Supporting Vulnerable Children in the Early Years

Practical Guidance and Strategies for Working with Children at Risk

Pat Beckley

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784505158
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring specific experiences, circumstances and events that can put children at risk, this book provides practical guidance for early years practitioners working with vulnerable children. It covers supporting children who are abused and neglected, those with special educational needs, children from ethnic minorities, those with emotional or health difficulties, children affected by poverty and children in care.

Each chapter draws on current research and theories to set out clear advice and strategies for supporting the wellbeing and development of vulnerable children, including working in partnership with parents, carers and communities.

PART 1

The Contemporary
Environment

CHAPTER 1

The Contemporary
Environment

Yinka Olusoga

Course Leader, PGCE Primary Education (3–7), leading to QTS
Leeds Beckett University

Chapter overview

The term ‘vulnerable children’ is now in common use in statutory legislation, non-statutory guidance, reports and processes relating to the care and education of children. It is drawn upon by politicians, by professionals working in care, education, health and social care and by campaigners and charities who advocate for children and families. It is the focus of research by academics working in a range of disciplines. Vulnerable children have been the focus of official reports. The most recent is from the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2017b), which sets out to count and to categorise vulnerable children in England. Debate rages regarding how best to address ‘vulnerable children’ in policy, practice and research.

This chapter will examine how the term ‘vulnerable children’ has come to be so prominent in policy and debates around practice and will consider what the term actually means. It will also explore how within ‘vulnerable children’ as an umbrella term, different categories of vulnerability have been identified and how these categories map onto children’s real-life experiences. Alongside vulnerability, it will scrutinise how key related terms such as ‘adversity’ and ‘risk’ inform current understandings of vulnerability and how that impacts on policy and practice. This discussion will consider how critical research into children and childhood has challenged traditional concepts and practices that underpin approaches to working with, and advocating for, children.

Finally, the chapter will examine the implications for the early years sector in recognising and addressing the needs and rights of vulnerable children and their families in our practice and settings. This will include considering how research and theory can help us to critically reflect on and develop policy and practice in the current educational climate.

The journey to the contemporary context: policies and politics

In 21st-century Britain, the popular argument as far as children and childhood are concerned is that it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Childhood is physically safer than ever before. Children are less likely to die in early infancy; they are more likely than previous generations to finish their schooling and to go on to gain a university education (Bolton, 2012; NSPCC, 2014; Wolfe et al., 2014). However, not all children have an equal chance at these positive experiences and outcomes. Child poverty rates, rather than decreasing as they did across most of the 20th century, since 2013 have been once again on the rise (Ivinson et al., 2017a, p. 8). In their 2010 book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett highlight the growing size of the income gap between the richest 20 per cent of the population and the poorest 20 per cent, arguing that this is leading to Britain becoming an increasingly socially divided country (cited in Ivinson et al., 2017b, pp. 6 and 18). Furthermore, unlike previous generations, the life expectancy of some of today’s children may be lower than their parents, due to diet and lifestyle factors (Olshansky et al., 2005). As a generation, children are less likely to experience free, unstructured play outside the home (Loebach and Gilliland, 2016). They are exposed to outside influences via technology and social media that, as well as bringing them opportunities to absorb and contribute to the cultural landscape, also open them up to potential harm.

Children’s rights

Children’s rights to protection are today enshrined in international and national law. There is also a legal recognition of their ability to exercise agency, to participate and to express their opinions. The Articles of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, 1989), recognise, amongst other things, the rights of children to participate in education, to have their voices heard and to have their views taken into account. They also place upon governments a duty to interpret and implement those rights within their own legal, policy and practice frameworks. As the UK is a signatory to the UNCRC, legislation in England since the Children Act of 1989 has recognised children’s rights to ‘provision, protection and participation’ (Payler, Georgeson and Wong, 2016, p. 13). Under the Act, the right of children to protection is established in the legal duty on statutory authorities to carry out child protection enquires where there is ‘reasonable cause to suspect that a child is suffering, or likely to suffer “significant harm”’ (Jopling and Vincent, 2016, p. 8). Suffering or experiencing significant harm can be the result of abuse or neglect of a child, it can be the result of deliberate cruelty or it can be due to a lack of capacity for effective parenting that would meet the needs of the child. The Act also defines children as being ‘in need’ if they are disabled or if they are ‘unlikely to achieve or maintain, or to have the opportunity of achieving or maintaining, a reasonable standard of health or development’ or their ‘health or development is likely to be significantly impaired, or further impaired’, without the provision of services from the local authority (cited in Moss, Dillon and Statham, 2000, p. 233). The Act has been criticised for its focus on protection and provision and its relative neglect of participation. Moss et al. (2000, p. 242) describe the ‘child in need’ as its central concept, providing justification for state intervention in family life. They, and others, argue that the freedom of children to exercise their agency and to have their views not just listened to but also respected and actually impact on what happens to them is constrained within ever greater regulation and processes of surveillance.

