Читать книгу Children’s Charities in Crisis - Body Alison - Страница 10

Introduction

‘This isn’t the voluntary sector we once knew, it is a new and challenging landscape, basically a whole new ball game … if you want to play, you need to learn the rules fast.’ (CEO, medium children’s charity)

Let’s start by relaying the experience which inspired this book. It took place in 2016 during an interview with a Chief Executive of a charity tackling domestic abuse. On a blustery winter’s day, clutching a hot coffee we sat, wrapped in our warmest clothes, in a freezing cold office. ‘I’m sorry’ the CEO said, ‘we try to only switch the heating on when the clients are here, money savings, you know’ she broke off, and then she started crying. She went on say how she had started this charity over 30 years ago, as part of the women’s aid movement and as a victim of domestic abuse herself. She passionately believed in holistically supporting women, and particularly their children, through developing play-based early intervention and support. Over the 30-year period they had directly supported more than 6,000 women and children to escape and overcome domestic abuse. The charity had won national and international recognition for their work. Built on their vast experience, knowledge and practice they had developed a specific framework of intervention aimed at helping children cope with, and move on from, the emotional turmoil of living with an abusive parent or carer. Throughout the 2000s this programme had grown, and in the mid-2000s they expanded, becoming dependent upon funding from the local authority. Two days before our meeting she had been informed that under a recommissioning process they had ‘lost’ the contract, a tender for a service which was based on their 30 years of experience, in favour of a large housing association with no previous experience of delivering domestic abuse support services for children. ‘They were cheaper’ is the only explanation she was given. She was distraught, not because they had lost a contract, but because she felt, knowing the organisation who had ‘won’ that all the values and strengths of her lifetime’s work would be lost. In her words, she ‘was done, done fighting, done grovelling for money, done trying to fight’ for the survival of her small but vitally important charity. She finished by saying:

‘It’s all well and good these commissioning documents and compacts that say we will all work together, but the reality is very different, the reality is destroying the local charities which make up the fabric of our communities … but that’s a story that is never told.’

Less than a year later this charity closed its doors for the last time, and we felt it was time to tell those stories and experiences, but in a way that did not present them as isolated cases, but instead as a series of shared experiences, contextualised in current and ongoing debates.

This brings us to this book, which presents original research spanning 2008–2018 about the lived experiences of voluntary sector organisations delivering early intervention and prevention services for children and families in the England, and contextualises these experiences in wider social policy, research and debates. Particularly focusing on the relationship between children’s charities and the state, we talked to 80 individuals from across 40 micro to major children’s charities delivering children’s early intervention-type services. To ensure that we gained a balanced insight into this debate we also spoke to 20 Commissioners responsible for commissioning some of these charities’ services. Commissioners came from across a range of children’s services, including children’s social care, health and education, and from a range of public service backgrounds, including the local authority (including statutory social services and early intervention services) and local borough councils. Drawing these 100 voices together we present here the lived experiences of those working with and on the frontline of children’s charities.

Why this book, and why now?

The title of this book reflects the motivation for this text: Children’s charities in crisis: early intervention and the state. The challenges facing children’s charities are effectively pushing the sector to crisis point. Propelled by increasingly tough discussions around independence of the voluntary sector (for example, Aiken, 2014; Benson, 2014; Independence Panel, 2015; Milbourne and Murray, 2014; Rochester, 2014) fears of mission drift (Cunningham, 2008), incorporation (Fyfe, 2005) and concerns over bureaucratic powers reducing the voluntary sector voice (Milbourne and Cushman, 2013), commissioning and state-sector relationships require further scrutiny. Policy shifts in preventative services have also raised significant questions about how we conceptualise and support vulnerable children in our society.

Nonetheless while all of this happens, the demand for children’s services is increasing. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of child protection enquiries undertaken by local authorities rose by 140% and children subject to child protection plans doubled (LGA, 2018). The complexity of problems facing children and families increases as levels of poverty deepen and inequalities intensify between those who are wealthy and those who are poor. The Local Government Association estimate that by 2025 councils are likely to face a funding gap of £3 billion, this is without costing for increasing demand, which is likely to increase in the face of disappearing early help and early intervention services.

