Education, Social Justice and Inter-Agency Working

Joined Up or Fractured Policy?

Sheila Riddell, Lyn Tett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415249225
• eBook ISBN: 9781134535040
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores policy and practice in a range of areas where education and other agencies (health, social and employment services and housing) interact. Its theme, of joined up policy and inter-agency working, is central to all those interested in promoting social justice for adults and children experiencing the effects of exclusion.

1 Education, social justice and inter-agency working

Joined-up or fractured policy?

Sheila Riddell and Lyn Tett

Introduction

The theme of inter-agency working and partnership, sometimes referred to by the shorthand term ‘joined-up government’, is at the centre of New Labour’s vision of the modernised welfare state. The need to make policy connections appears to be regarded as particularly critical in relation to those at the social margins, for whom the liaison of education, social work, health, social security and employment services is regarded as critical. This edited collection explores policy and practice in a range of areas where education and other agencies interact.

In this introductory chapter, we frame some of the questions which are addressed by the papers which follow. The first question which concerns us is why joined-up policy has risen to the top of the political agenda at this point in time. How does it connect with other aspects of New Labour’s political agenda, in particular the promotion of the ‘Third Way’ policies which reflect the dominance of global capitalism while seeking to mitigate some of its excesses and challenge social exclusion? Further questions arise about whose interests are served by the pursuit of joined-up policy, in particular when such policies are focused so tightly on those at the social margins.

A further question which bubbles to the surface throughout the book is the extent to which partnership, inter-agency working or joined-up policy is capable of achieving social change. The government has set itself the goal of moving towards greater social justice, with clear performance indicators and pre-defined milestones and long-term targets. Partnership is seen as a way of achieving greater social inclusion, but questions remain about whether this is actually the case and what evidence is available to support this belief. Furthermore, if partnership is seen as an alternative to forms of welfare based on internal and external markets, then what evidence is there that it leads to ‘better’ social outcomes, whether these are expressed in terms of social justice or greater effectiveness and efficiency?

The final question concerns the conditions which make for successful partnership working. Does the involvement of a range of professional agencies, parents and the voluntary sector make complicated decisions easier or easy decisions more complicated? In the following paragraphs, we flesh out some of the issues associated with each of these questions.

Policy goals associated with inter-agency working

The modernisation of welfare and the pursuit of social justice

During the late 1970s, a consensus arose that public services were wasteful, inefficient and geared towards serving the needs of self-interested professionals rather than the general public. Prime Minister James Callaghan in his 1976 Ruskin College speech raised these points in relation to education, and in 1979 the incoming Conservative government placed the reform of the public sector at the forefront of its political agenda. Informed by theorists of the right, such as vonHayek, the Conservatives committed themselves to ‘rolling back the welfare state’ to release individual initiative and entrepreneurialism (Deakin 1994). Quasi-markets were promoted, based on the creation of internal markets and the requirement that public sector organisations compete with those in the voluntary and private sectors to run public services. Coupled with the marketisa-tion of the public sector was the rise of the audit culture (Power 1987) which required service purchasers to specify service standards, expressed as clear deliverables and performance indicators, to be achieved by service providers. The impact of the new managerialism on the public sector has been widely discussed (e.g. Clarke and Newman 1997; Clarke et al. 2000). At its worst, new manageri-alism was seen to foster a dull conformity whereby all policy goals were expressed as quantifiable targets and only those things which were readily measurable were valued. It should be noted, however, that new managerialism has been enthusiastically adopted by New Labour, and social justice goals are expressed in terms of targets, milestones and performance indicators.

Just as new managerialism may be seen as a continuous element within Conservative and New Labour policy, so the desire to transform the welfare state has been placed at the heart of New Labour’s political project. However, whereas the Conservatives routinely portrayed state welfare as fostering cultures of dependency and inefficiency, New Labour has depicted the reform of welfare as inextricably connected with the pursuit of social justice. Joined-up policy is seen to lie at the heart of the new intelligent welfare state. Thus, in the 1994 Report of the Commission on Social Justice, the following key points are emphasised:

• Social justice cannot be achieved through the social security system alone; employment, education and housing are at least as important as tax and benefit policy in promoting financial independence.
• The welfare state must be shaped by the changing nature of people’s lives, rather than people’s lives being changed to fit in with the changing nature of the welfare state; the welfare state must be personalised and flexible, designed to promote individual choice and personal autonomy.

Since New Labour was elected in 1997, joined-up government in the interests of social justice has been actively pursued (see Chapter 2, by Sally Power, for discussion of social justice in the context of Education Action Zones). The rhetoric of partnership runs throughout both the UK and Scottish governments’ policy documents on social justice. For example, the report of the Scottish Taskforce on Poverty states:

Achieving our ambitious targets can only happen through partnership with colleagues across the UK. We share a common commitment to delivering social justice. A belief that we are stronger together and weaker apart as people, as communities and as nations … The targets in the Scottish Social Justice Report can only be delivered through focus, leadership and ‘new directions’ in the allocation and use of public, private and voluntary sector resources.

(Scottish Executive 1999b: 2)

Part of the social justice strategy is the Modernising Governmentprogramme, with the major goal of delivering public services to meet the needs of citizens, not the convenience of service providers (Scottish Executive 1999b).The development of person-centred services involves the breaking down of the old vertical hierarchies, such as the historical division between the UK Benefits Agency and Employment Service, which have recently been merged. The Report of the Scottish Taskforce on Poverty also recommends the pooling of departmental budgets to fund particular community initiatives and, in some cases, the transfer of resources from particular agencies to fund new patterns of welfare delivery. For example, it is envisaged that £140 million will be transferred from health boards to local authority social work departments and the voluntary sector in Scotland to provide care in the community for people previously in long-stay hospitals.

Joined-up policy and social justice

As discussed above, New Labour has identified joined-up government as the key to achieving greater social justice. At this point we consider the definition of social justice employed by the government, which often remains implicit rather than explicit. A number of commentators such as Driver and Martell (1998) have suggested that the key difference between Old and New Labour was the former’s emphasis on equality of outcome compared with the latter’s emphasis on equality of opportunity. This distinction is clearly evident in New Labour’s blueprint, the Report of the Commission on Social Justice published in 1994. This report outlined three possible futures for Britain. The first, favoured by New Labour, was characterised as the Investors’Britain, whereby greater social justice is achieved not by the traditional ‘tax and spend’policies of the left but by ‘redistributing opportunities as well as income’(Commission on Social Justice 1994: 95). Contrasted with this is the Deregulators’Britain, whereby the free market is allowed to run untrammelled, producing great wealth for some but insecurity and poverty for those at the social margins, ultimately leading to social destabilisation. The third possible future is described as the Levellers’Britain, where the focus is on achieving greater economic equality. Both high and low wages would be strictly regulated, so that the gap between high and low earners would shrink. The downside of this scenario is that businesses and entrepreneurs might leave the UK and economic growth would slow, producing a ‘poorer but kinder’ Britain. The policy of reducing inequality of opportunity rather than outcome is reflected in many New Labour welfare policies, yet some contradictions remain unresolved. In particular, the growth of poverty during the 1980s and 1990s is identified as a major source of social injustice to be tackled. The means of tackling this, it is suggested, is by some redistribution to the poorest through benefits and fiscal policy, but, more importantly, through widening opportunities. However, no mechanisms are suggested to check the growing wealth of the richest in society, leaving open the possibility that measures to redistribute opportunity and (more modestly) income will be outstripped by moves to increase the amount of wealth controlled by the social elite.

As noted above, inter-departmental working accompanied by targeting resources on the poorest in society is seen as one of the central means of tackling social exclusion. However, as noted by Fraser (1997) and Power (Chapter 2), a major problem in such an approach, described by Fraser as the politics of distribution, is that it may damage the social esteem, or ‘recognition’ of the groups identified as the chief policy beneficiaries. Children with special educational needs or those in Education Action Zones or New Community Schools are beneficiaries of differential funding mechanisms. However, there is a danger that parents of children in schools which are not receiving enhanced funding may feel disadvantaged and resent the groups they feel have been singled out for special treatment. Since social justice reflects the politics of both (re) distribution and recognition, there are clearly problems if the social status of certain groups is undermined by the very policies designed to widen opportunities. It is possible, for example, that if inter-agency working is seen as a policy targeted at poor communities, there is a danger that both the communities receiving such interventions and this mode of service delivery may become stigmatised (see Power’s chapter on Education Action Zones and Lloyd et al.’s chapter on alternatives to exclusion). On the other hand, efforts to ‘roll out’ educational interventions, such as early intervention or New Community Schools, to the wider population, while removing any stigma inevitably involves a reduction in the scale of resources targeted at the poorest communities, thereby possibly reducing the redistributive effects. Clearly, debates over whether social justice policies should focus on equal outcomes or equal opportunities, and the extent to which strategies should focus on (re) distribution or recognition, are likely to continue. While New Labour’s approach is castigated as hopelessly timid by some, its rejoinder would be that the old ‘tax and spend’ approach was not spectacularly successful either. The more cautious approach adopted has led to a Labour government being elected for two successive terms of office for the first time.