Concepts of childhood

The dominant view of childhood is as a period of innate vulnerability, both as a chronic condition common to all children by virtue of their status as children and an acute one in some cases as a result of a range of familial and social factors. As a result, even when they are the focus of concern, children can be understood in very passive terms, as victims who need to be rescued, rather than as having an active role and voice in the unfolding of their own lives. However, since the early 1990s, this view has been challenged by academic research into the sociology of childhood. This research argues that childhood is a social construct and that children can and do exercise agency (James and Prout, 1997). They do not just exist within the confines of adult culture, but they also develop and exist within their own peer culture. In both of these cultural realms, they do not merely absorb existing cultural ideas but are actively creative and thus capable of transform those cultures (Corsaro, 2012). However, despite these insights, government policy is heavily influenced by the findings of research in psychology and neuroscience, which tends to position children as passive subjects to whom things are ‘done’. This research establishes a link between negative events and conditions in childhood (particularly in early childhood) and ‘physiological harm’, resulting in poor outcomes in adulthood that are also costly to the economy (Daniel, 2010, p. 233). The relationship between adults and children, and between social and civic institutions and the family, is one of vigilant and accountable guardianship, poised to identify problems, actual and potential, and intervene for the good of the individual and of the state. Whilst the right of the children to be consulted on matters that involve them exists on paper, in reality that does not always equate to a right to be heard and to have a meaningful say in the decisions that impact on their lives.

The role of the state

Concern for children in vulnerable circumstances is not new. An intervening role for schools in family life, aimed at reducing the potentially negative impact of poor parenting, poverty and bad housing, was established in the discourses of the 19th century. These were the discourses that informed the framing of child labour laws that underpinned the establishment of key children’s charities, such as Barnardo’s, and that argued for the establishment and extension of state education. They can be detected in the pages of the 1861 Newcastle Commission, charged with investigating whether and how national provision of state-funded elementary education should be provided for the ‘labouring classes’. In an echo of official reports today, the report of the Newcastle Commission identified and categorised children in relation to their exposure to poverty, parental abuse and neglect and poor parental influence. It provided a detailed and highly emotive discussion of the potential role of the state in preventing or offsetting the negative consequences of such children being ‘exposed to the corruption of their vicious origin’ (Newcastle Report, 1861, p. 372). These discourses are evident in the writing and work of Rachel and Margaret McMillan, who argued that nursery education was needed to advance the physical, intellectual and moral health of the poorest working-class children (Lascarides and Hinitz, 2011). Mayall (2007) argues that the introduction of the welfare state in 1945 continued and extended this pre-existing social tradition that positions the state as the protector and regulator of the lives of children. However, contemporary official priorities regarding accountability for child protection of the professionals working within services for children have hugely expanded since the turn of the millennium. Children are to be protected from actual harm and from potential future harm that is deemed ‘likely’ to happen. Furthermore, these expanded accountabilities for child welfare have been impacted upon by changes in government and in the national and international economic context.

The rise of the term ‘vulnerable children’

1997 to 2010: the New Labour years

The New Labour Government between 1997 and 2010 placed a focus on reducing poverty rates and increasing social mobility. Emphasis was placed by New Labour on provision and services in the early years, via the expansion of universal services aimed at all children. The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families was published by the government in 2000 (Department of Health (DoH), 2000). It introduced the term ‘disadvantaged and vulnerable children’ and described children in need as ‘some of our most vulnerable children’ (DoH, 2000, cited in Children’s Commissioner for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Professor Chris Atkin
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Contemporary Environment
• Part 2: Vulnerable Groups
• Part 3: Supporting the Child
• Part 4: A Positive Process
• Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix: A List of Written Feedback Strategies and Approaches Used in Primary Schools
• Contributors
• Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest