Every Child Matters: Change for Children

The 'Five Outcomes'

Every Child Matters: Change for Children is a programme to deliver improvements to the whole system of children's services - locally and nationally.

Every Child Matters: Change for Children sets out to help children and young people to:

1. be healthy;
2. stay safe;
3. enjoy their lives and reach their potential;
4. contribute to their local community;
5. achieve a good standard of living.

These are known as the 'five outcomes'.

Local authorities across the country are leading the change programmes, each designed to address local priorities for children and young people aged birth to 19 and their families. Gloucestershire's formal Change for Children programme has now closed, as the county moves to embed integrated working through its Localities Development programme. See 'Locality Working' under 'Related Pages' for more information.

Why was Every Child Matters introduced?

The Green Paper 'Every Child Matters' was a consultation paper published in 2003 alongside the formal response to the report into the death of Victoria Climbié. It built on the Government's existing plans to strengthen preventative services for children by focusing on four key themes:

• more support for families and carers;
• identifying problems before children reach crisis point and protecting children from falling through the net;
• addressing weak accountability and poor integration of services;
• ensuring that the people working with children are valued, rewarded and trained.

Every Child Matters: Change for Children was published in December 2004 following wide consultation with children, parents, young people and those working in children's services. It sets out a national framework for local change, led by local authorities and their partners. The aim is to provide more effective and accessible services focused around the needs of children, young people and families.

The Children Act 2004 came into force to provide legislation for the programme of change set out in Every Child Matters: Change for Children. The Act means that organisations working with children and young people must work together when planning and delivering services, lead by the local authority (in Gloucestershire, this is Gloucestershire County Council)

Protection of children in England: Progress report by Lord Laming March 2009

Following the legal verdict on the death of Baby P, Lord Laming was asked by the Secretary of State for children and families to report on the progress being made across the country to implement effective arrangements for safeguarding children. Lord Laming acknowledged that there is support for the approach of Every Child Matters, but that there are still "significant problems in the day-to-day reality of working across organisational boundaries and cultures, sharing information to protect children and a lack of feedback when professionals raise concerns about a child." He stated that joint working often depends on the commitment of individual staff and sometimes takes place despite of rather than because of organisation arrangements.

Gloucestershire's plans to move to locality working, through Locality Hubs, supports the key findings of Lord Laming's progress report, which are:

• the focus should be on the child and everyone should know how and who to contact if they have concerns about a child or young person;
• the focus should be on early intervention which is not necessarily about early years provision;

• the assessment process should be a joint one building a picture over time and result in a full understanding of what is happening to a child in the context of the family;
• thresholds are generally too high and are inconsistently applied. This means that opportunities to intervene and support families at an early stage can be missed. Laming advises that local authorities should address this urgently to ensure that we are providing the range and level of services and support that children and young people need;
• practitioners should be confident in using, appropriately and decisively, the full range of available legal options;
• tracking children is vital and there should be constant monitoring of the progress of children in need by all agencies involved with the family;
• Data systems need to support information sharing and Laming highlighted concerns with current arrangements.

Download a copy of Lord Laming's Progress Report under the 'Downloads' section, below.
For more on the development of Localities go toLocality Working.