When did the word "amateur" acquire such strong negative connotation?
In The Times a week or so ago, the headline to a Philip Collins' opinion piece states "These amateurish charities aren't fit for purpose". And in The Guardian the day before an Editorial headline ran "The Guardian view on charity trustees: no role for amateurs".
These confident assertions arise from the Kids Company débâcle. Yet if there was one thing that the Board of Kids Company was not, it was "amateurish". Consider the Chair and Vice Chair: Alan Yentob (someone whose competence as a Director the BBC regards so highly, he is paid around £330,000 for his part time post) and vice-chair Richard Handover (former Chair and Chief Executive of W H Smith, now Chair of the Big Lottery Fund's £150m 'Power to Change' programme. The rest of the Board are no slouches. These are thoroughly professional people by any definition and expectation.
"The work demands time, commitment and ability. It is not a role for amateurs," repeats The Guardian. But what is meant by "amateur"? A dilettante? An incompetent? Someone unskilled? So what might the opposite be? A "professional" perhaps? Worth remembering is that Kids Company (like many similar charities) was founded to fill a gap in mainstream services; to provide services to children the mainstream was not reaching - in short to repair the damage left or not attended to by "professionals" - the trained, the skilled, the paid.
There is a solid case to be made that over-professionalisation itself, across public and private sectors, has done damage both to the services themselves and the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. One can point, a little dramatically perhaps, to the Board and management failures at Winterbourne View and Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust; closer to home, for me at least, is the behaviour of Southern Health in the case of 'LB' (Connor Sparrowhawk alias "Laughing Boy" as his Mum thinks of him).
These are the high profile cases. For an indication of the sheer scale of the problem, Google, for instance, care + failure + adult (you will need to add 'adult' as there is apparently a Canadian 'rock star' calling herself "Care Failure").
For a more considered, positive and forward-looking account, there is "The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits" by John McKnight published as long ago as 1995: "... a book that celebrates the ability of neighbourhoods to heal themselves from within .... [that] shows how competent communities have been invaded and colonised by professionalized services ... [and that] instead of more or better services, the basis for resolving many ... social problems is the community capacity of the local citizens." Without a hint of utopianism, naivety or 'golden age' nostalgia, "The Careless Society" is an immensely optimistic book, a perspective full of Hope.
Likewise optimistic and hopeful is "People, Places, Possibilities" by Ralph Broad published by The Centre for Welfare Reform (based in Sheffield and with a contribution from the Centre's founder Simon Duffy) which reports progress on Local Area Coordination, a term that may be as unfamiliar to you as it was to me until recently.
Or consider, finally, recently published by Centre Forum (David Boyle May 2014), "Turbo Charging Volunteering: co-production and public service reform". You may not be familiar with the (rather ugly, in my view) term 'co-production' which stands for "the broadening and deepening of public services when they are delivered by the beneficiaries, alongside professionals". Co-production, make no mistake, proposes a radical and challenging shift in public service culture and practice. It may, as the author points out "be the type of service delivery model that the father of the welfare state, Sir William Beveridge, envisaged six decades ago" and that "the way public services have evolved in Britain has precluded it from being widely applied." You may be surprised to learn that the NHS is formally committed to co-production, which "denies that professionals are the only people required to do practical things."
What all of these represent, as David Boyle puts it ("Turbo Charging Volunteering" page 17), is a belief "in ordinary skills, amateur in the best sense, when the trend has been increasingly over-professionalised. Most important perhaps ... the idea that the users of services, and their families and neighbours, are a vast untapped resource – when the trend has been to regard them as drains on an overstretched system."
Since when has "time, commitment and ability", as The Guardian has it, been the exclusive preserve of professionals? If there is to be a resurgence of grassroots community activity (in social enterprises, community benefit societies, local cooperatives or social firms as well as charities and charitable companies), then volunteers will necessarily be "amateurs in the best sense" yet bringing with them time, commitment and a host of abilities. As Philip Collins puts it "They know the locale, they arrive freighted with a set of values that the remote, resented, bureaucratic state cannot match. At their best, they can represent the desire to solve social problems with their clients,not for their victims."
Competence of Boards and Board members is the issue, not yet more professionalism. If grassroots volunteers are to be attracted to Boards (or to work alongside professionals as co-production equals, training is necessary and infra-structure that makes sector training possible. Yet the very opposite seems to be happening. In South Yorkshire, we have seen the rise and demise of a rich panoply of valued infrastructure organisations: SCEDU (Sheffield Community Enterprise Development Unit) - long gone; Regen School, which in 2006 was commended in the Deputy Prime Minister's awards for sustainable communities for delivering practice-based, practitioner-led training in skills - gone about a year later; the Academy for Community Leadership that grew out of Northern College - gone; or VCTrain, a consortium approach to training, contracts and contract compliance that evolved into something not entirely the same - gone. In a similar vein, the UFI's learndirect programme (of which Paces was a pioneer partner even before the national launch) withdrew from small community IT training centres in 2007 and UfI sold learndirect to a private equity firm in 2011. Finally, there is the concern that the Charity Commission is increasingly less able to provide the invaluable advice and guidance to Trustee Boards.
All of these organisations were directly or indirectly, often both simultaneously, committed to raising competence in grassroots organisations. Such organisations are essential if "amateurs" are to set up or to expand 'fit for purpose' local organisations.
Finally, this being a blog with a focus on conductive education, what might any of this have to say to the Boards of our charitable organisations? I'm not suggesting for a moment that any are badly run. I do not know that any face difficulties of the kind that led to the closure of Kids Company. So here are a couple of things that occur to me, having reflected on the two newspaper articles and the three publications mentioned above.
Firstly, no-one can ever get enough training in governance, as dry as that seems. Likewise, I would say the same of continuous learning about conductive education.
Secondly, the best centres work well with parents, but even they do not approach the radical step forward represented by co-production, the implications of which certainly challenge conductive education's historic relationship with parents documented by Ralph Strzałkowski on his blog.
Thirdly, the whole thrust of this blog post is towards the greater active involvement of grassroots in charitable companies. It is no longer good enough for members to trot along, or not, to AGMs. I wonder if the Trustees of Kids Company had a clue what the members of the Charitable Company thought? I was interested recently to find that of the 23 Directors of the Board of Tsad Kadima (2 of whom are salaried staff) as many as 10 are parents and 2 more are grandparents. How many UK CE charities can boast over 50% voluntary engagement from service users on our Boards?