Credit: Phil Meech for UCL

17 October 2024

By Peter Moss and Pat Petrie

Imagine an IOE academic in the 2000s, committed to policy-relevant research and absorbed by the Labour government’s policy agenda for children and young people. Imagine they fall into a deep sleep in May 2010, only to awaken in October 2024. As when they’d fallen into oblivion, they find Labour in government, and expectantly ask an old friend what news of their field. Whatever happened to the Department for Children, Schools and Families? To Children’s Centres and Extended Schools? To that interesting work on social pedagogy at IOE, much of it government funded and with so much promise for children in care? Above all, whatever happened to ‘Every Child Matters’? The old friend pauses, noticing the expectancy in the questioner’s voice, then breaks the difficult news: all gone and forgotten. Our academic Rip Van Winkle is left shaken and speechless.

What are we talking about?

A little background for those readers who weren’t around in the 2000s, or else have forgotten. In 2003, the previous Labour government introduced a wide-ranging policy agenda for an integrated approach to children and young people in England. Under the label of ‘Every Child Matters’ (ECM), this was ‘a framework for services that cover children and young people from birth to 19’. They followed up with a raft of initiatives, sweeping in their scope and ambition, including:

• Common outcomes and a common inspection framework for all children’s services, including schools.
• The transfer of government responsibilities for children’s social services into education.
  A statutory requirement on local authorities to promote cooperation between local agencies to improve the wellbeing of children.
• A programme of ‘Children’s Centre’ development, with a target of 3,500 by 2010, one in every community. (Children’s Centres were multi-purpose services for young children and their families, pioneered at IOE in the 1970s.)
• A programme of ‘Extended Schools’, with a target to include every school by 2010. (Extended Schools were open from 8am to 6pm, offering a range of services for children and families, including ‘wraparound’ childcare, varied extra-curricular activities, parental support and wider community access to school resources.)
• A children’s workforce strategy, identifying a common core of skills and knowledge for all working with children, young people and families.

Alongside ECM, from 1999 the Labour government funded IOE to study social pedagogues and social pedagogy, little known at the time in the UK, yet widespread in Continental Europe; imbued with strong democratic values, they are the basis for a variety of services for children, young people and adults in many countries.

What happened next?

A lot happened in the seven years after ECM was published. The Department for Education and Skills was renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and assumed responsibility for a wide range of services for children and young people. By 2010, there were around 3,600 Children’s Centres, one in every community in England, while every school had become an Extended School. Stimulated by IOE’s research, interest grew in social pedagogy: a Green Paper proposed to ‘incorporate the principles of social pedagogy’ into work in children’s social care; while the Association of Directors of Children’s Services suggested social pedagogy could be used as ‘a way of thinking and working across complex systems which in turn…could help to further integrate local services – from schools, to healthcare, to specialist care provision – with a common outcomes focus’.

These reforms were not unproblematic, far from it. The pace of change was rapid, sometimes too rushed, and driven from the top down by a controlling central government. Other policies were sometimes in tension with ECM, for example the DCSF’s parallel focus on raising a narrow range of academic standards. Instead of an ambition for Children’s Centres to form a national system of integrated early years provision, they were added to an already muddled and fragmented system, the new public service running alongside, not replacing, the dominance of for-profit nurseries. Social pedagogy was sometimes seen as a threat to existing occupations and resented accordingly, not appreciated as a new approach that could accommodate itself under different job titles and duties.

Yet, with ECM and its interest in social pedagogy, the Labour government did set a potentially transformative policy agenda in services for children and young people, an agenda aiming to develop innovative and more integrated approaches for achieving collaborative working and shared goals. And not only setting an agenda: much of the agenda was being acted on.

Decline and fall – and time for a revival?

It was still early days in the process of transformation when the 2010 election ushered in 14 years of coalition and Conservative government. ECM was dropped and simply air-brushed out of history. As one commentator observed at the time, ‘The 2010 Government placed a ban on the phrase “Every Child Matters” as part of a widespread change in terminology within Whitehall departments. Effectively, the ECM policy was scrapped’. The DCSF went back to being the Department for Education, focused on a standards agenda; Extended Schools and Children’s Centres were left to wither away; and social pedagogy was ignored, to the extent that a later ‘independent review on children’s social care’, published in 2022, made no reference to it, its potential nor to research that demonstrated that potential.

When Covid-19 came, we were reminded of the important role of schools as community services, an invaluable public resource for the wellbeing of children, parents and their communities – but not that Extended Schools would have been perfectly placed to play that broad role. Many schools worked valiantly, but despite, not because of, government policy.

And now comes a new Labour government, apparently suffering historical amnesia. No attempt is made to revive and refine ECM or to develop social pedagogy, no interest shown in attempting to build back, and better, on the foundations laid by an earlier Labour administration. There’s much talk of change, but transformation seems off the agenda.

Peter Moss is Professor Emeritus at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. Pat Petrie is Professor Emeritus at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, and a trustee of the Social Pedagogy Professional Association.