Social Research Unit

Blogs and Ideas

Analysis and sober reflection are fundamental aspects of what we do. But the best ideas usually begin more sketchily among the notes, observations and conversations perhaps collected during fieldwork or in conference corridors. This page captures some of the creative speculations of staff and collaborators.

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What I mean to say: fit for purpose

Just before Christmas, UK Children’s Minister Tim Loughton commissioned a review of the adoption process. His advisor, Martin Narey, had become “exercised …. about (the)

Michael Little

Just before Christmas, UK Children’s Minister Tim Loughton commissioned a review of the adoption process. His advisor, Martin Narey, had become “exercised …. about (the) parental assessment process which is”, he said, “not fit for purpose”.

‘Not fit for purpose’ is, as far as I can work out, a recently invented cliché. I suppose a cliché by definition should have a certain vintage, maturing through over use from meaningful observation into banality. But some words and phrases are quicker to triteness than others, and ‘not fit for purpose’ has made the journey at the double.

Take away the negative, add a question mark and we are left with ‘fit for purpose?’ a routine quality assurance test. But whereas ‘fit for purpose?’ is asked of a specific part of a process, a cog in a system of wheels, ‘not fit for purpose’ is an adjective applied to the organisations on which society has come to rely.

Its intention is to shock. The Home Office, prior to its break up, was ‘not fit for purpose’. The European Union, say the eurosceptics, is ‘not fit for purpose’. The failure is not a part of the organisation, a department or leader, it is the whole damn system. ‘Blimey, I didn’t know that, thank goodness someone is going to put it right’ is the requisite response.

The riposte should be ‘what purpose’. The European Union seems to be implicated in near-on 70 years of peace in a continent that has specialised in war, so maybe it is suited to this purpose. On the economic front, capabilities are rightly being questioned.

The purpose in doubt with respect to adoption is its ability to supply middle class childless couples with healthy children from working class homes. As Minister Loughton put it,
"We cannot afford to sit back and lose potential adoptive parents when there are children who could benefit hugely from the loving home they can provide”.

Another purpose of children’s services is to ensure that working class parents are not deprived, because of temporary incapacity, from the opportunity of providing a warm supportive upbringing for their children. Another is to weigh the risks of things going wrong with the birth family against things going wrong with a foster or adoptive family. That middle class families are as vulnerable as working class families to incapacity or death, and as able to screw up their children, or to be screwed up by their children, is one of the great inconveniences of modernity.

Social workers are being asked to make life changing, in some cases, life saving decisions. I am sure I would, as Narey put it, ‘meander’, when faced with such huge choices. And I might slow to a complete halt if my decisions were constantly being questioned by unqualified people like me, the Minister or Narey.

What the high ups can do is to be clear about the purpose and to stop second guessing ‘fitness’. With a bit more clarity, maybe the practitioners would have more confidence to act.

Finlandia: What’s essential and what’s optional in the quest to improve children’s lives?

To the British liberal eye, Scandinavia is an idyll as perfect as that painted in Sibelius’s short symphony Finlandia.

Michael Little

To the British liberal eye, Scandinavia is an idyll as perfect as that painted in Sibelius’s short symphony Finlandia.

Recent terrorism, the emergence of nationalism and the unsettling effects of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell scratch at the surface but the beautiful vista remains undimmed.

By most calculus, the Scandinavian states do more for their citizens than we do in the UK. The argument goes that doing more would make our children, our people, happier and healthier.

But it is interesting also to look at what apparently successful states omit.

Last week the Social Research Unit hosted a visit from anti-bullying expert Christina Salmivalli from Finland. Part of the story was about addition. She reported on how her well-crafted, rigorously evaluated bullying programme had been implemented, effectively so, and at scale. It is another Scandinavian success.

But the back story covered some of the things Finland does not do that the UK does. Finland does not have school inspectors. There is no equivalent to OFSTED.

Finland does not give parents or students choice about which school they attend. You go to your local school. It's not a command, it's just what you do. There is no testing. In fact the first real exam is at matriculation, when students are 16 years old. No SATS in primary school, and none in secondary school. Not that there is much primary school to speak of. Finnish students don’t really get around to learning how to read and write until they are seven years old.

And to round it all off, Finnish teachers are not told their raison d’être is to produce super smart graduates. The task is to prepare students for life. The product of this laid back approach to schooling is the smartest students in the world. Finland regularly tops the widely respected OECD PISA survey of scholastic performance.

In many ways I am resistant to these idylls. Sibelius is ok. Finlandia is quite nice and only seven minutes long. But most of the symphonies go on and on and are relentlessly uplifting or lovely.

But it did set me off wondering what would happen if we abandoned all inspection in a dozen or so local authorities. What if we gave OFSTED a school holiday and a social care break for a couple of years. Would the world come to a halt, and if it didn’t could we spend some of the savings on prevention or early intervention? And if we abandoned the commitment to choice in another handful of local authorities, would parents or pupils rise up and revolt, and would standards plummet as we have been led to believe?

If we went about this exorcism of choice randomly, we could find out, and potentially save a few bob. Or is this just another idyll, a fantasia maybe?

We Can Work it Out

Bill Gates stares out of a Rotary International poster and tells us ‘We are this close to ending Polio.’ His thumb and forefinger are placed either side of the words ‘this close

Michael Little

Bill Gates stares out of a Rotary International poster and tells us ‘We are this close to ending Polio.’ His thumb and forefinger are placed either side of the words ‘this close.’

Gates is making a huge contribution to this dream. As, no doubt, are Rotary International. But it was the pronoun ‘We’ that caught my eye. Eradicating Polio demands that a lot of people do something different.

