Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), to whose thoughtful contribution I listened with respect. I declare an interest as an adviser to the Priory Group, which owns a number of special schools around the country. I start by offering strong support to the proposal in the Bill to give statutory recognition to children's trusts by mandating the creation of children's trusts boards in every part of the country. It is important in this context to underline that the children's trust is not some abstract, esoteric philosophical construct divorced from the reality of public service delivery and children and young people's opportunity. On the contrary, the children's trust is or should be the embodiment of the local partnership between the commissioners of services for children, young people and their families, and the providers of those services. As such, the children's trust has a responsibility to spearhead the process of integrated commissioning across education, social care and health services. Necessarily in the process if it undertakes that work, it will bring together and work with local authorities, primary care trusts and social services departments, but it does not end there. Very likely, if the work is done properly, it will involve the children's trust's interaction with and learning from a range of other organisations—for example, the Connexions service, youth offending teams, Sure Start children's centres, the police service, housing services, leisure services and voluntary organisations. I am not sure that there is adequate recognition of the significance of the children's trust. The difficulty is that five years ago, for entirely understandable reasons, the Government did not want to invest those trusts with too much formal responsibility. They were susceptible to the criticism if they did so that local discretion would be unduly fettered or constrained. The result is that on the ground there may be a children's trust, but in many cases there are what are amorphously known as children's trust arrangements, and they are not as specific or explicit as a children's trust. My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, said in his contribution that the track record of the children's trusts so far has been chequered at best and subject to ferocious criticism. There is no denying that last year's Audit Commission report is very critical of the work of the trusts so far. It says, among other things, that the trusts are guilty of a failure to distinguish between strategic, executive and operational issues. The report laments the fact that many of the representatives on those children's trusts boards that exist lack a mandate from their sponsoring organisations to offer a view about policy or, more particularly, to commit resources. It rues the reality, too, that there is often among the members of the trusts little or no experience whatever of the process of joint commissioning, which the Government believe to be integral to the future successful delivery of services to children, young people and their families. When I undertook a review of speech, language and communication services for children from 0 to 19 for the Government between 2007 and 2008, it was also my sense, regrettably, that in respect of health and education services, all too often there was a tendency to commission separately, based on different understandings, different priorities and different processes. The Audit Commission is justified in saying that so far, over the five years, there is little evidence that the trusts have made a substantial difference to outcomes for children, young people and their families, but the burden of my contention is that that is not of itself an indictment of the notion that there should be children's trusts or joint commissioning arrangements. Rather, it is a reflection of the reality that all too often those trusts are themselves intangible. Going round the country, I wanted to see the trust, to hear the trust, to smell the trust, to recognise the trust in action, and I would often ask besuited individuals of great seniority in the commissioning or delivery of local services whether there was a trust in that area, of what it consisted, and what it was doing. I have to say that I was greeted, in a multiplicity of places around the country, with answers of quite the most stupendous and unsurpassable eloquence, at the end of which I was absolutely none the wiser as to whether anything was being done on that front. That leads me to say that at least on the surface there would appear to be a good Government case for changing the arrangement and offering a degree of a lead from the top in saying that there should be statutory recognition.