Naomi gets to the point
One of the interesting findings of the RSA’s Whole Person Recovery project was that the very act of engaging people with substance abuse issues in discussing how services could be organised seemed to be beneficial. Possible explanations included providing a different, more constructive, self-image (as participants rather than passive users) and opening up new more positive social networks.
The value of participation may also be reinforced by the most recent Sure Start evaluation published last November. Although outcomes for children were mixed, there were very significant gains in terms of styles of parenting and parental well-being.
These findings chime with the RSA’s interests in social networks as potential sources of opportunity, resilience and well-being. We have tended in the past to see levels of social and civic participation as a consequence of someone’s self-esteem and circumstances, but we should also look at the reverse process through which starting to engage can help people feel better and develop new resources.
This was one of the ideas I got from an interesting meeting hosted by Making Every Adult Matter, an alliance of organisations which work with multiply disadvantaged people, and Revolving Doors. They had invited me, Hilary Armstrong (whose political roles included being minister for social exclusion) and Naomi Eisenstadt , former national director of head of Sure Start and Director of the Social Exclusion Task Force, to reflect on the highs and lows of Labour’s approach. Among the highs were real improvements in life chance indicators like school attainment, among the lows was the failure ever to solve the problem of joining up local services to the most vulnerable people.
But for me there was one point in the meeting which was really memorable. The feisty Ms Eisenstadt was talking about how she often got frustrated about the ambiguities of what was inelegantly called ’the Every Child Matters agenda’.
‘I used to ask them’ she said in her New York drawl ‘what are we talking about here: all children, poor children or f***d up families?’
If everyone in Government was as ready to ask the tough questions so directly we would have a lot more clarity in policy making.
Eureka!
As many current and former colleagues will confirm, it is a dangerous business presenting me with emerging research findings. Always eager to discover something newsworthy, and better at big concepts than methodological detail, I am prone to seize on tentative findings and turn them into a massive breakthrough in human understanding.
The dismayed research team has then to deal as best they can with the fallout as I charge around town, telling anyone who cares to listen that we have made a great discovery while each time expanding just a little bit further on what I was originally told. Within a short period any resemblance between the modest claim supported by the research and my towering hyperbole is mere coincidence.
So, I sensed a nervous frisson run through the team when yesterday I seized on a very early finding of our Connected Communities project, being undertaken in New Cross Gate. The researchers are now analysing the nearly 200 interviews which aim to map the social networks of local residents. The results confirm starkly the hypothesis that many people in disadvantaged areas have very limited social networks – for example a significant minority say not only that they don’t know anyone in authority but they don’t know anyone who knows anyone in authority.
But the finding upon which I alighted related to who and what are the main foci for networks. Not only are these centres – as we might predict - local institutions, like schools or Sure Start, or local public servants, like postmen or wardens, but a particular kind of person. It appears that those who say they most value neighbourliness are also those to whom most people connect.
This immediately put me in mind of two recent statements made at recent RSA Great Room events. First, there was David Halpern telling us that what appears to shape levels of happiness within nations is not so much their material circumstances as what they say most matters. So, for example, the Danes are the happiest people in the world partly because, uniquely, they say that ‘love’ is the most important component of contentment (unlike the miserable Bulgarians who say it is money). Second, there was the comment by the author of ‘Connected’, Nicholas Christakis, that there is a significant genetic component (around 40%) to explain why some people are better social networkers than others.
As the research team tried in vain to get me engaged with others aspects of their findings I was already air-born with my flight of fancy…..
It appears that some people bothvalue social networking (it is what makes them happy) and are adept at it. These people are potentially a massive resource for any community. There is no reason to believe that this character trait will be less prevalent in deprived communities than anywhere else. However, it may, for a whole variety for reasons, be the case that these people are not in positions where the community as a whole can best capitalise on these skills. (Indeed it may be that some of those in key formal positions of influence – the ones we tend to assume are the most important – are not themselves well-endowed with networking skills.)
Therefore, it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.
You might think this is a bold and interesting enough claim to be going on with, especially as it is based on analysing only about a quarter of the returns. But surely we can go that one step further. Doesn’t our research offer convincing proof of ‘the people gene’? If only we could find the people carrying the gene, support them, listen to them, make them be the leaders they were born to be, we could transform the resilience and capacity of every community.
The left would rejoice as deprivation was tackled, the right would celebrate the evidence that it is not in the actions of the state but in the capacities of civil society that the path to social renewal lies. The RSA would be seen to have been responsible for one of the most powerful findings in modern social science and its (surprisingly young-looking) Chief Executive would become a household name, winner of awards, friend of Presidents, feted at home and abroad for his leadership and wisdom, a regular on the One Show …..
‘Nurse, I think it may be time for Mr Taylor’s medicine.’
