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CHILDREN’S CHARITIES IN CRISIS
Early Intervention and the State
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Whereas some children’s charities have fallen in line with this narrative, others have rejected it, some precluded by the commissioning process and others as an act of dissent against the hierarchal relationship between the state and voluntary sector (Ryan, 2014). In contrast, other children’s charities fall somewhere in between this conformity and dissent. They are, to some extent, part of the legitimisation of this approach as they bend and accommodate contractual obligations posed by the state. Nonetheless, they are also able to utilise social skills and tactics to not only secure themselves more advantageous positions in this environment but also to mobilise their particular ideological bias, that is what they think should be done. The ability to mobilise this ideological bias results in these charities being able to, under the right specific circumstances of more relational driven commissioning approaches, set the agenda for the wider field of activity.
The second of our significant arguments results from taking a closer look at commissioning. We seek to extend our understanding of commissioning beyond the binary divide between process- and relational-driven commissioning approaches. Instead, in keeping with some previous colleagues’ work (Checkland et al, 2012; Harlock, 2014; Rees, 2014; Rees et al, 2017), we propose a much more nuanced, richer understanding of the realities of commissioning service provision, which is multifaceted, complex and often awkward, driven by individuals’ professional and emotional responses to multifarious situations. Building on this richer understanding of commissioning we hope to have responded to the call for ‘further grounded research into the realities of commissioning at the local level’ (Rees et al, 2017: 191), using children’s services as a case study example. The reality is that Commissioners are largely critical of overly bureaucratic commissioning processes, and often seek to rebalance them through the employment of specific strategies, such as informally supporting and promoting certain charities over others alongside trying to act as buffers against the impacts of austerity. Within process driven commissioning styles this means that Commissioners develop strategies and ways to ‘bend the rules’, or ‘play the game’ to ensure that contracts are secured at a local level by children’s charities that they have ‘faith in’ to the deliver the required services.
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