The poster caught my eye at the airport as I returned from the convening on Achieving Lasting Impact at Scale organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.

We had been reminded that we know how to reduce infant mortality but we haven’t figured out how to get the solutions widely taken up. Exclusive breast feeding in the first two years of life saves lives but few mothers start, never mind persist, in nursing their own children. Chlorhexidine kills the infection that spreads from the umbilical chord to the new born child. But how do we get this simple, inexpensive, antiseptic to every birth place?

There was an impressive ‘We’ at the Gates convening. Experts in child health sat alongside business leaders. Politicians and policy makers shared the platform with media experts. Most branches of academia were represented, and participants came from all corners of the globe.

Most will have left reflecting on the need to collaborate and to think anew. Experts like to think they have the solution, when in fact most solutions are the product of several experts.

We know that telling people what to do in order that they and their children will lead healthier lives seldom works. So how do we change our habits with a view to tracking down innovative ways of getting people to demand health enhancing products and practices?

We learned that the personal approach pays dividends. But how do we mass produce the personal so that we can help recipients of innovation to be determinedly individualistic whilst adhering to emerging health enhancing norms?

I cannot work out the solutions to these problems. And nor could the participants at the Gates convening in the short amount of time allocated. But with more time and more collective effort progress should be possible.

We know what works and we continue to invent new ways of improving global family health. But preventing eight million under five deaths each year requires a new expertise, the scaling of proven products and practices. We don’t yet know how to do this. But We can work it out.

Michael Little is co-Director of the Social Research Unit at Dartington, an independent foundation dedicated to bringing science to bear on better child development. Dr Little assisted in the facilitation of the Achieving Lasting Impact at Scale convening organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle in November 2011.

Connecting research, policy and practice with Evidence-Based Associates

In a recent interview for the Evidence Based Advocate, I talk about the payment-by-results contracts in place in the U.K.

Michael Little

In a recent interview for the Evidence Based Advocate, I talk about the payment-by-results contracts in place in the U.K.

Evidence-based associates is a business dedicated to improving the quality and effectiveness of juvenile justice systems through the use of performance-based contracts. They do this by providing guidance and services to support system reform while substantially reducing costs and improving results.

They also publish a quarterly newsletter, highlighting developments in of their current work. In the most recent publication, Clay Yeager interviews me about the new performance-based approaches to improving social services here in the UK. A transcription of the interview is available online. Click on the link below to read the full interview - Link to the Evidence Based Associates newsletter.

Response to the response

Michael describes the reactions of UK ministers to the Reviews around improving child development since the Coalition Government was formed 12 months ago.

Michael Little

Michael describes the reactions of UK ministers to the Reviews around improving child development since the Coalition Government was formed 12 months ago.

Four reviews. One response. Two more reviews promised. There has been a lot of reflection on how to better support child development since the Coalition Government was formed 12 months ago.

Today, Education and Health Ministers Sarah Teather and Anne Milton published their reaction to the reviews commissioned from Labour MPs Frank Field and Graham Allen, Action for Children Chief Clare Tickell and LSE Professor Eileen Munro (the 19th of July, 2011). The detail is set out in Supporting Families in the Foundation Years.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the publication is its’ authors. The drive for change has been coming from Treasury, Number 10 and the Department of Work and Pensions. But it is the owners of children’s policy, Education and Health that have provided the primary reaction. This may or may not signal future priorities.

The four reviews produced a lot of requests for action and it is impossible for Government to respond favourably to all of them. The initial reaction is broad. Inevitably it backs the things to which Government is already committed, the expansion of Family Nurse Partnership for example. There is strong backing for more information for parents, a better trained workforce and a shift of resources towards the most disadvantaged.

There is nothing here to argue against. But the aspirations may be too broad to be useful, and some of the things that matter most may get shunted down the list of priorities.

My contribution to these reviews, a lot with Allen and a little with Munro and Field, has been a call for a higher standard of evidence. The Government response indicates a shift in the right direction. But it is far from all embracing perhaps reflecting the anti-body reaction that this injection of science has produced.

Maybe Teather and Milton have judged this right. Interventions selected by a high standard of evidence are potentially part of the solution to impairments to children’s health and development. They are not the entire solution. And we have to further test the potential. As long as evidence-based programmes and policies are not being kicked into the long grass, to borrow a favourite Whitehall phrase, then we are doing well.

The test will be the extent to which Government backs or at least does not impede the creation of an Early Intervention Foundation to provide independent standards of evidence, identify programmes and policies that pass muster and support new financing arrangements to see if the potential benefit to children can be realised.

One recognises in Teather and Milton’s report the cleft that Government must stand over. One line takes us away from telling local authorities what to do. The other line demands that we all do one or two things to improve the lot of England’s children.

The join requires proper experimentation at a local level, and an honest sharing of results so that others can pick up what is successful. Science, truth and embracing failure are necessary ingredients to make this work.
The cleft also highlights the need to develop a social contract regarding child development. Little is to be gained by telling people what to do. Nobody has ‘a’ solution to the ills visited upon our children. We still lack consensus about what we agree on, what we need to learn and how we can test innovation.

The glaring gap in both the reviews and the government response is innovation through subtraction. Everyone wants to add (in a time of economic adversity). Nobody wants to acknowledge that some progress depends on taking away that which is harmful (and testing the extent of its harm along the way).

The great triumph of this process, the reviews and the response, has been the way it has crossed party political interests. Child development is not going to be enhanced by voting left, right or middle. The political parties can help by approaching child development in a non-partisan manner. That reviews were commissioned from two Labour MPs and the response came from the Coalition parties is a significant step in the right direction.