A few years ago, a young girl tragically died in the UK. She was under the care of various health and social helping agencies, none of which were communicating with each other, but merrily passing the buck from one to another. I don't know the details of how she died - suicide? - but it shocked the educators at Whitehall into drawing up a massive policy-framing document called "Every Child Matters". This document has theoretically formed the framework for all caring agencies which deal with children and adolescents ever since.

At its heart, ECM proposes that each individual child deserves the standard of care which is appropriate to their individual needs. It does not matter here if those needs are bigger or more wide-ranging than those of other children. It does not matter if the needs are of a different type than other children.  The policy collects together multiple bulleted lists in order to help professionals formulate what Every Child's needs are and to work out how to meet them within the context of the possible.

In particular, the buck-passing was supposed to stop. Situations where a truanting child's family is taken to court while they are still waiting for a mental health appointment from a different agency, or where one agency (such as "Breakdown") stops providing a pick-up service for the truanting child because they don't want to interfere with a family mediation session which will happen the following week, are theoretically a thing of the past. 

Furthermore, with the move away from Edwardian child-rearing practices, Education Welfare Officers reputedly no longer recommend to the single parent of a truanting adolescent that the child be locked out of the house in order to give the parent a rest.

However, Medway Education Authority has broken every single one of these precepts.

Tags: chris