Social capital and joined-up policy

New Labour has framed its social justice policies in terms of fighting social exclusion and promoting social inclusion, reflected in the establishment of the Social Exclusion Unit as part of the Cabinet Office in England and the creation of the Social Inclusion Network in Scotland. In conceptualising social exclusion, the government has sought to shift away from a sole focus on material deprivation towards a recognition of the salience of wider social and cultural factors. Thus, while it is recognised that poverty is likely to produce social alienation, it is also recognised that unless ways are found of hooking individuals and communities into positive social networks based on trust and reciprocity, money spent on alleviating material disadvantage may be wasted. Drawing on the work of Etzioni (1993) and Putnam (2000), social capital features increasingly prominently in New Labour thinking. The privileged position of the concept of social capital is almost certainly due to its compatibility with Third Way policies more generally. Work by researchers such as Wilkinson (1999) suggests that highly unequal societies are inefficient, since the erosion of social capital leads to high rates of mortality and morbidity and a host of other social problems, including crime and violence. Investment in social capital, on the other hand, promotes social justice but also is essential to the reproduction of human capital and economic growth. Partnership between public, private and voluntary sector agencies, individual service users and communities, is seen as the way of promoting social capital and lies at the heart of many recent educational initiatives not only in the UK, but also, as illustrated by chapters in this book, in other European countries, the USA and Australia. The nurturance of social capital is dependent not only on the breaking down of old departmental boundaries, but also on the development of new roles for services users and professionals, discussed in the following sections.

Joined-up policy and user empowerment

The idea that service users should play a significant role in shaping the type of services available and their mode of delivery is, of course, not a new one, but the notion of service users as partners has been used for a range of ideological purposes. In the area of special educational needs, for instance, the idea that parents might work in partnership with professionals was emphasised in the Warnock Report (DES 1978), but, as noted by Mordaunt (Chapter 8), professionals have been very reluctant to relinquish power to parents and policy changes have been pursued at different rates throughout the UK, with greater parental rights being guaranteed in England than in Scotland. The right of disabled children to contribute to important decisions about their education (Tisdall, Chapter 12) has been even slower to be recognised in practice.

Within the wider sphere of education, the promotion of parents as educational consumers was used by the previous Conservative administration to advance the marketisation of education. By giving parents the power of choice of school, it was believed that ‘good’ schools would expand and flourish, while ‘failing’ schools would wither and be closed down. The reality of this policy was, of course, somewhat different, with schools in socially disadvantaged areas experiencing falling rolls and reduced funding, but tending to survive while offering their remaining pupils an increasingly impoverished educational experience. Other measures, such as the establishment of school boards in Scotland and governing bodies in England, were ostensibly to give parents a stronger say in the running of their school, although the extent to which such measures actually resulted in a redistribution of power is contested (Vincent 2000). Vincent suggests a further model of parental involvement, that of parent as citizen. Parent-Centred Organisations, Vincent suggests, while being ‘limited, fragile and partial in their scope and their impact’, nonetheless ‘go some way towards the creation of a language and several arenas in which (at least some) parents acting as citizens can participate in shaping educational opportunities for all children’ (Vincent 2000: xiii). In addition to the chapters by Mordaunt and Tisdall, an international comparison of partnership with parents is provided by Kasama and Tett(Chapter 14). By exploring different experiences in Japan and Scotland, the authors highlight the different uses of partnership in the two countries and the different types of empowerment (or lack of it) which result.

Joined-up policy and the new professionals

Just as service users are construed differently within the modernised welfare state, so the casting aside of departmental boundaries and the deregulation of services creates new roles for professionals. Within the post-war welfare state, each professional group worked within clear boundaries, operating according to specific working practices and with clear routes of accountability. Within the new welfare state, the boundary between public, private and voluntary sector workers and those employed by particular departments is increasingly blurred. Workers are cast in the role of social entrepreneurs, crossing departmental boundaries in order to undertake a particular task, whether this is engaging with parents in pre-school education (Smyth, this volume), working in one of the models of full-service schools (Semmens; Boyd and Crowson; Hatcher and Leblond; Power; and Baron, all this volume) or finding jobs or educational placements for young unemployed people (Salisbury;Riddell and Wilson, this volume). The idea of the free-ranging worker adopting an extremely flexible and innovative working practice has been developed most fully in the context of New Dealprogrammes. In order to move individuals destined for long-term unemployment back into the labour market, job brokers have been instructed to use any means at their disposal to persuade employers to find work for individuals and to support individuals in holding down a job or a trainingprogramme placement. The rolling out of the New Deal for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Education, social justice and inter-agency working
• 2: ‘Joined-up thinking’?
• 3: Education Action Zones and Zonesd’Education Prioritaires
• 4: Coordinated school-linked services
• 5: Full-service schooling
• 6: New Scotland, New Labour, New Community Schools
• 7: Schools,community education and collaborative practice in Scotland
• 8: The nature of special educational needs partnerships
• 9: Supporting pupils with special health needs in mainstream schools
• 10: Housing and schooling
• 11: ‘Some woman came round’
• 12: Social inclusion or exclusion?
• 13: Inter -agency strategies in early childhood education to counter social exclusion
• 14: Involving parents in their children’s education in Japan and Scotland
• 15: Exploring the tailored approaches of the New Deal for 18–24 year olds
• 16: Disabled people, training and employment