Climate change commissioning #1 – Think globally Act locally
This is the first contribution bringing and applying the insights and learning from the science of climate change to Residential Child Care and its commissioning
There are many ideas as to the current critical situation of children’s services. There are polite and professionally reticent explanations, all disavowing one’s own involvement or that of the employer, or state, and splitting and projecting fault and blame on to others. Providers to local authorities, and local authorities to providers. This is the outcome of decisions by the national state, clearly ‘the state’ still exists, enacted in the arrangements at local level.
There’s a discernible slow breakdown of every aspect we’ve known before. Over the years there have been many amendments, ever more technical tweaks.
We may not be there yet, but we do have to consider we are getting closer. Like climate warming we have to consider the effects of our actions.
We cannot wait until the economics of children’s services don’t work any more, and the relationships don’t work any more.
In place of understanding this and a strategy out and beyond our current condition is to endure fluidity and circularity. Each of the tweaks is presented as new or change, but, in reality rather than rhetoric, is a polished version on what went before, that we have already been round several times.
We can see the links between climate and commissioning looking at 2 concepts, being agile, and the waterfall.
Agile – relating to or denoting a method of project management characterised by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans. Contrasted with waterfall.
Waterfall – relating to or denoting a method of project management that is characterized by sequential stages and a fixed plan of work. Contrasted with agile.
In making plans for children we have been exhorted to be agile but have never benefited from a waterfall.
There’s a limit to being agile, and especially so if you’re just asking dancing to your tune by the other, whoever it might be. Maybe the Care Review was only moving the deckchairs of the unsinkable Titanic that is children’s services, in reality facing a polycrisis? Those icebergs are out there in reality today, the biggest iceberg ever recently broke off in Antarctica. In children’s services we have not seen them yet. There are obstacles ahead.
In children’s placement making the chemistry has changed, and temperatures are rising.
There are further connections, floods (of registrations), droughts (of high level needs placements).
Get people in children’s services together or read the media, and we talk about things happening that didn’t used to, and without preparation. Whatever resources or defences we put in are overwhelmed, for example, solo homes, supported accommodation.
Limitless creativity exhausts all available resources by demanding more and quicker for less.
Plainly, this is not child care thinking, which is attuned and preoccupied the pace set by the child.
Are Regional Care Cooperatives another roll of the same dice? By some readings we’ve been here before, different words describing the same thing.
We have 25 years of learning that is being untapped.
You don’t manage markets, management consultants tell you this. Economists don’t.
You ride markets, think waves, rollercoasters or any other analogy. Has there been management of the market? Would we have had the unplanned explosion of private providers profits without the market and commissioning? Answers start from unlikely, then very doubtful, concluding with ‘No’.
The world was not like this before the imposition of the instrumentality of commissioning. Before commissioning we were moving towards regional planning. To take a view from child care theory we were closer to the secure base of attachment. Child care theory doesn’t feature much in, or at all in some, commissioning literature.
In every way if you want an example of relational working then look before commissioning; provision, planning, social work engagement, workforce development, inspection.
The world of children’s services changed with the imposition of commissioning. To encompass the current situation it helps to visualise this as a far more specific cause than we have dared to accept.
Commissioning and collaboration of everything everywhere is the solution, the way out of here, bigger is better.
Is it?
We have not yet encountered the inevitable reaction from providers to the incorporated power of LAs as embodied in Regional Care Cooperatives. Every action has a reaction. Organisational and economic thinking advises us to anticipate that whilst some larger providers will find a way of living within the regional arrangements. Smaller providers to gain scale must surely form up in a mirror of the incorporation of the LAs in Regional Care Cooperatives? See below re ARLA.
Where does this end up? What comes after the experiment of the Regional Care Cooperatives?
We know about what works in residential child care. All the research coheres to a common set of conclusions. It existed before commissioning (which has brought no new insights into what works, or models of care, or child care theory and practice in general)
The imposition of commissioning was an act of colonisation of residential child care. It set off the chain of events that has led us to where we stand today, on the precipice of catastrophe. We don’t know it. Nor did the dinosaurs.
Commissioning is not science or economics, New Public Management vocabulary gives it these veneers.
It places at the centre, not child care, but management of capital and its accumulation.
Until we come to terms that this is what we have done, and what it means for the ways we relate to children, increasingly so, and each other today, we cannot hope to find a solution.
It is the same situation we face with our climate. Commissioning has contributed to a climate change in children’s services
Knowing this the question is, “How best to betray the future that we thought we had planned, and do it before it is too late?”
It requires collective action to withdraw from current ideas, but not to a never existed Eden before 2000.
Continuing the colonisation critique, commissioning exists between LAs and owners. Something else is happening too, the ‘enslaving’ of residential child care workers into an increasingly mainstream monocrop. We have lost a lot of the high level specialist provision we had in previous decades, often assimilated into large companies on purchasing smaller ones. This requires clearing of territory and developed social ecosystems, loss of the full range of the necessary social ecology that is provision to meet specific needs. See what happens with co-occurring needs, they become vulnerable extremities. This made possible by a lack of categorisation of needs, resulting in inappropriate placement, a good example being shoehorning high needs into supported accommodation as observed by Ofsted in a recent report.
In a quote that needs little amendment to fit children’s services in England today (…) Goffe in her new book (see below) observes, “In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.” Those disposable in children’s services today are children and workers, examples being workforce turnover and children’s multiple moves in a year rates.
The result, according to Goffe’s analysis, is a system of knowledge production that projects a logic of ownership and exploitation on to the world that understands nature/ children – and fellow humans – as no more than a means to profit.
Like slavery and climate change, residential child care is “a dark laboratory, as this place that’s off the map, that’s kind of shrouded in darkness and secrecy, but a place where all of these experiments happened.”
As Audre Lorde said, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. We have found this to be true concerning commissioning successive repetitions and tweaks proving moribund.
A solution is beyond whatever we do now. It needs a multi-factoral, multi-dimensional, “multisensorial way of seeing the problem. The issue before us is more multi-dimensional than just a problem than is on paper or that we’re going to solve with policy or the law,” Goffe says.
We need a new narrative, “a new storytelling, a new soundtrack so that we can find ways of storytelling when it comes to the climate crisis.”
The conventional narrative structure is failing us. Maybe an unconventional structure that allows for unconventional thinking and no less is required to rethink an approach to understanding the world that is so pervasive it can feel as if there is no alternative.
It is going to be disorienting. We will be well outside our zone of comfort, in the zone of learning, not doing the same over and over, as we have been, assisted by some sort of existential analgesic.
The solutions for all children are probably with those least well served today, those with high level needs. The lessons learned as to really meet their needs will work for all. Not the other way round as the Care Review suggests. They have already faced down, and lived through, multiple catastrophes/ placements. Their care can offer solutions, if only the powerful would listen.
We need to be living on the edge. Building upstream dams doesn’t work. Channelling doesn’t work. Water and needs find different ways. If not from above, then around the side, from beneath, literally taking the ground beneath your feet.
This thinking derivative from a Damien Gayle book review in Guardian 28 93 25 of Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe.
The ARLA cooperative is owned by 13,500 dairy farmers and we work to get the best possible price for the milk they deliver. Each farmer has a vote in the cooperative democracy. Every year the farmers invest some of their earnings back into the business so it can develop – to secure their own future and the future of the next generation of farmers.
