Things seemed to be going well. There was a general acknowledgment in the room that family support services and early help interventions were well worth investing in. And then, very slowly, the focus of the conversation started to change.
I was recently in a (virtual) room presenting forthcoming research to a large group of people. I’m not able to disclose who they were, so I will just call them very important and powerful people™, to the extent that they, unlike me, could probably change things if they wanted to. I explained that the papers my colleagues and I have under review showed that the more money local authorities were able to spend on family support and early help services in a given year, the fewer children in need and 16-17 year olds entering care there were the following year. The research also showed that the more local authorities spent on these services, the more likely they were to get a ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ Ofsted rating under any of the frameworks from the past ten years. (This research is still under review, but I hope to be able to share it with you soon.)
Things seemed to be going well. There was a general acknowledgment in the room that family support services and early help interventions were well worth investing in. And then, very slowly, the focus of the conversation started to change.
“Yes, we all agree that we need more early help and family support. But we have to make sure that we’re using the most effective services with the best quality evidence.”
I could go on for the length of a book about the problematic aspects of the term “best quality evidence” or how “effectiveness” is measured, never mind the fact that all public spending is accused of being inefficient by default. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with the tendency of very important and powerful people™ to focus first on efficiency. This came to mind today after seeing this hilariously self-defeating motivational cartoon.
