Every statistic matters

The DCSF has published a revised ‘outcomes framework’ for their ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda. You may remember that the original version included targets for the number of children eating 5 fruit’n'veg per day, but this has been expunged from the latest edition.

It’s a puzzling document - a mixture of vague, undefined aims like:

‘Increase the number of children and young people on the path to success’; ‘Improve the skills of the population, on the way to ensuring a world class skills base by 2020′; ‘Promote world class science and innovation in the UK’

political grandstanding:

‘Deliver a successful Olympic and Paralympics games with a sustainable legacy and get more children and young people taking part in high quality PE and sport’

and pernickety little measurements:

‘Percentage of pupils who have school lunches’; ‘Bus services running on time’; ‘Gap between initial participation rate in full time higher education rates for young people aged 18, 19 and 20 from the top three and bottom four socio-economic classes’

The only thing that you can be sure of is that each of the hundreds of little targets will demand even more data collection. It really is worth having a good look at the whole framework - even if it does look like a glorified classroom wallchart.

Schools and FOI

As I mentioned before, we had a dismal time trying to get schools to respond to Freedom of Information requests about their use of CCTV. We’ve at last got the report that we sent to the Information Commissioner (and relevant government departments) up on the website.

He did it first, Miss

From the Home Secretary, a licence for the police to behave like, well, ‘young thugs’:

Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, the home secretary will say today.

That ought to model suitable adult behaviour for them. It makes you wonder who the grown-ups are.

RIP Child Protection

The mainstream press has belatedly picked up on the news that the cost to councils of issuing care proceedings is to rise from £125 to £4,000. A shame they couldn’t have done so when the government might still have been persuaded against it, rather than two days before the new rules come into effect, but that’s life.

I wonder how much longer the government can maintain the fiction that it is committed to child protection.

Pinging ARCH members

There have been some ongoing problems with the ARCH mailing list for updates etc (for various reasons that I won’t bore you with). We’ve now sorted it out, fingers crossed. If you are an ARCH member and have not been receiving updates, can you contact us and make sure we have your correct email address? archrights(at)arch-ed.org. Ta.

Suffer the children

On Sunday the Observer carried this shock story:

The scale of violence against children has been revealed in new figures which show that in England an average 58 youngsters a day are being admitted to hospital after being deliberately injured. The numbers, contained in National Health Service data, suggest that the incidence of intentional harm against children may be rising. Five years ago some 16,600 were counted as having suffered deliberate harm, but the figure rose to 21,859 last year.

…For doctors, the situation is intensely difficult as they have to explain to parents why they are carrying out investigations on a child who has what appears to be suspicious fractures or burns.

The message that the person on the Clapham omnibus would get from a quick scan of this article is clear: last year nearly 22,000 children were hospitalised by their parents.

Now look at this rather more measured item on BBC News:

Violence against babies and young children in England and Wales more than doubled last year, a survey of accident and emergency unit data suggests.

The Cardiff University study indicates the number of under-10s who were hurt rose to 8,067 from 3,805 in 2006.

The report said: “It is not clear whether violence at the hands of parents or carers is responsible for this increase. Recent evidence suggests that violence between children at school and in public places is also a problem.”

Why the disparity in the figures? Because the first article is talking about all children – that is, everyone under 18, while the second concentrates on the physically more vulnerable under-10s. The Observer article also fails to make clear that it’s talking about injuries received from all sources, and not only as a result of parental violence.

The problem is that such vague, breathless reports do no favours to child protection work because they make the more pertinent figures for abuse seem trivial by comparison. Each week, 150 young children are deliberately hurt by somebody else, and badly enough to need hospital treatment. Even if only ten percent of them were to be assaulted by their parents, that would still be appalling.

We can do without the Clapham-bound traveller thinking: “Oh, so it isn’t actually that serious after all” because from there, it’s a short step to discounting what may be happening right under your nose. But believing hyped-up figures is equally dangerous because it encourages an idea that abuse is so widespread that all families must be monitored, with the result that the relatively tiny number of children whose parents are frighteningly violent towards them disappear into a swill of trivial observation.

We’ve now had several years of increasing ‘information-sharing’ about children, but the figures for non-accidental injury seem to be getting worse. Contactpoint and eCAF are not going to make any difference: by the government’s own admission they are not child protection tools. Meanwhile, the Integrated Children’s System – which is replacing child protection registers – isn’t fit for purpose and many authorities are dragging their feet in implementing it because it’s worrying the hell out of them.

While all this fiddling around with shiny, fantastical new technology goes on, too many children are getting hurt. What will it take to persuade the government to shut its toybox and re-focus attention and money on honing the child protection workforce?

Begettings

I used to love those bits of the bible that went something like: “And Ahitub begat Zadok, and Zadok begat Ahimaaz, and Ahimaaz begat Azariah” etc (Yes, I was a strange child, OK?)

There’s something similar over at Ideal Government, only this time it deals with the convoluted and incestuous history of the biometrics company expected to win the contract for the National Identity Scheme. Fascinating.

More on that ICS report…

…in The Register;
Computing and again here;
e-Health Insider
and What PC.

