The following statement has been issued by Chris Sewell, Oxfordshire County Council’s former Family and Community Support Manager, now retired and former chair of Oxfordshire Parenting Forum.
Children’s Centres provide vital services for children, families and communities and are part of the county’s strategy to provide early intervention for children and families in need. They promote children’s development, parental involvement, parenting skills, healthy lifestyles, personal development and empowerment. They also protect children from harm and can intervene as and when the needs of children and families arise, providing access to specialist services. They need to be a community based service so that people can attend voluntarily and without barriers of access and geography. It is right that they should target their services in areas where need is greatest, but this does not mean that services should be restricted to those in greatest need. To do so removes their ability to respond to the needs that most parents feel at some stage in their family life and allows a vacuum to develop in which problems can escalate to the point where children’s safety is at risk. Further, to deny access to parents within the locality who are not perceived as ‘in need’ cuts the most vulnerable parents and children off from the support that they can get from fellow members of the community. ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’.Sadly the County Council has decided that they can no longer provide preventative services and has decided to focus on early intervention once children are at risk. We need both prevention and intervention. The present proposals to provide services in a very limited number of places with outreach to ensure a wider spread are based on a false premise that the most vulnerable are best cared for in isolation from other parents. Those of us who have run parenting groups know that parents learn and change most through their interaction with fellow parents and that mixed groups, if well managed, are a superb source of mutual support for parents. The highly successful Parenting in the Community course at Rose Hill has been an excellent example of this for many years. It has been both preventative and a means of intervention in specific cases of risk. We may ask what is proposed to happen once prioritised families have been supported and are considered to be no longer at risk? Who will provide ongoing support? This is just what children’s centres provide. Without children’s centres the safety net won’t be there and they may very likely become isolated and vulnerable once again.The prospect of families falling back time and again due to the lack of community support must be a great concern. Not only will it badly affect the quality of life for their children, it will also be wasting scarce resources. In the long run children’s centres save money.The current regressive proposals take us back fifteen years to the dark days of stigmatised family centres with families taxied in to centres at the command of the courts or social workers. Parents feared the intervention (or interference as they saw it) of social workers and many parents resisted attempts to draw them into open-access sessions such as stay and play. Vulnerable parents and children do need specialist support, but within the context of a wider community of supportive and confident parents. The proposed model of ‘one coherent 0-19 years’ service’ will not provide an ‘integrated response to families’ needs’ nor will it prevent the escalation of need. I believe it will ignore the needs of parents at a lower level of need and will lead to an escalation of those needs.The proposed model is a million miles from the universal and integrated services that Children’s Centres currently provide. Children’s Centres are a launch pad to give all young children, especially the most vulnerable, the best possible start in life. They are also a safety net that catches and supports those in greatest need and refers them on for multi-agency support where necessary. Take the safety net away and many more will fall and they will not have the access to the mutual support of parents and the timely interventions of professionals. Most Children’s Centres have built up local networks of support involving local schools, health practitioners, playgroups, childcare, parenting groups, basic skills and, yes, the much maligned ‘stay and play sessions’ which provide a strong local safety net. The safety net also provides community cohesion by involving many minority groups such as refugees and asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, victims of domestic abuse, teenage parents and, of course, fathers. They provide an inclusive and safe place for many on the margins of society, helping them to feel included in their local community. Stronger self-sufficient communities are an invaluable benefit of integrated services at Children’s Centres. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.Despite the menace of austerity, we need to retain prevention as well as intervention. To enable integrated services to be delivered we need an element of accessible professional support in communities along with voluntary sector support, parental involvement and suitable community buildings. Don’t kid ourselves that buildings suitable for young children and parents can automatically be used for youth work – and vice-versa. We need an appropriate mix of resources. The County Council is right to allow for local communities/groups and parishes to play a part in service delivery, but don’t be deceived into thinking that being able to bid for funding for alternative models will plug the gap left after the closure of centres. There will be winners and losers and short term funding will provide little security even for the winners. At a stroke universal services will be scrapped and what remains in the voluntary sector will have to rely on the lottery of a bidding process to maintain open-access services. There will be a heavy price to pay if we remove preventative services. More children will be at risk as a result.Children’s Centres provide the best preventative support and targeted work that we have seen in generations. Don’t ignore the evidence of effectiveness. Integrate services as effectively as you reasonably can but make sure that preventative services, through children’s centres, are a major part of that mix.
Chris Sewell
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