RETHINK THIS INTRUSION INTO FAMILY LIFE:
THE defenders of the Named Person scheme are starting to look a little embarrassed. Having attempted to portray anyone who opposed this new Scottish Government legislation as Right-wing loons or Christian fundamentalists, they’re now struggling to maintain credibility as more and more commentators, organisations and individual parents raise their concerns.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is trying to backtrack, attempting to argue that the Named Person is not something that is universal and for every child, if you don’t want it to be. Strange, then, that all the guidance documents for this legislation talk about ‘a Named Person for every child’.
One of the remarkable things about those championing the Named Person scheme is their complete inability to see that by creating this state-appointed guardian for every child, they are automatically undermining parents. If every child needs a Named Person to be watching out for them, what are the parents doing? The advocates of the policy are so enthused by the idea that professionals ‘intervening early’ in a child’s life can solve all of our problems that they are blind to the fact that the Named Person scheme is highly intrusive and will undermine family privacy.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, a proponent of the Named Person scheme and head of policy at the Scottish children’s charity Aberlour, argues that because teachers have hundreds of children for whom they will be the Named Person, they couldn’t possibly ‘undertake the role of a guardian or snoop around in that person’s life’. This is not about ‘unpicking the lives of families in every walk of life’, Mr Cole-Hamilton argues. But this is what not only the Named Person but every professional working or coming into contact with children is being trained to do.
If you don’t believe me, go to the Youth Scotland website and check out the Getting It Right For Every Child Cluedo game. This game is designed to illustrate to us all, and to practitioners, the benefits of having the Named Person scheme in Scotland. If you know the game Cluedo you can imagine what happens here, except instead of a murderer you are looking at a family.
In the case the website provides, we have a mother, Jayne, and her daughter, Melody. Everybody playing the game takes on the persona of somebody who knows Jayne or Melody – best friend, grandparents, doctor and so on – and each of them has a snippet of information about this mother and her daughter, but not enough to know for sure that they both (apparently) need help.
EVERYBODY has noticed a slight change in the behaviour of the mother or the child. The mother drinks more, she has been more upset about her break-up, problems at work mean she is tired, even the youth worker has noticed she isn’t picking her daughter up from the youth centre as she used to. The same youth worker notices that Melody is a bit quieter and Jayne has had more time off work recently because Melody has been unwell.
What’s remarkable about the game is that, at least from my perspective, even given Jayne’s depression (which was ten years earlier), or the minor incident with the police after an argument with her ex, I see absolutely no need for professionals and experts to get involved with this family. But of course, this is no longer the ‘correct’ response. Today’s therapeutic culture that has helped create the Named Person scheme assumes that it is stupid and wrong of us to think we can cope without professional support.
Even more remarkable is what is being implied in this game, because the point being made is that if all of these tiny snippets of information about Jayne and Melody had been shared, we could have intervened, we could have got in early and we could have prevented, what they assume, is some major problem developing in the future.
This is the essence of the early interventionist zeal that exists among the new elite – a presumption that all our problems are caused and solved in our private relationships and that, as Glasgow’s head of children’s services Mike Burns argues, professionals ‘hold the key to solving our social problems’.
If only we’d got in earlier, they argue, we could have prevented that child becoming violent, antisocial, a criminal, an alcoholic... And so we are all to be trained and to be made aware that we should all be sharing the tiniest scrap of information about everyone we know – just in case.
The guidance to the Cluedo game makes this quite clear, stating that the point of the game is ‘to demonstrate how having a Named Person in place within the universal services for every child in Scotland can enable early and effective intervention at even the lowest level of concern. It’s worth repeating this point. Professionals working with children should be intervening (and sharing information) at the “lowest level of concern”.’
LATER the guidance explains that in this brave new world where ‘every child has a Named Person, children like Melody get the help they need’. Without this, if our Super Nanny doesn’t turn up to somehow miraculously solve all Jayne’s problems, ‘children like Melody might have to wait and suffer until such time as things become so bad that services such as social work have to become involved’.
Discussing this game, the SNP’s Joan McAlpine previously asked: ‘Is it not the case that trying to anticipate problems that might or might not exist will inevitably lead to breaches of privacy? Perhaps we should be honest about that and say we will have breaches of privacy for quite a lot of families to protect the children who are at risk.’
She was right to ask this question, and the Government and all the supporters of this scheme are wrong to have hidden from it. Indeed, it is an outrage that they have not been upfront about what the Named Person scheme is and the level of intervention that it implies.
The Named Person scheme and the policy framework that surrounds it is a disaster for Scotland. It is intrusive and presumptuous and belittling. It treats parents as incompetents. It assumes children with minor difficulties are the social problems of tomorrow and it encourages professionals to become snoops. If the Government’s aim is to undermine families, overload children’s services and destroy trust between parents and professionals, it’s doing a great job of it.
If this is not its objective, which I assume it is not, it needs to be more honest about what it is doing and take another look at this destructive and invasive policy before it’s too late.
Stuart Waiton is author of the Sage Open paper Third Way Parenting and the Creation of the Named Person, which is available online.