Opinion: Letters

The recent announcement by the Department of Education turned me into a grumpy old woman fit for the BBC2 programme. Why was I feeling so irritable? Because I could not see how the allocation of £60m (News, 3 March) to the usual suspects would result in them having a significant role in reforming and delivering services for children, young people, parents and families, with a particular emphasis on early intervention and tackling the needs of the most disadvantaged groups.

The departmental blurb tells us that these organisations will develop a vigorous and responsive sector, freed up from the dependency on grants and better equipped to operate in a payment by results environment, and look at innovative approaches to lever private investment. Does this not pose a tension for organisations funded so generously by the department? Would they not have been better to be told to join forces and work as single entity? Also, is it not ironic and somewhat galling to those of us working hard to provide a sustainable service with no access to taxpayers' funds to find that endless support organisations are allocated millions of pounds of our taxes to lead on creating sustainable organisations in a quasi-market led industry?