Developmentalism

The first framing discourse identified in the policy texts was developmentalism. Fendler argued that ‘normalisation operates through the discourse of developmentality when the generalizations that stipulate normal development are held to be defined and desirable . . . (and serve) as the norm and the lives of individual children are evaluated with reference to that norm’ (Fendler, Reference Fendler, Hultqvist and Dahlberg2001: 128). Children, in other words, are governed through the normalising effects of psychological classifications. Rose (Reference Rose1985) linked the rise of experts to techniques of individualisation and the new scientific ‘gaze’ on children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Developmental scales were not just ways of assessing children but also provided new ways of thinking about childhood. ‘With the rise of a normative expertise of childhood, family life and subjectivity could be governed in a new way’ (Rose, Reference Rose1991: 150).

Expert guidance on child development became an area of training for professionals (Bowlby, Reference Bowlby1944; Winnicott, Reference Winnicott1975). ‘The Psy complex’ has been used to refer to this network of ideas about human beings, their perfectibility or corrigibility, the reasons for their behaviour as well as the ways they can be classified, compared and controlled. Developmental psychology became a technology of normalisation and governance (Walkerdine, Reference Walkerdine, Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine1984; Burman, Reference Burman1994).

Mayall (Reference Mayall, Smith, Gollop, Marshall and Nairn2000) argued that the child development industry cornered the market in relation to knowledge about children. Child development discourse tends to construct children as immature, incomplete human beings at the beginning of a process of biologically determined development, which consists of a universal series of stages leading them through to adulthood. Riley showed how this measuring of stages and milestones was problematic because ‘the individual is always already social, always there’ and that separating socialisation from development is a marker of the priority of the biological (Riley, Reference Riley1983: 33).

In general, the policy texts in my research supports the view that, despite challenges, contemporary welfare policy continues to be actively based upon this view of childhood as a series of, more or less, universal stages. One way this is embedded within policy is that participation in child protection contexts is closely linked to age and it is often assumed that younger children cope less well with participation than older children. What was interesting was the way that level of understanding interacted in complex ways with a child's age within practice. Within this context, it is the assessment of a child's understanding that becomes significant.

Many authorities at that time did not routinely invite children to attend child protection meetings. Younger children, in particular those under twelve years, were most likely to be excluded. Although meetings are not the only way children participate in decision-making (and interviews were often acknowledged as being difficult arenas for children to participate in), the formal policy documents revealed the way they had become an important site within the participation process, Analysis of the policy documents showed that too little attention was paid to the meaning of participation and how it is practiced. It was in the informal documents produced by children's rights workers and in interviews with staff closely involved in children's participation that this view was being actively challenged. What became visible through the analysis of the formal policy texts was the way that age was still being privileged. The underlying assumption was that the older one becomes, the more responsibility and competence becomes likely. Debates about children's competence have shown that competence evolves in response to the world in which children grow up. International studies have shown that it is not possible to make universal assumptions about children's capacity for participation as it varies so widely (Lansdowne, Reference Lansdowne, Tisdall, Davis, Hill and Prout2006). During the 1990s, the argument – that children's age, limited experience and incompetence meant that they could not participate – was successfully challenged and, as a result, increasingly the practice since then is that a child's level of understanding is assessed before a decision is made about their participation.

Children's participation is often negotiated and mediated via professionals, who assess and make a judgement about the child's level of understanding. This assessment of understanding can become problematic because of variations in interpretation of ‘the best interests’ of the child in any given situation (Kelly, Reference Kelly1997). The policy texts illustrated the various ways ‘expert’ professionals become gatekeepers for children's participation. The ‘experts’ involved in assessments often have a background and training in either medical or psychological perspectives of child development. The underlying assumption is that these experts know, or can discover, the developmental ‘truth’ about children. The ‘new’ sociology of childhood has challenged the dominance of psychology in childhood studies (Fendler, Reference Fendler, Hultqvist and Dahlberg2001; Hobbs, Reference Hobbs, Goldson, Lavalette and McKechnie2002; McKechnie, Reference McKechnie, Goldson, Lavalette and McKechnie2002). Despite the challenges to the traditional orthodoxy of the psychological and medical models, a number of policy texts in the research bear testimony to the way developmentalism continued to play a dominant role within contemporary legislation and policy formation.

