Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Ann, you are very welcome. We appreciate the effort that you have put in to taking a look at the Bill and giving us your thoughts on the basis of your experience and evidence. Would you care to open with a few thoughts that might direct us in our questioning?

Ms Ann Godfrey: Thank you very much, Chairman. Like the commissioner, I very much support the fact that the Bill would require cooperation to achieve agreed outcomes. I started in this work in 1998, and the experience that I have had covers the period before we had agreed outcomes to work to and afterwards.

As the commissioner explained, when the children's strategy came in, with the agreed outcomes in place, the children's services planning process, which I worked in, changed what it had been doing. We changed all our work so that, instead of looking at how services were operating, we looked at how the outcomes were being achieved. That process has taken a good number of years.

Where the six high-level outcomes in the children's strategy are concerned, I will say that one thing that I am very aware of is that that strategy was consulted on for, I think, about five years. There was a lot of input from children and young people in particular. There was a lot of discussion, particularly in the context of what you were saying, Mr Maskey, about how the outcomes can actually be measured. That led to the extensive set of indicators that are now in place for the measurement of the children's strategy. In the children's services planning process at agency level, where I worked, we used the same indicators.

As Ms Fearon said, these outcomes seem very general, but, in fact, when you break them down and ask, "Well, how are we going to measure that outcome?" — say, for children achieving educationally — you see that there are the obvious things like educational outcomes, such as how many A levels and GCSEs children are getting. However, there are other outcomes, such as how children are going into school in the first place. When added up, those indicators add to the outcomes. That goes to another of the questions that you have just been debating. It concerns how you have a reporting mechanism — I agree that that should be annual — that does not just become a report on process. My view is that that reporting mechanism should be, first and foremost, about how the indicators are progressing. From the work that is already in the reports, it will be clear who is responsible at agency and departmental level for increasing those indicators. That would mean that, if an annual report that was required was structured around how the indicators were progressing, it would not become too onerous.

You could look at the online children and young people's strategic partnerships' plans. They report annually and are based on the indicators. A lot of work has been going on for years and years now on measuring those indicators and being able to track them. Some of that work has been about encouraging agencies to share their information into the pot so that it can be used. I suppose that I am very much in favour of the link between the outcomes and the Bill as a whole. As the commissioner said, the outcomes come from the children's strategy. I am very much in favour of that link with the children's strategy.

As has been said, the duty to collaborate is essential, because it is core business. It makes the collaboration core business for every agency. As we know, anything that is a statutory duty for a statutory Department or agency is something that will get a lot of attention. I have sat around tables for years and years encouraging and helping people from different agencies to talk about how we can improve outcomes for children. There is a great deal of goodwill at chief executive and officer level in the agencies. It falls down when it gets into those discussions that go on in agencies when people say, "What we are going prioritise? Will we prioritise this, or will we prioritise those things that are in our core business?"

That is my view on the importance of outcomes. I have made a couple of suggestions for amendments to the Bill. I know that there was a bit of discussion about the Bill not being clear enough. My view is that, as the Bill already requires cooperation at two levels, it should clearly state that. First, I suggest that there should be a change to the title paragraph to add that, as well the statutory duty to collaborate at departmental level, agencies would be required to discharge their functions and to cooperate with each another to contribute to the achievement of the same outcomes through amendment to the Children Order. That is there already, but that change would just make it clearer. There should also be a title saying that there should be a general duty at departmental level and a corresponding duty at agency level. Those should come through an amendment to the Children Order.

I suggest another amendment to schedule 2 to the Children Order. Schedule 2 and part 4 of the Children Order relate to children in need; that is, children who require services particularly from health and social care and education because they will not achieve their outcomes unless they have further services. The problem with that wording is that it does not allow collaboration on early intervention. I know that this and many other Committees have looked at the value of early intervention in the last few years. I know that that case has been won.

The practice in the Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership has been to focus on and to encourage agencies to collaborate for early intervention. I know that there has been some very good practice at departmental level on particular projects. My suggestion is to change the wording — I have given the wording in my written response — and, instead of looking at children in need, to look at the high-level outcomes to ensure that the work at agency level looks at improvement in the outcomes for children, rather than at particular groups of children.

The commissioner said a lot of what I would have been saying about children's services planning. I am quite happy to answer questions about the detail of that planning. I have suggested in my amendments that, in the list of statutory agencies, including the community and voluntary sector, that need to be involved in children's services planning, there should also be a requirement that children and young people be involved in the planning process. They should be not just consulted on it but involved, and they should look at it afterwards. There should be a requirement for that in the planning process.

I have personal experience of how that has worked at the agency level over the years. The transition of disabled children and young people to adulthood has been mentioned. That has been a huge issue in the lack of collaboration, particularly between health and education. The workload of the working group of the children and young people's strategic partnership on young disabled people transitioning to adulthood and its three-year plan has been determined by disabled children and young people's views on what would make a difference for them in their transition to adulthood. It is coming from those young people and is very different from what would have come up from agencies. So, it can be done. That is what I am saying.

My final thought is on sharing and pooling resources. My view on that is that it is essential. Even a duty to collaborate gets you so far, but at the end of the day what makes a difference is what agencies do with their money. The experience in GB and in other parts of the world where there is outcomes-based planning has been that resources also need to be pooled. The step that makes a difference to services on the ground is what you do with your money. Once it is possible to pool your resources — there are different ways of doing that — the people who are sitting round a table thinking about how to make a change to a particular aspect of children's lives can think about their resources together, rather than separately. That means that they do not get to the point where they say, "We all agree that in theory, but we have to go back to our agencies' boards to persuade our chief executive to give a little bit of money to a collaborative effort". That does not work.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Thank you. You said that the strategy changed thinking and put the focus on to outcomes. Why could what the Bill intends to achieve not be achieved in the next iteration of the strategy?

Ms Godfrey: The strategy has been in place since 2005 and the children's services planning process started in 1998 and is still in process. After the children's strategy came into place, the experience was that it really was helpful, in that it put in place the outcomes, which everyone could then look at. Without the statutory duty to collaborate, however much goodwill there is — I am really aware that there is a lot at different levels in agencies — we are limited by the fact that each agency and Department does not have a duty to collaborate to deliver the outcomes. That then puts it further down the pecking order of importance and below everything that is required in each Department or agency.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So, does that mean that the strategy is good but that this is better?

Ms Godfrey: No, the strategy is excellent. The strategy requires a statutory duty to collaborate. It needs that to allow it to succeed.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Are there any examples, either here or elsewhere, of where pooling resources interdepartmentally has worked?

Ms Godfrey: There are quite a lot of examples from elsewhere. This has happened since I retired, but I know that there has been a major early intervention project here involving the pooling of resources across different Departments and that the Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership has been involved in that at agency level. I also know that that has been very helpful. There have been other examples, but they have been few. One that I was involved in was early intervention for the prevention of offending, and funding from DOJ and DHSSPS went into that. That has involved very successful projects across Northern Ireland to prevent young people getting involved in offending. Without a statutory duty to collaborate, the examples are few and far between.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Where timing is concerned, would this work, or would it work to best effect only if you did it at the beginning of a comprehensive spending review or at the design stage of a Programme for Government?

Ms Godfrey: I think that it should be done as soon as possible, whether it fits with the timing of the comprehensive spending review. If the statutory duty to collaborate is enacted, and obviously statutory guidance has to come afterwards —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): If it is enacted at 9.00 am tomorrow, where will the budget come from?

Ms Godfrey: The budget is not there, but tomorrow morning those people with responsibility for deciding what happens, such as Ministers in Departments and chief executives in agencies, would start thinking, "This is part of core business in my agency or Department, so I will be thinking about this in a different way".

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Yes, but they will also be thinking, "I do not have a budget to pool".

Ms Godfrey: No, but Departments and agencies have existing budgets.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): But they do not have spare cash lying around.

Ms Godfrey: No, they do not have spare cash. I remember when the Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership was set up in 2012. It brought together the chief executives of all the relevant agencies, like the Health and Social Care Board and the education and library boards. It was very interesting that, at that first meeting, the chief executives welcomed the partnership. Given that it was 2012, they also said, "We have less in our budgets, which is why it is really important that we collaborate with other agencies. We have less money, rather than more." So, it is about collaborating better with the existing resources; it is not about new resources.

Mr Maskey: Thank you, Ann, for your presentation. Looking at your profile, I can see that you are obviously an expert practitioner in this field, so your views are very important. If I heard you right, you were describing measuring outcomes through a matrix almost. Each component would have x number of points, which would then be totalled up. I am only paraphrasing, of course, but you might take a score out of 100 marks, depending on whether they have done well. Given your expertise, I am just trying to work out how ambitious we can really be with all this. It is like everything else, and I am not offering this as a reason for not doing it, because, as I said in the last session, I think that we have all agreed that this is an inherently good thing. We are trying to work out the nuts and bolts of it now to make it the best thing.

I heard you say that there is a lot of goodwill out there among a whole range of people. I know schoolteachers, principals and other public servants who, when they see things, try to join up the dots themselves. I have also seen examples in the criminal justice system of police thinking at times that they can work with young people to prevent reoffending and so on.

I was at a wake the other night for a young fellow who took his own life, God love him. He left a family behind. This is what happens. A lot of good work had been done, the lad had been in prison, and people would have thought up until a while ago that a reasonable job had been done with that young fellow. But problems re-emerged, and you had the worst case scenario. I do not want to deal with all that, but I am saying to myself that you would have measured that case six months ago and said that it was relatively successful, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, it was not. Again, I stress that I am not making that as an argument not to do what we are discussing. So, given your experience, I am just trying to work out how ambitious we can be, or is the thing to do to enact this legislation so that there is an obligation to cooperate, which will be a good thing? What is your view on that?

Ms Godfrey: I think that it is a good thing because of what you said about the young man who took his life. Every report about children and young people dying — we have seen them all — whatever else it says, will say that the agencies did not collaborate. It has been going on for 30 years. So, this is critical to allowing proper collaboration at a senior level in agencies. A lot of what goes on at practitioner level, between the social worker and the teacher and the community and voluntary sector members in a group, is really good. Those people usually collaborate pretty well. If they can, they want to. When they go back to their agencies, those agencies fail to give them the time and support to do what are sometimes the really small things that make a real difference. That is absolutely critical.

We can be ambitious, because the measurement is a gradual process. It reminds me of the discussions that were held during the consultation on the outcomes. People thought, "We cannot have such grand outcomes, because we were not going to get there". The critical thing is to be able to measure progress against those indicators over time — over a year, two years or three years.

As well as the statistical indicators, it is always really important to take on board the views of children and young people and parents. They may say, "Some of your indicators are getting better, but in fact, we are finding that, on the ground, such and such is not getting better". That is the intelligence that comes from people who know about their own life. It should be both. I think that we can be ambitious, because it is so critical. However, I think that we are not. Will we be content with the next report and the next and the next saying, "There was no collaboration"? Why not?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Ann, thank you very much not just for your evidence today but for your written input. We note the suggested amendments. It seems that the Bill will come forward but with significant amendments. We thank you for your suggestions.