Children’s Charities in Crisis. Body, Alison
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,