Protectionism

The second and related discourse is protectionism, which often involves essentialist notions of a child and links to ideas of childhood being a time of innocence and play, where children need protecting. Professionals trained within the ‘psy’ perspectives are more likely to feel that protecting children from unnecessary burdens and responsibility is the best outcome in terms of intervention. This is often linked with ideas about children and (in)competence. This article argues that within the UK, protectionism has become institutionalised, normalised and ‘taken for granted’. Children rarely walk to school or play outside, instead they are chaperoned almost everywhere by parents because of perceived risks, such as ‘stranger danger’. This unremitting adult gaze on children has become a feature of western childhood. Protectionism takes on a particular form within social care contexts where children are protected from harm and abuse. The analysis reveals how protectionist assumptions about children, abuse and participation have achieved the status of ‘truth’ and become ‘taken for granted’ within UK social policy relating to children. While protecting children from harm and abuse has to be a priority for policy and practice, some of the assumptions implicit within the child protection framework may merit further attention.

The following policy extracts from three different Departments’ child protection procedures express concern at the idea of children being ‘upset’ by participation in the child protection process:

It seems that as well as protection from abuse and harm, children also need protection from information. The question is what ‘things’ are considered inappropriate for the child to hear and know? The claim is that talking about abuse with children can itself be abusive or ‘corrupting’. Protecting children is being constructed as not talking to them about topics which adults/professionals consider outside the realms of ‘normal’ childhood. What unsettles is the idea that these children know things and this knowing disrupts the innocence of the imagined normative child.

This next extract is from an interview with a Children's Rights Officer (CRO) discussing this idea of children potentially being ‘upset’:

This CRO is challenging the protectionist discourse in a particular way. The ‘at risk’ child is generally constructed passively within policy with the emphasis on vulnerability, risk and protection. This extract illustrates the way that discourses are never ‘pure’ or completely closed and resistance to protectionism emerges from within the children's rights perspective. One challenge to protectionist discourse is the idea that potentially children can be actively involved in their own protection (Pinkney, Reference Pinkney2005; Lansdowne, Reference Lansdowne, Tisdall, Davis, Hill and Prout2006). For this to work, it would involve a shift in the relations of power between welfare professionals, parents/carers and children. As inquiry after inquiry demonstrates, there is considerable scope for rethinking protection of children. Involving children more actively in their own protection is proposed here as one way forward alongside all the other measures that are involved in safeguarding and protecting children from abuse and harm. The tension between viewing children as competent social actors as well as ‘victims’ of abuse are highlighted acutely when we start to consider alternative ways of constructing child protection policies and practices.

Rights

The third set of discourses are rights discourses, which were mobilised around different subjects, including children, parents’ and families. In the policy texts, the internal contestation between these was visible. The children's rights discourse developed from within the New Social Movements (NSMs) and post-structuralist perspectives (Fraser, Reference Fraser1995; Honneth, Reference Honneth1995; Lister, Reference Lister1997; Clarke and Cochrane, Reference Clarke, Cochrane and Saraga1998; Lewis, Reference Lewis and Saraga1998; Hughes, Reference Hughes and Saraga1998; Williams, Reference Williams, Lewis, Gewirtz and Clarke2000; Martin, Reference Martin2001). It was here that the discursive space was created for the children's rights movement to develop (Saraga, Reference Saraga and Langan1998; Mayall, Reference Mayall, Smith, Gollop, Marshall and Nairn2000; Moss et al., Reference Moss, Dillon and Statham2000; Pinkney, Reference Pinkney, Lewis, Gewirtz and Clarke2000; Tisdall et al., Reference Tisdall, Davis, Hill and Prout2006). One of the significant features to emerge from reading the policy texts in this study was the way that children's voices were just starting to make an appearance within the formal policy texts of Children's Social Care.

Department FFootnote ³ had the strongest representation of the ‘voices’ of children throughout and included direct quotes from children regarding their experiences of Looked After services. The following are taken from a paper authored by a CRO after a consultation event with children about why SSDs should listen to them:

• • Because we're our own people and should have some privacy and make our own decisions

• • Because without children Social Services would not exist

• • Because what we say is important

• • We think Social Services should listen to us because it's our lives and we know what we want

• • By listening, Social Services will enable us to achieve what we want

• • Because they have to listen!

• • Because we know what we want and how we feel

• • Because Social Services is here for young people not the other way round

• • There is no reason why not

• • Because I want you to

• • (Department F)

This change in the subject position from ‘they’ to ‘we’ is small but significant because it becomes children talking about themselves, their expectations and aspirations, rather than being represented by professionals.

The interviews with policy professionals and children's rights officers illustrated some of the difficulties and tensions within the processes of participation from their perspective. It was easy to hear their sense of dismay at not being able to make a difference for young people. This has been a common experience of consultation and service user participation in different policy and service delivery contexts (Danso et al., Reference Danso, Greaves, Howell, Ryan, Sinclair and Tunnard2003; Carr, Reference Carr2004). This juxtaposition of the consistent messages from consultation events with children and the sense that welfare organisations are not always able or willing to listen creates a tension between the advocates of children's rights, children and welfare institutions.