As early help and early intervention support rapidly disappears, children increasingly only get support when at crisis point. According to four of the leading national children’s charities, The Children’s Society, Action for Children, Barnardo’s and the National Children’s Bureau, between 2010–11 and 2015–16, local authority spending on preventative services decreased in real terms by 40%, with a predicted further 29% reduction by 2020. As a result, early intervention support services have been systematically dismantled, almost to a point of no return. This has meant the loss of children’s centres, family support, parenting help and youth work. By 2016 over 600 youth centres had been closed, and approximately one children’s centre has closed every week since 2010. A failure to intervene early means that children are entering the social care system more than ever before.

In response to these challenges, this book brings forth, a not yet fully explored debate about the relationship between voluntary sector organisations working with children, young people and their families (referred to in this book as children’s charities), and the statutory responsibility of the state to deliver early intervention and prevention services. This is not a new relationship. The ‘third way’ driven by the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010, and the subsequent ‘Big Society’ and commissioning agenda propelled by the Conservative party in the Conservative-led coalition (hereafter referred to as the Coalition) has redefined these relationships and created an altered space, with adjusted rules, within which voluntary sector organisations must now operate. This book aims to examine and explore this space and the relational factors that guide children’s charities, drawing together academic literature, social policy and the lived experiences of children’s charities navigating these changes over the period of a decade (2008–2018).

Defining the scope of the book

This book specifically explores the relationship between children’s charities and the state, particularly in the context of early intervention service provision within children’s social services. By children’s charities we refer to any formally constituted, not-for-profit organisation with a central mission of supporting children, young people and their families. While the majority of the voices from children’s charities which we have included in this book are registered with the Charity Commission, some are not due to size (that is, they are micro, community groups), while another is a registered community interest company, limited by guarantee. We refer to these organisations as children’s charities throughout this book to protect confidentiality.

In the context of this book early intervention means services which are established to intervene as soon as possible to tackle social and emotional problems emerging for children, young people and their families, or pro-actively working with a population most at risk of developing problems. Early intervention can happen at any point in the life of a child or young person and can be delivered through both universal and targeted services.

Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide early intervention support, currently provided under a service commonly known as ‘Early Help’. This book however does not seek to offer a critique of early intervention, moreover it explores the relationships between the voluntary sector and the state in this policy area. Therefore, this book draws specific attention to the intersection between the state and children’s charities in the provision of these services, and indeed the role of wider support services such as schools. Commissioning is the dominant mechanism by which this is managed. Commissioning is the process by which health and social care services are planned, purchased and monitored. Commissioning broadly comprises a range of activities, including assessing needs, planning services, procuring services and monitoring quality. While clinical commissioning groups are responsible for the commissioning of services for the National Health Service, local authorities are responsible for commissioning publicly funded social care services, including children’s early intervention services.

Although specific in focus to early intervention, schools and children’s charities, due to the focus on commissioning, this book offers valuable insight for anyone interested in the role of the voluntary sector in the provision of public services.

Why is this book significant?

Children’s charities play a central part in the provision of early intervention and prevention services. Unsurprisingly, the close working relationship between these charities, schools and the state has come under increasing scrutiny. This book raises and discusses the tension between how the commissioning bodies define early intervention and prevention services, as targeted interventions to support identified ‘problem families’ (Pithouse, 2008; Dean, 2010), and voluntary sector actors, who on the whole reject this definition of early intervention, citing it as too targeted and too late. Instead, many voluntary sector organisations opt for a more universal approach in which services may address wider social concerns (Hardiker et al, 1991). However, the dominant and more process driven, somewhat transactional commissioning approaches often result in prescriptive and punitive contract management and hierarchical relationships, meaning that some children’s charities operate in a constrained space and struggle to act independently and speak out with a critical voice.

