The Manifesto for Hope, For a New Social Covenant

If we are going to build and fund an integrated and holistic system of care for children, young people, and their families; one which is aligned and attuned to the real needs of those it seeks to serve, we have to reimagine society together.

‍We therefore call on central government to establish a new social covenant that:

1. ‍Replaces the ‘political-cycle-is-all-that-matters’ short-term-policy-making approach and the financial wastage that accompanies it, with a cross-party written commitment to an agreed set of core principles, to be honoured over a twenty-year period, in order to reimagine and rebuild our expensive, but suboptimal systems.
2. Creates a new generation of visionary ‘cross-system’ government leaders and officers, responsible for delivering innovative, joined-up systems with a specific focus across education, social care, healthcare and mental health, housing, policing and justice, in order to connect the policies and practices that are supposed to protect and nurture every child and young person.
3. ‍Builds a deepened level of trust between government, local authorities, funders, private and voluntary agencies, and local neighbourhoods by establishing a model of collaboration and mutual accountability around our vital community-building services, designed to empower ordinary people and whole communities.
4. ‍Acknowledges the central role of the voluntary sector – local charities, grassroots movements and faith groups – in a more imaginative, more collaborative, less bureaucratic, more transparent and mutually accountable approach to community development.
5. ‍Designs services ‘with’ local people rather than ‘for’ them, by listening hard to the people they are seeking to serve, thus enabling individuals and whole communities to become change makers and take responsibility for their own lives and neighbourhoods.
6. ‍Realigns funding priorities to create a new focus on longer-term partnerships, with more core funding, and avoids the negative competition for resources by local organisations, which by its very nature has eroded trust, created confusion, wasted time and resources, and fails to deliver the desired outcomes.
7. ‍Reimagines the anchor role education plays in order to end the culture of exclusion from our schools, and develops a greater focus on the issue of childhood adversity, the nurture and support for vulnerable children, and the extension of special educational needs support, to enable every child to succeed.
8. ‍Facilitates and invests in the essential but neglected role of an effective youth service, to work in tandem with schools, in a relationship of mutual respect, in order to create more holistic care for all young people.
9. ‍Recognises the urgent need for education, social care, healthcare, housing, policing and justice policy and practice, to catch up with our twenty-first century neurological and psychological understanding of child and adolescent development.
10. ‍Promotes a national conversation around the recognition that external transformation is never enough and that the impact of poverty, disadvantage and exclusion, can only be addressed in a deep and sustainable manner when, ‘the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development’, as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is vigorously pursued.