The Children Act 1989 (Department of Health, 1989) reflected a tension between the rights of children and parents within social welfare policy. The Children and Young Persons Act 2008 (Great Britain, 2008) does not address this tension. Some departments invited parents to evaluate and offer feedback on their services, aware of the need for consultation and evaluation but not always extending this to children. Some authorities actively encouraged parental participation in child protection meetings, but not children's. What became evident was that parents’ rights have a longer and more established history in partnership and participation working than children's rights. The policies reinforce the argument that participation of parents within child protection is now firmly established as a norm, whereas children's participation is still being negotiated.

In some of the policy texts relating to Looked After children, however, it was parental participation which was dependent upon the assessment of the social worker. This demonstrates a reversal of the situation within child protection meetings where it is now routine to invite parents and carers but not always to invite children. One conclusion from this is that the relationship between welfare agencies, the family and the child is constructed differently within Looked After and child protection arenas. Looked After children are constructed more actively and the discourse of protectionism is less apparent, participation is assumed, though not unproblematic. Within child protection, participation is circumscribed and negotiated via a range of adults, ‘experts’ and professionals. This seems to represent a different settlement in the relationships between welfare agencies, parents and children. One of the fundamental differences between these two groups of children is that one still lives at home with parent/s and the other lives away from home with carers. This is significant in altering the relations between welfare agencies, children and families. In child protection, it appears the professionals have more agency than children. This suggests that these children are more easily identified as ‘victims’ needing protection whereas Looked After children are more likely to be constructed as ‘villains’. This may reflect the way that Looked After children are sometimes blamed for family breakdown in terms of their behaviour and viewed as being ‘out of the control’ of their parents. The issues of the delicate and difficult balance of power between parents, children and young people is clearly one that causes concern for most authorities and this was reflected within the policies.

This extract speaks to the tension between parents and children's rights in a way that attempts to reassure that the desire is to work in partnership with parents. The strain of the desire to work with both is intense but the underlying tension is the implied difficulty in achieving this.

The other feature of discussions about parents in these policies is that they are usually undifferentiated. Feminists earlier challenged interventions and policies relating to child sexual abuse (Campbell, Reference Campbell1988; Macleod and Saraga, Reference MacLeod and Saraga1988; Kelly et al., Reference Kelly, Regan and Burton1991; Saraga, Reference Saraga, Dallos and McLaughlin1993). Within the policy texts, it seems that the idea of working in partnership with ‘parents’ is offered as a less controversial way forward. The use of the gender-neutral term ‘parent’ obscures the different patterns between mothers and fathers in relation to abuse (Milner, Reference Milner1993; Featherstone, Reference Featherstone2006). The policy texts in this research reflect and bear out this avoidance of issues of power and gender inequalities within families.

Managerialism

The fourth discourse is managerialism, which has been viewed as seeking to displace, subordinate or incorporate ‘professionalism’ (Clarke and Newman, Reference Clarke and Newman1997). As such, managerialism legitimises and extends the ‘right to manage’ and involves competing discourses of ‘how to manage’ (Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Gewirtz, McLaughlin, Clarke, Gewirtz and McLaughlin2000). The rise of new public management within public sector and welfare organisations since the late 1980s has been well documented (Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Cochrane and McLaughlin1994; Newman, Reference Newman, Hughes and Lewis1998; Pinkney, Reference Pinkney, Hughes and Lewis1998; Froggett, Reference Froggett2002). Managerialism was developed under Conservative regimes during the 1980s and continued to develop with New Labour administrations since 1997. In 2010, it looked likely to continue with the Coalition government almost certain to ensure further continuity of the managerialist agenda because it is firmly embedded in Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic policies.

This research was interested in the extent to which managerialism had permeated social care contexts. The aspect of managerialism highlighted here is the customer discourse within children's services, where the ‘client’ became the ‘service-user’ and then the ‘customer’ of SSDs. The customer discourse does not map easily onto public sector welfare services that are imposed rather than being asked for, such as Child Protection services. The second related point is that ‘customers’ can conventionally take their custom elsewhere if they are dissatisfied, but service users cannot usually exercise this choice. The following extract gives a flavour of the way this discourse is being used within Children's Services:

• • Privacy

• • Children and young people should be allowed to make phone calls on their own

• • Children and young people should not feel bullied into something by the department

• • Children's views should be listened to and taken seriously

The example above shows how the customer discourse sometimes converges with rights discourses. Here the principles of respect for children are as customers and not as children. The language used however bears the hallmarks of children's rights, with its emphasis on the rights of the child to be respected, listened to and taken seriously.