Prison works, or at least, it can do
At the end of last week the RSA published the report on its Prison Learning Network. Despite there being plenty of news coverage for prison related issues – including the Conservative debate about prison ships – we have had very little take up in the national media. Is this because the report isn’t saying anything interesting, or just that it is hard to get coverage for moderate, constructive ideas? You judge….
Can you name the European countries that boasts the following projects? The first is a prison restaurant, opened last year, where inmates cook and serve dishes such as paupiette of chicken with spinach mousseline, using organic ingredients direct from the garden. The restaurant offers prisoners the opportunity to gain skills and catering qualifications and encourages employers to take on ex-offenders.
The second is a prison radio station that recently won a prestigious broadcasting award even though its audience is limited to 800 inmates. Programmes are pre-recorded and edited by civilians who run the station. As well as shows covering religion and music, the station broadcasts interviews between prisoners and a regular slot where the governor responds to questions. The aim is to improve communication within the prison and increase the chances of inmates getting a job when they leave by building skills in broadcasting and in information and communication technology.
These initiatives are not in Norway or the Netherlands, nations with reputations for welfare-led approaches to criminal justice. The Clink restaurant is in HMP High Down in West Sussex and Electric Radio in London’s Brixton Prison. They are just two of many examples of innovation taking place within the UK prison system. It is this work that the RSA set out to explore through its Prison Learning Network, led by Professor Malcolm Grant, Provost at University College London.
There is consensus that this work in prisons is important in reducing the number of people who re-offend when they leave. The Conservative Party has emphasised the role of work and education in custody as central to its proposed ‘rehabilitation revolution’. The government has recognised learning and skills provision as fundamental to achieving its target for reducing reoffending. Indeed there has been in recent years significant improvements, particularly in relation to young offenders. Spending on prison education and training has risen in recent years to over £150 million in 2007/8. This is very welcome but is dwarfed by the staggering £11 billion that reoffending by ex-prisoners is estimated to cost us each year. But this has been progress by stealth, as good news gets drowned out by a more strident, negative narrative on prisons dominated by exposes of overcrowding and, alternatively, poor or ‘luxury’ conditions.
This conversation, the one we tend to hear on our airwaves, is like a domestic row between warring parents – the egalitarian father and the authoritarian mother – whose children have gone off the rails. As each blames the other for their offspring’s transgressions, for being too harsh or too soft, the children either sneak out of the house or struggle to do their homework. The egalitarian position at its purest believes that accepting that prisons should be the ‘school of last resort’ is a form of defeat; while the authoritarian believes only in punitive measures whether they ‘work’ or not.
Without better understanding of what takes place inside prisons and stronger evidence on what works to reduce crime, the public remains either suspicious or fatalistic, without the basis to support one policy or another. A shift in the quality of the public conversation occurs only when we see prisons not just as a way of punishing criminals and assuaging victims but as a vital public service that can benefit us all. Politicians may differ in emphasis, but their core script about public service modernisation is likely to have common features: the role of technology, the need for services to focus on outcomes, the importance of engaging service providers and users to design new solutions.
It turns out that this is exactly what is needed to transform the effectiveness of prisons. Take technology, high tech security innovations are already being used: the UK is likely soon to see its first keyless prison. A similar transformation of technological infrastructure needs to be applied in relation to offenders learning and skills if we are to maximise the chance of prisoners securing work on release.
The prison system should also take a more strategic approach to user engagement. Recent work by User Voice, a charity run by ex-offenders, shows that many governors recognise that prisoner engagement is a priority. Prisoners want prisons to work, and they usually know what needs to happen inside to help them avoid reoffending outside. From the design of prisons to the content of training and employment programmes, prisoners, like all service users, have the best insights into how services can be modelled to achieve the outcomes we all want. Prisoner engagement is an education in itself, requiring constructive engagement from to people who, if they weren’t truanting, generally spent their school years sitting at the back of the class .
Prisons must also follow the lead of other public service institutions, like schools or Sure Start centres, seeking to mobilise what former Downing Street advisor David Halpern has described as ‘the hidden wealth of nations’. This is the willingness of all of us to play our part in strengthening the social fabric; taking responsibility for our behaviour, volunteering, caring, or in the case of prisoners, giving people a second or third chance in life. Greater community and business engagement with prisons serves to remind the public that rehabilitation is not within the power of any one institution and underlines the social benefits of making offenders more employable.
My liberal friends won’t like me to say it, but prisons work. They keep off the streets people who would otherwise be committing offences. Albeit at huge public cost, the expansion in places has probably played its part in the fall in crime. But that doesn’t mean this is all prisons can or should do. Tomorrow’s prison should be a modern, intelligent institution, one in which prisoners can learn not just the error of their ways, but the skills and the self respect they need to start a new life.
Family, character and class – the Cameron view
Our Trustees’ AwayDay (which was neither away nor a day, but very useful nevertheless) having finished, I find myself with a rare opening in my diary. How better to fill it than reading David Cameron’s speech on character and parenting delivered yesterday at Demos.
And what a fascinating speech it is. I hope it justifies this long post.
