This is the third of a multi-part series on Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced in the House of Commons on 17 December. This article considers how the conflation of ‘welfare’ and ‘wellbeing’ is working against the best interests of children.
What’s been said?
We expect by now that readers are familiar with the existence of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, [CWSB] which had its Second Reading on Wednesday 8 January. Much of Bridget Phillipson’s opening speech consisted of multiple, recycled clichés revealing the underlying worldview which shapes her policies. This article, begun before the debate, focuses on a key element of the philosophy behind this Bill, and helps to decode the Minister’s choice of words. It is important to understand why politicians, departmental officials and the increasing army of “children’s professionals” are under the impression that they know far more about what is in “the best interests of a child” than their parents could ever do.
Our previous article compared the intentions of the CWSB to those of the 2104 Named Person Scheme, which was part of the GIRFEC proposals. One instance of professional overreach reported at that time was what happened to Professor David Anderson, a father of two young boys and an academic at a leading Scottish university. After submitting multiple Subject Access Requests to establish why the family was being criticised, he eventually received a heavily redacted sixty page document. From this he gleaned that local Health Visitors had concerns about the family because a one year old was sucking their thumb, which indicated that he was not accepting their advice. In another section they noted nappy rash as a potential sign of a lack of care.
Another absurd example of where so-called ‘professional concern’ can lead was reported by Schools Week in March 2024. In January 2022, a primary school headteacher had her three-year-old son and eleven-year-old daughter in the office with her when working late. (Both attended the school). The boy had previously squirted hand sanitiser into his eye and when he started playing with the bottle again, his mum sought to prevent him from doing so. The Employment Tribunal heard, “The boy ‘turned his face away from her and she tapped him with two fingers on the back of his hand to get his attention.'” This was observed by another teacher, the school’s safeguarding lead, who reported it to the Trust’s CEO as a ‘smack’ . Things escalated from there, apparently because no-one wanted to be accused of “not taking safeguarding seriously,” and eventually the headteacher was sacked by the Trust. The Tribunal later judged that the headteacher had been wrongfully dismissed.
What is missing from the various reports, however, is any discussion of the way this incident illustrates how a culture of mistrust of parents prevails in conversations around safeguarding. One cannot help but wonder if the stress the family went through has done the headteacher’s children far more harm than the perceived harm reported by the safeguarding lead.
Examples like these are important because they demonstrate how the obsession with total safeguarding is causing children’s professionals to cry ‘Wolf!’ so often that no-one notices when genuine danger is present. We shall have to wait for the publication of the Sara Sharif Child Safeguarding Practice Review before we know how the system portrays the circumstances of that case. Some commentators are of the view that it was a combination of systems and silence which failed Sara. During the Second Reading debate Chris Coghlan, (LibDem) Dorking & Horley, spoke passionately about children being failed [transcript | video], asserting that:
“Surrey county council objectively contributed to the deaths of Jennifer Chalkley, Oscar Nash and Sara Sharif by ignoring existing legislation.”
When will the State realise that inspiring its employees to sound the alarm over the most minor of circumstances actually puts more children at risk than they protect?
Why does it matter?
We now find ourselves in a place where the concept of ‘safeguarding’ has become very ill-defined for many people. This confusion has found its way into official documents such as the 2019 EHE Guidance, and also appears to be reflected in the title of this Bill. Many concerned with the ‘safeguarding’ of children today can no longer distinguish the historic difference between ‘wellbeing’ and ‘welfare.’
Whilst the Bill’s short title headlines ‘wellbeing,’ its long title begins, “A Bill to make provision about the safeguarding and welfare of children.” ‘Wellbeing’ is absent from the extended title, and the term only features twice in the whole text, buried on both occasions in the phrase “health and wellbeing.” (See current clauses 5 & 7.) ‘Welfare,’ on the other hand, occurs 25 times in the body of the Bill.
This discrepancy requires further explanation. Dr Julie Doughty, currently a Senior Lecturer in Law at the Cardiff University School of Law and Politics, wrote a short and very readable article in 2016 which posed the question “How do you define a child’s ‘welfare’ as opposed to ‘wellbeing’?” She is clear that “children’s welfare” has been clearly understood since the Children Act 1989. Her seven point list is well worth reading, as is the wording of Part 3 of the Act, though neither can be included here.
Doughty then identifies the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 as changing the “common understanding” of welfare just prior to this piece of legislation replacing the 1989 Act in Wales. Here she explains the implications of this, and its consequences in Wales:
“Wellbeing for a child is extended to include their physical, intellectual, emotional, social and behavioural developmental needs, in accordance with the views, wishes and feelings of the child and parents. But a child’s wellbeing also includes ‘welfare as that word is interpreted for the purposes of the Children Act 1989’.”
