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 3, Andrew Eccles argues that our understanding of ‘collaboration’ must be informed by an understanding of the politics of partnership. In Chapter 4, Joan Forbes stresses the need for close attention to potential points of policy-practice tension, incoherence or disconnect in the current redesign of transprofessional relations. Finally, in Chapter 5, Ian Stronach and John Clarke, questioning the spurious certainties of the economic and financial market epistemologies which have infiltrated education and children’s sector social policy, urge a turn to an epistemology of uncertainty more fitting to the difficulties and risks involved in education and children’s services work in the current moment.

Andrew Cooper’s opening chapter, introducing the contemporary challenges of working together, acts as an initial thoughtful provocation for the examinations and debates in the chapters that follow. He carefully sets out the context within which calls for joined-up working are situated. In particular, Cooper considers a number of assumptions surrounding ‘collaborative working’ with the intention of stimulating deeper debate on issues relating to inter/professional working and the character of modern public sector organizations. The chapter deftly considers the problems and possibilities of inter/professional working in human service organizations, and children’s services in particular, in terms of an interaction between the task to be carried out, the professionals charged with this, and the complex systems and organizations within which they are asked to carry out their work. Each of these layers, Cooper argues, has its own particular associated tensions that render the task of inter/professional working possible – but difficult. Cooper concludes that the development of new organizational structures in the public sector aimed at producing more fluid and networked forms of working do support the emergence of innovative approaches, but equally these developments present threats to professional identity that must be understood if we are to overcome them, a key theme that is taken up and responded to by contributors throughout the book.

In Chapter 3, Andrew Eccles responds to Cooper’s provocation that meta-level analyses which provide understandings of policy and governance are now needed in his examination of political aspects of the growth of partnership working in children’s public services across the United Kingdom polities. Over the past ten years a burgeoning literature has developed around the idea of partnerships, their operation and processes of policy delivery, as a central feature of government thinking. There has, however, been less specific discussion about the complexities of the politics of partnership working. The political considerations addressed here include the ideological framework in which partnerships have evolved, an examination of the policy-making process itself and – often underestimated – the politics of implementation. An overarching concern is the question of political power and its dynamics: who might hold it and how it might be exercised in the complex realities of partnership working. The analysis presented here, which considers inter alia how policy has emerged, tensions between central and local government, and between policy and practice, draws largely on the experience of Scotland, which, in its post-devolution guise, has seen particularly concerted attempts by government to change relationships between education, health and social care through partnership working across these sectors.

Taking up and developing the theme of policy-practice power relations, in Chapter 4 Joan Forbes analyses the redesign of professional relations, or transprofessional capital, in the current policy trajectories of children’s services. She discusses recent policies in the UK countries and other places predicated on the notion that public services for children and young people need to work better together to be effective at all levels if the aims of social and educational inclusion are to be achieved. With this as a starting point she takes as a case study some of the inconsistencies in Scottish education and allied health professions policy which produce policy-practice disjunctures for those involved. Forbes draws on social capital theory and presents a mapping of social capital interstices as a conceptual and analytical framework to discern and explore these potential disjunctures in practice relations between education and allied health professions practitioner groups, theorizing this as an effect of their particular stocks of human capital formed in specific mono-subject disciplinary knowledge practices. Using published data concerning education and the allied health professions as exemplification, the chapter analyses the ways in which the social capital resources held and used by these two groups of children’s sector practitioners, their transprofessional and transdisciplinary capital, currently work effectively or break down in policy-practice incoherence and inherent disconnects in transprofessional social capital-in-practice. Forbes concludes that children’s sector integration may not solve previous problems and may indeed create new problems to do with size and complexity that are too hard to manage. But in either case, she maintains that new conceptualizations and analytics are urgently needed to examine the materiality of the forms of practitioner relations as these are done, blocked or fudged in cross-boundary trans-sectoral integration-in-practice.

Part II ends with Ian Stronach and John Clarke’s theoretical insights into the nature and effects of current education discourses, including those surrounding the transformation of children’s services. The thesis informing this chapter is that the future of children’s services needs to embrace a new epistemology of uncertainty. Stronach and Clarke argue that prior to the 2008 Crash the scientificist certainty of ‘financial engineering’ migrated into the discourses and methodologies of education and health. Across the (children’s) public sector, economistic and statistical metaphors were appropriated – markets, measurement of inputs/outputs, audit, accountability, league tables and the ‘knowledge economy’. Stronach and Clarke argue that economizing assumptions and a world view commodifying the social and the educational became accepted in/through the available economic epistemology, discourses and metaphors, e.g., those of social, cultural and other ‘capitals’, but that as global and financial markets crashed in 2008, the certainties – albeit always fantasies – of financial/economic epistemologies and the order, progress and predictability of the ‘knowledge economy’ vanished with them. The chapter ends with the warning that scientific capitalism and its underlying philosophy, although illusory and discredited in the Crash, will mutate and re-invade the public sector – and perhaps has already done so. In response, Stronach and Clarke conclude with an appeal to the merit of an epistemology of uncertainty more appropriate to the risks involved in the unruliness and disruption which attend current efforts to theorize and conceptualize children’s services discourses and practices.

The next part of the book, Preparing practitioners and leaders for inter/professional practice: identities, connections, knowledges, focuses on inter/professional practice and the education, training and preparation of professionals for this. In Chapter 6, James McGonigal and Julie McAdam examine ‘threshold concepts’ as conceptual gateways or portals which must be understood by early career professionals in the development of inter/professional working. In Chapter 7, Michael Cowie and Megan Crawford discuss issues arising from a case study of the development of primary head teachers working within the context of schools/children’s services. In Chapter 8, Gary Crow highlights the complexity of inter/professional working and what is required to train leaders in education to undertake this. Finally in this part, Chapter 9, by Ian Kerr considers the limitations inherent in current, competing models adopted by different professionals working within mental health care provision and presents a case study of an integrated approach aimed at providing a common understanding among such professionals.

In Chapter 6, James McGonigal and Julie McAdam closely examine the question of how practitioners might be better equipped for inter/professional practice. They start from the premise that if effective inter/professional working is to develop between those who work with children and young people in various educational and care contexts, then some sort of shared ‘theory’ is needed. Theory here is taken to mean a rationale that is assented to by the different professionals involved in such working together, and a felt awareness of the attitudes, values and constraints that operate within their different contexts. McGonigal and McAdam argue that social capital theory offers one perspective, providing a framework for thinking about the relational dimensions of inter/professional practice, but because social capital as theory is more effectively deployed at the macro-level of policy or the meso-level of reflection, rather than at the micro-level of practice, additional theory is needed to maximize its potential in exploring the complex realities of professional decision-making. To address these concerns, McGonigal and McAdam introduce a potentially fruitful theory, fresh in its application to inter/professional relations, but one that is currently used to think about conceptual difficulties and, increasingly, professional learning across a range of academic disciplines. The notion of troublesome knowledge and of threshold concepts as ‘conceptual gateways’ enabling perceptual shifts in the development of professionals’ knowledges can perhaps offer a shared language in which the next generation of teachers and social workers can begin to understand each ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Policy, theory, discourse: the complexities of collaborative working
• Part III Preparing practitioners and leaders for inter/professional practice: identities, connections, knowledges
• Part IV Questioning the orthodoxies of collaboration
• Part V Conclusion
• Index