Let me start with some of the things I really liked about it.
It has a strong core narrative. It isn’t just a list of facts or sound bites. It is genuinely interesting. A couple of points made me pause, just to let them sink in. Like this for example:
‘ Commercialisation and the culture of children’s rights means that children are treated like adults while a great knot of rules and regulations and over-the-top bureaucratic nonsense means that increasingly adults are treated like children. With a culture of suspicion and paranoia that is increasingly preventing adults from even interacting with young people. We can’t go on like this. It’s time we gave children back their childhood and got adults to behave like adults’.
There was also a reassuring recognition of past mistakes
‘This is relatively new territory for the Conservative Party. In the past we’ve been guilty of giving the impression that to build a responsible society, all we needed was freedom for the individual plus a strong rule of law from the state. We didn’t talk enough about what happened in between.’
There were also elements which showed that the modern Conservative Party is willing to support policies previous Tories might have ruled out on principle. For example:
• Extra spending commitments: Sure Start, Health Visitors, a National Citizen Service for Young People, and the implicit cost of delivering on the pledge to let head teachers expel pupils unilaterally (Referral Units are very expensive).
• Criticism of the media: ‘The media needs to show some restraint as well. The premature sexualisation of our children has already gone way too far. There is way too much arbitrary violence in the lives of children too young to understand irony or fantasy. Businesses have got to understand that parents don’t like it and want it to stop’
• And a willingness to regulate when it is needed even where this adds burdens to business:
‘we’ll introduce Flexible Parental Leave, meaning both parents can share the responsibilities of caring for a new baby’
‘we’ll extend the right to request flexible working to all parents with a child under eighteen’
The speech also put meat on the bones of the Tory approach to decentralisation. On the one hand, Mr Cameron argues, both for schools and for Sure Start, that there are some practices that clearly work better than others, that services must be held to account for their effectiveness and that there should be more use of payment by results. On the other hand, he argues for more diverse provision (particularly more use of the not for profit sector) in running schools and Sure Start services.
This underlines a model which decentralises governance and ownership (so local services are not part of national or local bureaucracies) but, arguably, increases central prescription over the content of the service provided. Assuming they win power, it will be interesting to see whether the Conservatives can pull off this balancing act.
I was less convinced by the section of the speech on the foundations of good character. Mr Cameron is clearly very excited by the idea that it is parenting not class that matters:
‘I believe that this research produced recently by Demos is truly ground-breaking. It shows that the differences in child outcomes between a child born in poverty and a child born in wealth are no longer statistically significant when both have been raised by “confident and able” parents.
For those who care about fairness and inequality, this is one of the most important findings in a generation. It would be over the top to say that it is to social science what E=MC2 was to physics, but I think it is a real ‘sit up and think’ moment. That discovery defined the laws of relativity; this one is the new law for social mobility:
What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’.
Wow – Richard Reeves as Einstein (not that I’m jealous, of course!). High praise indeed. The problem, I think, is that the evidence doesn’t quite make the point being argued by the Conservative leader. This is because his final rhetorical flourish conflates two arguments:
- If you have a good upbringing it can largely cancel out the effects of poverty
- You are much more likely to have a good upbringing if your family does not live in poverty.
The policy question is not whether Government should encourage good parenting (of course it should, and, to be fair, the current Labour Government has massively expanded parenting provision) it is, first, whether policy can significantly increase the proportion of poor families who parent successfully, and, second, whether this is a more effective strategy than simply trying to reduce the number of families in poverty.
Mr Cameron appears to acknowledge this when he says a few paragraphs later:
‘Successful parenting style in wealthier families occurs not because these people are intrinsically better, or that they love their children more. It is because with poverty can come a host of other problems that make parenting more difficult. Worse schools, higher crime, bad housing. Unemployment. Problems with alcohol and drugs. Mental health conditions. The wearying grind of worry about debt. Higher crime, bad housing. Unemployment. Problems with alcohol and drugs. Mental health conditions’
But this paragraph is hard to reconcile with the earlier statement (which is worth repeating):
‘What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’
This I suspect is the take-out line, the one that shows the core philosophy and reassures the Party activist, rather than the more nuanced elaboration a few paragraphs later.
This impression is underlined by two further points. First, I hear (perhaps someone can confirm) that in questioning Mr Cameron rejected the idea that Government should see reducing statistical inequality as an objective of policy (which directly contradicts something I heard David Willetts say at a Bow Group meeting we both addressed last year). And the fact that Mr Cameron repeatedly praises the Demos work while pointedly ignoring its most uncomfortable finding for the Conservatives, which is that marital status does not seem to be a significant variable in successful parenting.
So this is a powerful, interesting and at times incisive speech (how often can we say that about political offerings?). It also confirms the impression that as more policy clarity is demanded and as the public spending sums get harder, the Cameron blend of progressive and traditional Conservative ideas may be gradually tilting towards the latter.
Discuss …
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