We in the Alliance believe passionately in involving children and parents in shaping the services they receive from us. But I am left with a number of questions arising from observations of what has happened in the last year or so.
First, if children's needs and parent choices are to drive services, why is it that the present Government has an overwhelming bias towards full daycare? Choice will be limited if the system is largely built on the premise of getting parents back to work.
Integrated commissioning has not been well defined by a Government that seems to have delegated ambition and responsibility to local authorities with inadequate resources and no enforced template on how to commission. As a result we have seen a number of renegade local authorities taking our staff in-house at greater cost and with no evidence to justify changing long- established contracts.
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