In discussing these tensions, three significant arguments are presented in this book. The first is how children’s charities have evolved in light of the changing environment, presenting three typologies of responses. We start by suggesting that by engaging in these process driven commissioning processes, some children’s charities legitimise this discourse and subscribe to the delivery of more punitive, targeted approaches which would normally be considered as sitting outside of the charities’ ethos (Peters, 2012). Children’s charities can become more entrenched in this activity, and these behaviours become more self-fulfilling, as the activity continually reproduces itself. The process of commissioning can therefore contribute to hardening the approach on ‘problem’ families (France et al, 2010), and children’s charities become part of the legitimisation of this narrative.

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.

This leads us to the third significant argument: children’s services are in crisis and change is an imperative. Austerity has stripped support to the core and children’s charities are struggling to cope with ever-increasing complexities and challenges, with fewer resources. As a result, schools are feeling the pressure and being asked to pick up the pieces. However, they too are in midst of a funding crisis with many schools struggling to make ends meet. Thus, they themselves are turning towards charities and fundraising for support. As children’s services come under increasing strain, traditional organisational structures, such as education, health and social care, are breaking down. While this breakdown of traditional institutions and subsequent blurring of the boundaries creates significant problems for vulnerable children, it now provides the ‘action imperative’ (Hupe and Hill, 2007) to develop innovative commissioning responses which step outside of the traditional and policy ‘rule bound’ boundaries to find collective solutions. We therefore conclude this book with suggestions about how we can and should move forwards collaboratively.

Structure of this book

The book is divided into four parts, Part I, covering Chapters 1 and 2, focuses on social policy, and how the discourse of the third sector and early intervention has evolved over recent successive governments. Part II, covering Chapters 3 and 4 discusses those on the frontline of early intervention, including charities and schools. Part III, covering Chapters 5 to 7, focuses on children’s charities experiences of these shifting landscapes and what this means for both the voluntary sector overall and the field of preventative services. Part IV, Chapter 8, concludes and suggests positive steps for moving forwards.

In Chapter 1 we provide an overview of the concept of prevention within child welfare, particularly under the New Labour government (1997–2010). Coming to power in 1997, Labour placed considerable focus, and financial investment, on reducing child poverty and social exclusion, and increasing universal early intervention support and coordination between services. The role of the voluntary sector became mainstream in the provision of children’s services, with the launch of several high-profile initiatives. Focusing on the concept of ‘prevention’ within child welfare and building on these shifting understandings of childhood and the concerns for children, this chapter explores how social policy operationalised under the Labour government. It discusses how Labour developed strategies to tackle issues surrounding children and young people who are considered disadvantaged, vulnerable or at risk and how they mobilised the voluntary sector within this response.

In Chapter 2 we explore contemporary children’s services, and how the persuasive logic of prevention has been adopted in more modern service delivery and the role of the voluntary sector in providing these services. Focusing specifically on the early 2010s, we map the shift from the Conservative flagship project of the Big Society, to the renewed localism project of the Civil Society Strategy (HM Government, 2018b). We draw out the links between the societal hardening in focus, shifting from universal to targeting of preventative services, and discuss the role of the voluntary sector in delivery of these services.

In Chapter 3, we provide a contemporary policy overview – covering the past decade from 2008 to 2018 – and how that has translated into practice. We outline the realities of early intervention policy and begin to look at the lived experience of delivering services on the frontline. What is evident is that practice in children’s social care and early intervention is struggling to keep up with the pressure and the diversity of demands placed upon services. Voluntary sector and statutory services are facing increasing cuts as thresholds for defining a ‘child in need’ increasingly shift up. Children’s outcomes and the services available to them are widely varied depending on the type of support they require and where they live.

In Chapter 4, we focus on education and explore how education has increasingly turned to charity in times of austerity. Education is a core service which provides the grounding, qualification and socialisation for children and young people, which will likely have an impact on them for the rest of their lives. A primary tool for increasing social equality, achieving aspirations and supporting children and young people to become active, pro-social citizens, it is unsurprising that this is an area of interest for many philanthropists, charities and voluntary sector organisations. Similarly, as schools face ever more fiscal, performance, recruitment and retention pressures, we see them increasingly turning to voluntary action – that is fundraising and volunteers – to counter resource pressures. This chapter explores this core concept, the relationship between education and charity. Focusing particularly on primary education which concentrates on 4–11-year-olds, we investigate how charities shape and support education, and indeed how schools engage in voluntary action to support their day to day delivery. We consider the implications of this work and what this means for the charitable sector. We finally conclude with what this means for schools, and, what is most important, what this means for the children whom they seek to serve.