The following extract is from a document relating to the distribution of information and publicity leaflets within a Children's Services Department:

In this extract, like many others, we can see the ambivalence between parent and child rights. Within this particular authority, it is not made clear if the customer is the child or the parent.

Within this research, ‘participation’ is being viewed as a socially constructed and performative process accomplished by professionals and practitioners within the wider context and constraints of organisational and individual imperatives. Professionals often feel they are too pressurised to be able to really involve, listen to, take seriously and build trust with children. Participation takes time, which is increasingly a scarce commodity in social welfare settings. The interviews illustrated an alternative view of what happens to children's participation within the conditions of managerialism. In part, these narratives can be viewed as the stories the profession tells about the difficulty of delivering services in this pressurised environment:

Managerialism carries within it the promise that better management will improve services. This magic of management can be viewed in part as a response to the discourse of failure that developed after three decades of inquiries into child abuse where services were viewed as failing to protect children. In the interview texts, there was evidence of the discourses of displaced, subordinated and appropriated professionalism. Professionals sometimes resist subject positions created by powerful discourses, such as managerialism. This resistance usefully highlights attempts to disrupt power relations and the undermining of ‘colonizing discourses’ (Marston, Reference Marston2004: 117). The formal policy texts show an increased focus on management, efficiency, customers, best value, accountability and performance, and showed how managerialism forces the procedural and customer version of rights. The question remains whether the particular version of rights within the customer discourse enhances children's rights.

Every Child Matters

These four discourses were played through in specific policy contexts. Every Child Matters (Department of Health, 2003a), for example, illustrated well the way discourses ‘bump into’ one another within policy frameworks and make visible the dynamic interaction between the discourses. In 2003 the Labour Government launched its consultation paper Every Child Matters, which proposed reorganisation of Children's Services in England in response to the Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié (Department of Health, 2003b). In his foreword to Every Child Matters, Tony Blair said the names of abused children, whose deaths triggered previous inquiries, ‘echoing down the years, are a standing shame to us all’. For the government at that time, each inquiry included a failure to intervene early enough to protect the child, poor coordination of services, failure to share information, absence of anyone with a strong sense of accountability, frontline workers coping with staff vacancies, poor management and lack of effective training.

The report announced reform in several areas, including early intervention, greater accountability and integration (creation of Children's Services and the formation of Children's Trusts), workforce reform and supporting parents and carers. The Inquiry had called for greater efficiency within, and better coordination between services for children. In addition, national standards, training, resourcing and local leadership were also called into question and new national and local structures were recommended. Every Child Matters formed a central part of the then New Labour modernising project for social care and work with children in the early 2000s. Since that time, there has been a burgeoning of participation projects as children and young people become increasingly involved in consultations about services. This modernising framework also led to a reconfiguration of children's rights and participation within the modernising framework of welfare. Children were increasingly likely to be constructed as a ‘customer’ of services which represented a significant shift in the relationship between children, families and the welfare state.

An earlier policy report, Quality Protects (Department of Health, 1998) had proposed that improving the quality of services would enhance protection for children. It involved a review of services in the context of consultation with children, families, carers and staff. It also provided resources to enable the setting up of a Children's Rights service and to actively involve users and carers in planning services. What was interesting was the particular kind of ‘knowing’ about performance in relation to Looked After children that was established within Quality Protects, where ‘knowing’ seemed to involve consultations, checklists and complaints procedures. It is worth reminding ourselves that ‘performing’ performance involves a socially constructed agreement about performance as well as the evidence that will be used to mark success (Clarke, Reference Clarke2003; Paton, Reference Paton2003).

The Children Act 2004 (Great Britain, 2004) updated the Children Act 1989 (Department of Health, 1989) in relation to improved coordination and tracking in child protection and implemented the main proposals of Every Child Matters. The Children and Young Person's Act 2008 (Great Britain, 2008) significantly updated the 1989 Act in relation to the delivery of social work services for children and young people.

Developments in the policy field relating to children continue to appropriate and mainstream selective aspects of participation agendas. We can see how children's rights compete with managerialism, protectionism and child development discourses. When read through the prism of discourse, these policies illustrate a new configuration. This article argues that it is a particular version of children's rights that is being mainstreamed and represented within contemporary child welfare policy. Managerialism continues to attempt to displace, subordinate and appropriate professional discourses, although this is not completely successful. What is clear is that earlier policy developments, such as Every Child Matters, should not simply be read as managerialist driven policy since it incorporated aspects of children's rights and professional discourses about children, though in a way which arguably subordinated them to managerialism.