Inconvenient truths

Regular readers will probably remember the ongoing saga of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) evaluation. ICS is the new electronic system intended to hold social work records. Each local authority is expected to introduce it, but the process has been fraught with delays and difficulties.

In 2004 the government commissioned an evaluation of ICS from academics at York University. Over the next two years the academic team studied four local authorities as they attempted to get ICS up and running. Their report was submitted in September 2006 - and promptly disappeared. In the following 18 months, shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton twice asked when it would be published.

Finally, two months ago, the government published its own document which they said was based on the evaluation report. We are told that they did not consult the report’s authors before producing this (though we’re happy to be corrected if we’re wrong).

The government’s version said that the report identified these problems:

The unanticipated scale of organisational change which the implementation of a complex system such as ICS brought about.

The need for improvements in social work training to ensure that qualified workers are knowledgeable about the research and conceptual base of the ICS, and are enabled to develop their analytical skills.

The need for greater support for social workers to use the system appropriately with disabled children

It also included the now-familiar response to reports that don’t say the right sort of thing:

There was coherence to the data from the different data sources… However, the research does not provide a sound basis on which to judge the potential value of the ICS

We FOI’d a copy of the original report, but had great difficulty in reconciling it with the government’s summary. While the report’s authors generally believe that a move to electronic records could be a positive one, they say:

However, our evaluation raises serious reservations about the design and use of ICS in its present form and we believe that the ICS has yet to demonstrate the degree to which and how it is fit for purpose.

While optimism about the system’s potential prevailed over time and some early sources of negativity were resolved, other negative attitudes crystallized and hardened. Social workers with longer experience of ICS were not more positive towards it than those who had relatively recent contact with it.

The concerns expressed included (a) the increased time demands which were “associated with ‘paperwork’ rather than any significant shift in orientation to social work“:

The time required for assessment, planning and review is very considerable and could easily come to absorb the great bulk of social work time. The demands of ‘data entry’ are also considerable and, in ordinary initial and core assessments, take up slightly more time than direct contact with the family or child.

(b) The prescriptive nature of the system:

The ICS was seen by the majority of members of the focus groups in the process and audit studies as being too prescriptive, too long, and repetitive and divided unhelpfully into chunks. There was concern that since the exemplars insisted on similarity, they failed to ask questions that were relevant to some children while asking of others questions that were irrelevant. Practitioners were also concerned that the records were not suitable for use with children and families, and that some, such as the core exemplar, were inappropriate for use with children with disabilities.

(c) The inflexible and standardised format which made it “difficult to grasp the key features of a case or to track its coherence“. While the authors say that the assessment framework encourages social workers to think systematically about a case,

The difficulty arises because problems do not come divided up in the way in which the exemplars are structured. Linked to this, the system cannot easily encompass the logic of analyzing a case. Essentially it adopts an actuarial approach by asking for information which, in a large sample of cases, predicts negative or positive outcomes. This is a sensible approach for management purposes, but an individual case requires a more individual and flexible approach

Far from the problem being one of social workers’ failure to understand the system, as the government’s version of events suggests, or their underdeveloped ‘analytical skills’, it is pretty clear that the fly in the ointment is the system itself. A shame, then, that the government didn’t find out more about the ‘conceptual base’ of social work to begin with, and a disgrace that they prefer to suppress criticism rather than deal with the problems.

There’s more in Community Care and a bit in the Sunday Times - the article also deals with eCAF.

Toilet Lock-Down

I was doing an interview yesterday on the use of CCTV in schools, and had a fascinating discussion with the programme researchers. Apparently one school they visited (a state-of the-art academy) is so awash with new technology that they can lock every door in the building at the touch of a button, instantly transforming classrooms into communal cells and preventing anyone escaping out of the front door. They routinely lock the toilets during lesson-times - visits to the toilet are only allowed during break times. It seems it’s not only the Freedom of Information Act that has passed schools by. Human Rights, anyone? Hands up if you’ve ever heard of them.

YMCA

In the thrifty 50s (and 60s, but it doesn’t rhyme so neatly) Monday’s dinner was always concocted from the leftovers of the ritual Sunday Lunch - what my mother called YMCA, or Yesterday’s Mash Cooked Again. I was reminded of it by the latest bit of policy recycling spouted by the government:

Troublemakers as young as 10 years old are to be asked to sign a good behaviour contract to stop them going off the rails.

Ah, like ‘Acceptable Behaviour Contracts’ you mean? Just to give you an idea, here’s the guidance that was published in 2002 - although they were first piloted in 1999.

Ms Hughes said the project would target about 50 youngsters in each of the pilot areas - parts of the country with the biggest anti-social behaviour problems.

She told BBC News: “If you can really work in a very positive way with the 50 most difficult kids who are in danger and turn those kids around then you can have a disproportionately beneficial effect.”

Well, what a coincidence. That sounds remarkably similar to the Youth Justice Board’s ID50 scheme that’s been knocking around for 5 years or so. It’s designed to identify the 50 children thought most likely to offend so that they can be ‘diverted’ on to Youth Inclusion Programmes.