Chapter 5, is the first chapter of Part III, concentrating on voices from the frontline and their lived experiences. Within this chapter we focus on the lived realities of commissioning. Commissioning, the central process for managing relationships between the voluntary sector and the state, is one of the most contentious issues for modern day children’s charities. Early intervention and preventative services for children sit central to this debate – these statutory services at the heart of local government are often commissioned out to voluntary sector organisations for delivery, and form the very focus of this book. We argue that commissioning in its current form is failing; it threatens the very survival of local voluntary sector organisations seeking to support children and young people, and, rightly so, is coming under increasing scrutiny. High profile cases such as the demise of the charity Kids Company, led by the charismatic Camila Batmanghelidjh, have brought the relationship between the state and the sector to the fore of public and academic debate. In the simplest terms it raises the question of how the state and children’s charities should work together to ensure the best possible outcomes for children. In this chapter we begin to unpick some of that debate, examining what has happened over the past decade, charities’ experiences and how we may potentially move forwards.

In Chapter 6 we move on to explore the impact of commissioning and policy changes on early intervention and preventative services for children delivered by the charitable sector. The definition of early intervention and preventative services is highly contested and politicised within policy and commissioning processes. This reflects an ongoing debate regarding the shifting paradigm of prevention. As the commissioning narrative has developed, there has been an overall disengagement between the voluntary sector providers and the state. As the charitable sector is increasingly exposed to intensifying marketisation, polarisation of relationships increases. Indeed, the tendency towards this polarisation of relationships is significant in terms of the discussion concerning redefinition of early intervention services, highlighting the apparent lack of voice and agency of children’s charities in terms of defining this area of activity. We identify here three ‘types’ of organisational responses to this ever-changing environment: conformers – those charities who align themselves close to the state and regularly reinterpret their mission to fit state logic; the outliers – those charities which reject state approaches to early intervention and seek to deliver services completely independently of the state; and the intermediaries – those charities which walk between conformity and dissent, working with the state when necessary or to their advantage, and walking away when not. We discuss how these types fundamentally alter children’s charities’ perspectives and experiences of commissioning and the impact this has on their wider work.

Chapter 7 specifically focuses on how some children’s charities are not just surviving in this complex environment but indeed thriving. As the commissioning culture has matured within the public sector, so too have the responses from children’s charities. Commissioning and policies regarding the charitable sectors engagement are full of multiple contradictions, confusion and complexity. Within this, we have seen two major opposing schools of thought manifest themselves. One, often driven by politicians and social policy decision makers, advocates for the commissioning and competition agenda as it increases choice and diversifies services by placing them outside of the public sector (for example, Sturgess et al, 2011; Blatchford and Gash, 2012). Another, often pushed by academics and practitioners, which is more critical, argues that commissioning is leading to the marketisation and privatisation of services (for example, Davies, 2008; Milbourne, 2009). Many children’s charities, and indeed Commissioners, feel inhibited by these difficulties, however we also identify a group of children’s charities, supported by particular Commissioners, who ‘play the game’, reinterpreting rules, and at times breaking rules, to secure what they consider the best outcomes for children. This dedication to securing their own, individual ideological bias, sets them apart from other actors in the field of early intervention and preventative services. While many children’s charities experience significantly negative effects of Commissioning, several children’s charities have successfully negotiated a pathway between conformity and dissent. As a result, they have successfully negotiated contracts and tenders to their advantage, or even bypassed commissioning processes altogether, to secure a mutually developed contract. This includes small-scale grants which were considered to ‘go under the radar’ to large-scale contracts. This survival does not happen in isolation, but instead requires a relational approach in which some children’s charities deploy a range of tactics to secure additional advantage, while some Commissioners ‘bend the rules’ to facilitate advantage for certain children’s charities who they believe will deliver a ‘better’ service for children. Thus, we conclude that commissioning is neither a fair or rational process and suggest that now is perhaps the time to reconsider this relationship.

