A
faux pas by Ofsted shows the need
for professional knowledge in
regulating childcare services
Established
professions by and large regulate themselves, even if they invite
lay people to participate in their regulatory processes. These systems
have been set up historically because professionals wanted to set
high standards and exclude untrained workers and charlatans. They
also ensure that current professional knowledge and standards of practice
are applied to complaints and new issues which require professional
scrutiny.
The drawback
is that such systems can be used to defend the profession and protect
bad practitioners by dismissing complaints or concealing the findings
in cases of unacceptable practice. There is therefore a strong argument
for investing considerable authority in people who represent the clientele
of the profession and those who act as their representatives or advocates
in inquiries, (let alone the interests of the wider public), in order
to redress the balance and ensure that the interests of aggrieved
clients are properly addressed.
Work
with children : a new profession?
Childcare
stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is a relatively new
profession. Indeed it is not yet formed as a profession with its own
identity in the United Kingdom. While other European countries have
established professions of social education or social pedagogy, in
the United Kingdom we still talk of nannies, childminders, residential
social workers, foster carers and youth and community workers (and
a host of other types of job) as if they did not share common skills
and knowledge bases.
Yet they
are all forms of direct work with children and/or young people, and
the shared values, aims. knowledge, skills, and motivation all suggest
that all these workers should share a common fundamental identity.
Whether the professional task should be termed childcare or social
education or social pedagogy remains to be seen. There is, as yet,
no acceptance generally that such an identity is needed.
The outcome
from a regulatory point of view is that :
- the
profession is weak and splintered,
- it is not self-regulating and
- what regulation exists is imposed from outside.
Regulating
services
The General
Social Care Council (GSCC) in England and its counterparts in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland will register some groups of people who
work with children, such as social workers and residential childcare
workers. Throughout the structure of these bodies, care is being taken
to include the representation of service users and other stake holders
(such as carers) as well as professionals and people representing
the community as a whole.
Interestingly,
the GSCC and its counterparts appear to be the first regulatory bodies
which are registering groups of workers within a service rather than
members of a single profession. This is particularly important because
one result could be that the work of these bodies is better focused
on the service offered and its recipients rather than on the interests
of the professional groups involved. This would be a real improvement
on the established systems for other professions.
A General
Health Council, for example, could focus on the quality of health
care experienced by patients and their families, and deal with nurses,
doctors and other professions in that context, while a General Education
Council could address the concerns of students and their families,
and in that context deal not only with the registration of teachers
but other workers in the education field. Such a switch would represent
a real shift of concern and power, in the better interests of those
using these services.
Regulated
by outsiders : Ofsted and the NCMA
However,
it is important that professions should be involved in their own regulation,
for the reasons given at the start of this piece. It is the professionals
who should have the knowledge, skills and up to date experience to
be able to assess the quality of practice.
Yet childcare is often regulated by people who have not had relevant
experience and who at times appear not to know what they are talking
about.
We have
just witnessed a classic case of a profession regulated by people
who have not been practitioners and who do not appear to have appreciated
its fundamental nature. Ofsted is responsible for inspecting not only
schools but day services for young children. Some of these services
are provided by nurseries or in other group settings, but a very large
number of service providers are individual childminders working from
their own homes.
In its
commendable pursuit of openness and public accountability, Ofsted
decided to put all the contact details of the services it inspects
on its website together with inspection reports, so that they could
be scrutinised by the public. This may be fine for schools and day
nurseries, which tend to have big signs outside to identify them,
but it stirred up a hornet’s nest in the childminding field.
Under
a banner headline of “Put children’s safety first”,
the National Childminding Association (NCMA) expressed serious concerns
about Ofsted’s plans to make childminders’ names, addresses
and inspection reports freely available to visitors to the Ofsted
website. Their concerns ranged from threats to the safety of childminders
and the children in their care, to worries about being pestered by
bogus callers and receiving unsolicited mail.
NCMA’s
Chief Executive, Gill Haynes, said:
“Most
registered childminders are women working alone in their own homes,
caring for very young children. They feel that having their personal
details available for all to see online could make them an easy target
for everyone from telesales and direct mail organisations to nuisance
callers, paedophiles and stalkers.
”Ofsted
needs to realise that it cannot treat childminders in the same way
as nurseries and schools. Childminders don’t have the back-up
of a team of colleagues and sophisticated security equipment. And
they aren’t able to leave their working premises at the end
of the day.
“While
we agree with the need to make childminders’ Ofsted inspection
reports available to parents to help them make informed decisions
about their children’s childcare, we believe that Ofsted’s
plans could be disastrous for childminders and the children they care
for.”
NCMA
urged Ofsted to review its plans and work with local authority Children
Information Services (CISs) to ensure that parents get the information
they need, particularly on childminding vacancies, without making
childminders and children unnecessarily vulnerable. Otherwise, they
feared that many childminders might leave the profession, at a time
when more parents needed quality childcare than ever before.
The NCMA
received hundreds of e-mails - including scores from childminders
who were caring for children not involved in any child protection
issues, but where parental and custody disputes caused real concern.
There were also received 60-plus letters from parents, who do not
want their babies/children in a setting which could be continually
disrupted by a casual caller.
The clear
message from childminders was that many of them would cease childminding
if Ofsted's proposals were implemented. Gill Haynes and Lynn Daley,
Chair of NCMA, met Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education,
on 26th March, and since then Ofsted has said it will consult further
on this issue.
The implications
for the profession
But to
return to the general issue of regulation, Ofsted’s failure
to appreciate the significance of this issue was presumably due to
the absence of personal experience of the professional task among
its senior professionals. It would be interesting to know how many
of the top fifty staff in Ofsted have been childminders. And by comparison
how many doctors are there in the top fifty staff in the General Medical
Council? And how many lawyers in the top fifty posts in the Law Society?
The involvement
of representatives of the wider society, and in particular service
users and other stake holders, is to be welcomed in the regulation
of professions, and it should be extended. But the professions need
to be properly represented as well, and it is an indicator of the
lack of clout of the childcare profession that the body which regulates
day services for young children is so unaware of the nature of the
work.
It took
the organised impact of the NCMA, which knows the childminding field
inside out, to identify the problem and hammer the point home. Fortunately
for childminders, the NCMA is well organised and capable of making
its point. Other groups of people working with children and young
people are not so well organised or influential.
It really
is time for all childcare workers (or whatever we should call the
profession) to get together to ensure that their combined interests
are properly represented nationally. Splintered, they fall.
