Children Webmag - Alison Marlow's Editorial

The Importance of Ideas

When a new concept is dreamt up, the idea is known only to a small circle at the start. It then spreads until it is only outsiders who do not know the meaning of the new language. By then, for those at the cutting edge of developments, the idea will already be hackneyed and the language over-used – perhaps misused as it has been adopted. People get tired of the term and followers of fashion move on to new language.

But this does not mean that the idea has run its course. The Government’s wish for “joined up” thinking between Departments may now be dated language, for example, but the idea is still important.

The Webmag started just over five years ago, and a recent meeting of the Management Board of the new Consortium running the Webmag reviewed at its basic aims. When we put out the first issue in January 2000, people used the web less, there were no other comparable websites, and Children Now was the National Children’s Bureau’s quarterly in-house magazine. But although things have changed over the last five years, the basic values of the Webmag are still important and have not dated.

We are still concerned for high standards of child care practice and are keen that the pages of the Webmag help people to share problems and ideas, to learn of new thinking and to create networks.

We are still keen to be holistic. (There’s another word that has become over-used, but is still important.) By that, we mean that we believe that all people who work with children and young people have a lot in common and should see themselves as one profession. Much of what they need to know in training is shared. The skills they require are often the same. The different professional groups need to collaborate to meet children’s needs. The children and young people may be in different settings or of different ages, but they share the same developmental needs. Planning for children’s care needs to cover all aspects of their lives, whether for the individual child or all children. In all these things a holistic approach is important.

A lot of harm has been done by the British approach of using silos (yet another over-used jargon word, but graphic) where specialisms are separated from each other. Nannies have trained separately from childminders, for instance, though both work with children in the home setting. Foster care has been contrasted with residential care as if one or the other is better, when the two need to be seen as complementary options. Education is seen as schooling in the classroom, with upbringing left to parents, instead of the combined meaning of education in French.

If we are to rear children and young people to have an enjoyable childhood and fulfilment as adults, all the parts of their lives need to be approached holistically – their play, their schooling, their social learning, their health care, and so on – and the people working with them need to understand each others’ roles so that they can collaborate effectively in helping children develop.

In the Webmag, we want to provide a place where different groups of specialists can find something of interest concerning their own type of child care. But we also want them to be able - through the pages of the Webmag - to climb out of their specialist silos and learn about other types of child care as well, so that they can develop a holistic overview of the whole scene, and so that the interface between the professional groups is a means of communication, not a barrier.

The language may be jargon, but the ideas are still important – for the profession, for the services, and for children and their families.

As for the Webmag, we are only part-way there. We’d like to carry more material and cover more specialisms. But overarching the specialisms, we intend to carry on trying to help the profession develop a holistic sense of identity, because we believe that will be in children’s best interests.