Chapter 8, the conclusion of this book, discusses the potential way forwards. Collaborative commissioning as a concept is receiving increased attention from policymakers, practitioners and academics alike. As an emerging idea however it is still an unknown. In this concluding chapter we discuss the potential of collaborative commissioning as a way forwards for children’s early intervention services and the continued unknowns surrounding it.

A note about language and definition

According to the UK Civil Society Almanac 2018 (NCVO, 2018) there are over 166,000 charities registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. However, of these charities, those with an annual income over £1 million account for 81% of the sector’s total income, yet represent just 3% of the total number of charities. In contrast, charities with an income below £100,000 make up 82% of the sector in terms of numbers, but represent less than 5% of the total income. Therefore, the vast majority of the charitable sector is made up of small and micro organisations, while the major and super-major organisations (over £100 million income) dominate the landscape in terms of income and profile. Children and young people are the most common beneficiaries of charities, with 59% of charities listing them as one of their core beneficiaries. Based on submission of accounts to the Charity Commission, this figure does not encompass the vast number of other voluntary sector organisations including smaller enterprises that sit below the Charity Commission’s radar: social enterprises, community groups, voluntary action groups and cooperatives.

Identifying a definition of the charitable sector is problematic and widely disputed. Politicians, policymakers and academics struggle to agree a commonly applied name. Consequentially a number of contested terms have emerged. For example, utilising the Wolfenden Committee’s term ‘the voluntary sector’ arguably places too much emphasis upon ‘volunteers’, thus ignoring the vast number of employees within the sector. Alternatively, to capture both formal and informal activity some actors refer to the voluntary sector as ‘the voluntary and community sector’. There is the Labour terminology of the ‘third sector’ which still resonates today and with it carries a number of political ideologies (Alcock, 2010), or the stricter term for charities registered with the Charities Commission and recognised as such by the Inland Revenue of the ‘charitable sector’, however this ignores the vast number of voluntary sector organisations who are not registered as charities. Additionally, we could use the Conservative terminology of ‘civil society’, which is unwieldy in application, or the American inspired ‘not-for-profit sector’.

Such debates stem from political ideology, competing social, economic and cultural agendas and the differentiation of the application of criteria for definition. Famously termed as a ‘loose and baggy monster’ (Kendall and Knapp, 1995) the voluntary sector is a unique combination of service provision, advocacy, fundraising and campaigning, provided by voluntary sector organisations from large professionalised, bureaucratic entities to small networks and informal voluntary networks (Jas et al, 2002). As a sector in 2017, it employed approximately 2.7% of the UK workforce, that is over 880,000 individuals, and achieved an income of over £47.8 billion in 2015/16 (NCVO, 2018). However, definition per se is not the vital factor, what matters is ‘adopting a characterisation that is appropriate to the purposes at hand’ (Halfpenny and Reid, 2002: 536). In this book, we refer to the organisations directly engaged in the research as ‘children’s charities’ and use the terms ‘voluntary sector’ and ‘charitable sector’ interchangeably throughout. This is in order to encompass the vast range of organisations from the formal, professionalised, bureaucratic organisations to the informal networks, while reflecting the need to differentiate it from the for-profit sector, commercial businesses and the state. Such a definition draws upon widest understanding of the voluntary sector and focuses upon the notion of the structural/ functional definition (Salamon and Anheier, 1992). Used by academics such as Billis and Glennerster (1998) and Kendall (2003) this definition identifies the voluntary sector as an assembly of organisations that are: ‘(a) formal or institutionalised to some extent; (b) private – institutionally separate from government; (c) non-profit-distributing – not returning profits generated to their owners; (d) self-government – equipped to control their own activities; (e) voluntary – involving some meaningful degree of voluntary participation’ (Billis and Glennerster, 1998: 81).