Maybe the government just forgot that they were doing it already?

Juggling with eels

At the moment we’re in the middle of preparing a report to send to the Information Commissioner about our fruitless attempts to get answers from schools on their use of CCTV. For the time being let’s just say that FOI requests to several hundred schools over the past 9 months have yielded a pathetic 16% response rate – the remaining 84% didn’t even manage an acknowledgment.

An apposite story, then, in yesterday’s Telegraph about CCTV:

Schools are becoming “Orwellian” societies where CCTV cameras in classrooms monitor pupil behaviour and staff performance, teachers will warn today.

Many of the Government’s semi-independent academies have installed cameras and two-way mirrors to let senior staff monitor pupils, they say.

Last month the European Data Protection Working Party released a paper on the protection of children’s data (pdf), including a section on CCTV:

There are places where safety is of paramount importance, so CCTV can be more easily justified, for example, at entrances and exits to schools, as well as to other places where people circulate - not just the school population, but also people visiting the school premises for whatever reason.

…On the other hand, in most other parts of the school, the pupils’ right to privacy (as well as that of teachers and other school workers), and the essential freedom of teaching, weigh against the need for permanent CCTV surveillance.

This is so particularly in classrooms, where video surveillance can interfere not only with students’ freedom of learning and of speech, but also with the freedom of teaching. The same applies to leisure areas, gymnasiums and dressing rooms, where surveillance can interfere with rights to privacy.

These remarks are also based on the right to the development of the personality, which all children have. Indeed, their developing conception of their own freedom can become compromised if they assume from an early age that it is normal to be monitored by CCTV. This is all the more true if webcams or similar devices are used for distance monitoring of children during school time.

It is extraordinary that CCTV has become accepted as a normal part of school life in the UK, but when schools don’t regard themselves as public authorities open to public scrutiny, it is inevitable that some head teachers will start to treat them as their own private fiefdoms.

update: more on this from Mark Ballard in The Inquirer

Minority Report or plain old eugenics?

The latest victim of pixie dust is ACPO’s spokesman on DNA, who opines that small children should be put on NDNAD if they show signs of becoming criminals in later life. Quite rightly, Shami Chakrabarti recommends that he:

“go back to the business of policing or the pastime of science fiction novels”.

So how, exactly, do our public masters predict that a child will grow up to be a criminal? We’ve already outlined the research that Blair seized upon to justify his “menaces to society” outburst and, rather than repeating that, recommend a quick refresher before reading any further.

It’s also important to know that Feinstein (author of the research) wasn’t just talking about the likelihood of committing crime. Included in the list of ‘poor outcomes’ that he believed could be predicted were obesity, smoking and not voting, although you have to trawl the full, lengthy research document to discover that. The heavily-spun summary version implies it’s all about crime.

Tomorrow’s Fish and Chips Paper asks exactly how ACPO’s spokesman proposes to determine who is exhibiting potentially criminal behaviour. For that, we need to turn to the ‘predictive’ tools in use.

The most obvious example comes from RYOGENS -’Reducing Youth Offending Generic National Solution’. This also has the advantage that its ‘checklist’ is available on the web, albeit in archives. It used to be on the RYOGENS website but vanished shortly after we referred to it in the FIPR Report on children’s databases.

As an aside, RYOGENS was developed by Deloittes with ODPM funding (the same Deloittes that carried out the recent independent research on behalf of the government into the security of Contactpoint). It has since been handed over to Esprit Soutron.

So, here’s that RYOGENS checklist, derived from tools such as ONSET, a Youth Justice Board system also designed to ‘predict’ offending behaviour. It makes sobering reading. While one or two of the items on the list would undoubtedly be worrying signs, what about the clear bias against those who are poor? We have, for instance:

- Living in high crime area
- Lack of facilities / equipment
- Financial and/or housing difficulties
- Substance availability
- Frequently moving house

These are problems of poverty. Yes, we already know that there is a clear link between poverty and crime. We also know that putting resources into deprived areas has a beneficial effect. But that’s one hell of a long way from being able to say that a child growing up in poverty will become a criminal. The idea that criminality can be predicted is not just insulting to families struggling on the breadline; it is repulsively eugenic.

Is ACPO really saying that children living in poverty on abysmal estates should automatically be entered on to the National DNA Database? Because if they really want to use ‘predictive’ tools to decide which children should be on it, that is the inevitable result.

Talking of disclosure…

I’ve just received an email from the Home Affairs Committee about an evidence session for their ’surveillance society’ inquiry. instead of BCCing it, they sent it in an open email CCd to around 60 other people…Doh!

Mutual disclosure

Recommended reading: Bruce Schneier refuting the myth that:

“In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you’ll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we’ll also be watching the government.”

As he says, it depends on the relative power of the protagonists:

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

It occurs to me that, in the interests of reciprocity, practitioners using Contactpoint might like to disclose to children whether they’re visiting an obesity clinic or have attracted unfavourable attention from the police. Maybe when they’re carrying out an eCAF, they could reveal whether any of their friends is alcoholic, when they last bunked off work or if their marriage is in a parlous state. It would redress that power balance a bit.