Change and Continuity in Children’s Services
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JCS-12-2018-054 |
| Pages | 134-135 |
| Date | 17 December 2018 |
| Published date | 17 December 2018 |
| Author | Jonathan Bradshaw |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Vulnerable groups,Children's services,Sociology,Sociology of the family,Children/youth,Parents,Education,Early childhood education,Home culture,Social/physical development |
By Roy Parker
Policy Press
Bristol
2015
Review DOI
10.1108/JCS-12-2018-054
Really, no one else could have written this book.
It is at one level an edited, revised and often
considerably expanded collection of Parker’s
published research on children’s services. He
has been actively engaged with that subject for
over 50 years, extending long after his
retirement. At another level, it is a unique history
of those services, of lasting importance to
historians of the welfare state. Thus, it fills a very
important gap in the literature –agap
filled for ever. We should be extremely grateful
to him for producing it and to Policy Press for
having the imagination to publish it.
Typical of the author, the collection is preceded
by a really thoughtful review of change and
continuity in the sector. It reminded me of the
kind of thinking which went into his Change,
Choice and Conflict in Social Policy (Hall et al.,
1975). It is in effect an overarching review of
policy making in this field. As well as this
overview and the eight already published
papers. There is a substantial chapter on the
history of residential child care which (I think) is
original and a concluding chapter looking
ahead. In between there is the history, policy
analysis and commentary across the field.
My reading of it is that he takes a generally
positive viewof developments at least from the
beginning of the twentieth century –things
have on the whole got better over time.
Of course not all changes turned out to be
good ones –he thinks the trend against
residential care ignored the contribution that
children’s homes could make if well designed
and funded andstaffed by well-trained people.
And no one regrets the abandonment of the
“short, sharp shock”for young offenders; or
the emigration of poorchildren to Canada and
Australia that he described in his book
Uprooted (Parker, 2008).
I am not confident that you could now claim
such historical progress in some other fields
of social policy. The Child Poverty Action
Group recently “celebrated”its 50-year
history with relative child poverty rates
considerably higher than when it began. It
would be difficult to claim that social security
for people with disabilities was on an upward
trajectory since 2010, or housing policy or
mental health services or penal policy. Indeed
it is quite striking that children’s services may
be an exception. I also wonder whether this
message might have been moderated if
Parker had been writing after Jimmy Saville,
Rotherham and the Independent Inquiry into
Child Sexual Abuse. There is a curiously little
mention of child sexual abuse in the volume.
Among the emerging trends he discusses are
the growth of private agency fostering and the
commissioning of independent providers of
residential care which present challenges of
inspection, auditing and reporting, and
problems of financial uncertainty. He is
anxious that the transformation of social
services into market services will lead to a loss
of collective responsibility which has been the
aspiration of the post-war welfare state.
Early in the book, he argues that the powers
given to local authorities in the Children Act
1963 “to promote the welfare of children by
diminishing the need to receive or keep them in
care”enormously complicated and enlarged the
work of the children’s services. He ends the
book arguing that the quest for prevention
remains a huge challenge: how to identify
children who need help; and what is to be done
then? He stresses the importance of
maintaining general and universal services.
However, selective interventions that might
prevent ills that threaten children are more
patchy, with uncertain evidence that they are
effective (see the recent evaluation of the
Troubled Families Initiative –Day et al., 2016).
He concludes “[…] much will depend upon the
levelofcommitmenttoanintegrated
pursuit of better prevention that includes
across-the-board policies (such as those for the
reduction of poverty and unemployment) and
for the improvement of standards in health and
education as well as specific initiatives aimed at
those families with children (at whatever age) are
Change and Continuity
in Children’s Services
PAGE134
j
JOURNAL OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES
j
VOL. 13 NO. 3/4 2018, pp. 134-135, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1746-6660
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