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Context and culture

The partnership working needed to implement the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda, means new challenges. As a leader, you need to address children’s outcomes collaboratively through a range of strategies. You also need to support the principles of equity and diversity as part of this work.

The social context of ECM

Britain has one of the highest levels of child poverty in the developed world. There is an absolute correlation between child poverty and social and educational failure. The ECM agenda establishes a link between children’s life chances and their educational achievement. Although research has not presented a detailed picture of causal links, certain factors are associated with poor outcomes including:

  • low income and parental unemployment
  • homelessness
  • poor parenting
  • poor schooling
  • substance misuse
  • community factors

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Social capital, bonding and bridging

To be effective in improving outcomes for children, you need to find ways to build social capital, develop a community identity and bridge gaps.

  • Social capital: Social capital is based on the idea that relationships matter. By working together, people can achieve things that they could not achieve easily by themselves.
  • Bonding: A strong sense of community is often attributed to the process of bonding. This is when a community develops a powerful sense of its own identity. The danger is that this can be manifested in introversion and exclusivity – the community becomes elite. Effective communities combine the capacity to bond with the ability to bridge.
  • Bridging: A child or young person’s life chances will be significantly determined by the extent to which they are involved in communities (for instance, school and neighbourhood) that can both bond and form bridges with one another.

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The importance of social networks

Social networks are a way of describing relationships between different elements in a system. Your multi-agency teams and partnerships are all social networks. Using social network analysis can help people who are working in teams to be more effective. For instance, social network analysis can help you to identify:

  • invisible barriers to cooperation
  • emerging communities of practice
  • bottlenecks
  • knowledge sources within a team

You can collect data for a social network analysis in many ways, but electronic questionnaires are most popular. A typical questionnaire consists of 5-7 questions of various types, depending on the focus of the analysis.

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Practical steps

It is important for you to achieve higher equity within your community, closing the gap between those children who achieve and those whom we fail. Here are some steps to consider when involving people from marginalised communities.

  • Acknowledge differences: Listen to everyone and acknowledge differences, rather than narrowing participation by focusing on those people with whom you have everything in common.
  • Agree the rules: It is only by reaching agreed ways of working together and laying them down as policy that people can begin to work effectively as a group.
  • Be very welcoming: Most marginalised people are very keen to share their thoughts, but are rarely present at the discussion. Therefore, you need to deliberately seek them out and encourage them to participate.
  • Challenge your own prejudices. There are still too many people who have been subjected to negative attitudes and who fear the additional burden they might face when joining a new group. Attitudes translate into behaviour and will impact on a person’s feelings of empowerment.
  • Build trust. Everyone involved needs to contradict prejudice with positive statements that counter negative stereotypes. A failure to challenge negative statements keeps discrimination a living reality.

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