Do read the rest of her article which questions the use of ‘wellbeing’ in relation to children, for she cites others who describe the term as “conceptually muddy but pervasive” and “that childhood wellbeing had a weak theoretical status.” Doughty concludes:
“It is hoped welfare remains uppermost as an objective for children’s services and that we avoid a dichotomy in practice – welfare for children where there are safeguarding concerns and something ‘muddy’ for children who are in need of care and support.”
There is now an abundance of academic literature seeking to understand the current usage of the term ‘wellbeing,’ discussing it on the whole as an economic indicator. The list includes: Welfare and well-being – inextricably linked (Heins & Deeming 2015) – three very readable pages, and a more challenging text Wellbeing and Welfare: A Psychosocial Analysis of Being Well and Doing Well Enough (Taylor 2011). The latter cites another author who argues that ‘wellbeing’ is today “associated with the move from seeing ‘subjects as citizens to subjects as consumers’“
The shift to defining wellbeing as an economic product explains probably more than anything else why this Bill has ‘wellbeing’ in its title rather than ‘welfare.’ It assumes that the State is the provider of everything good, whilst both parents and children have become consumers of this provision. The mindset of today’s political purveyors of wellbeing, of which education is a key commodity, is that once independent citizens are now seen as consumers dependent on the State’s provision. Should parents dare to decline to “purchase education” from their megastores, there can be only one conclusion – they must be failing their children.
This of course is not a definitive exploration of this topic. It can be nothing more than a thought provoker and hopefully a discussion starter. However, it perhaps goes some way to helping readers understand why the narrative behind ‘wellbeing’ makes this Bill dangerous.
What can I do?
We encourage you to read the two shorter papers listed above. All three were written in the years since the political desire to register and monitor HE children was first put before Parliament by Labour’s Ed Balls.
Secondly, continue to engage as much as possible with the political process at every level, whilst acknowledging that we cannot place our hopes completely on that nor on legal action. However, it is still possible that some of the worst excesses in the CWS Bill could be restrained through such interventions.
But it’s also important that parents begin to think seriously about what they might do if this Bill was enacted without fundamental changes to prevent further blurring of the distinction between ‘wellbeing’ and ‘welfare.’ If that happens, the long-established responsibility of parents to determine the type of education their children receive will be entirely eroded.
Such questions are hard, and the answers are not simple either. But fundamentally we come back to that clash of ideologies – to what extent will parents allow the state to place itself between them and their children, not only in the matter of education but in all aspects of their upbringing and welfare?
The direction of travel is clear. For instance, legal academic David McGrogan made the following observation in a recent article [full article requires a subscription] about changing perceptions on the role of governments:
“But I want to focus here on something more fundamental, which is this strange idea Phillipson has – which would I think have been alien to anybody living before the turn of the millennium – that it is the government’s job to take responsibility not just for providing children with the opportunity to go to school, but for the sense of belonging, wellbeing, and even happiness of every child in the land.”
The truth is that children’s real wellbeing, including the provision of education suited to them as individuals, will never be achieved by the Utopian rhetoric employed by the Education Minister and the blanket measures proposed in this Bill. Though commonly obscured by “Government speak,” the fact is that every child’s wellbeing is connected more to their parents’ intuitive knowledge of them as individuals than to the State’s desire to supervise their every breath.
With all this in mind, recognise that despite the prominence of the word ‘wellbeing’ in the Bill’s title, its passage will fail to meaningfully enhance the genuine wellbeing of your or anyone else’s children. They are tomorrow’s citizens, not its consumers.
The proposals will not prevent more tragic deaths like those of Sara Sharif, Victoria Climbié, Khyra Ishaq, and Dylan Seabridge, all of which have been misused as political leverage to try to take away fundamental parental responsibilities. All these children were known to the relevant services before they died in tragic circumstances, but that is an uncomfortable truth for today’s politicians. After the end of the Sara Sharif trial, the Victoria Climbié Foundation published a statement which asserted amongst other things:
“Sara Sharif was not a hidden child – she was known to the authorities. As in the tragic case of Victoria Climbié, she simply fell through the gaps and was failed by services involved in her life. Concerns had been raised and seemingly not acted upon within a multi agency framework.
There are serious questions to be answered by children’s services, and how the tragic deaths of Sara Sharif and multiple children could have been prevented, including Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson, Logan Mwangi, Finley Boden and many more…”