Can a childcare social enterprise mend a broken society?

1. Can a childcare social enterprise mend a broken society?

2. The Broken Society… “It’s about our refusal as a society to protect and honour childhood. “When the child’s parents abused and humiliated we were not there to stop it. When the child turned to us for help, our services were under resourced, often emotionally thoughtless and unwittingly repeating the abuse again. “Too may abandoned children have been left to fend for themselves, like scavenging dogs fighting for morsels of intervention. “Our contribution to this abuse is our complacency, our facile arguments, our pseudo-debates, our cosmetic short term initiatives, our offensive neutrality, our readiness to perceive ourselves as victims, denying the children’s damage.” Batmanghelidjh (2006)

3. What do we mean by poverty? “Poverty is not a certain amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. “Poverty is a social status …it has grown…as an invidious distinction between the classes.” Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

4. Child Poverty 3.9 million children live in poverty in Britain = 30% of all children www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/keyfacts

5. “Investing in early years is as close as it gets to magic without being magic. “Parenting support and enriched day care, preferably both together create children with better behaviour and attitudes who will arrive at school with a capacity to learn” Sinclair (2006)

6. 2 SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

7. A solution? “No one really believes that a few minor reforms will do the trick. We probably need a committed social movement lasting 20 years or so but we lack an analysis which could inspire and guide it.” Wilkinson; Radical Economics Issue 41 (09)

8. The Social Enterprise Model According to the DTI, Social enterprises: “Are businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners.” Such businesses are seen as contributing to: • raising productivity and competitiveness; • socially inclusive wealth creation; • enabling individuals and communities to foster local regeneration; • demonstrating new ways to deliver public services; • fostering an inclusive society with an active citizenship In addition, where social enterprises involve local people as members, in democratic forms of organisation, they are claimed to have an important social purpose, helping to develop active citizenship.

9. Social enterprise is about people. Social entrepreneurs run profitable businesses that reject exploitation and instead choose to invest in society’s most disadvantaged people. ” Allison Ogden-Newton, Social Enterprise London

10. Social Enterprise:A Force for Creating Enterprise and Jobs “Social Enterprise is a business model of the times that is attracting talent and capital: an evolution of capitalism that we should welcome.” Nick Hurd, Shadow Minister for Charities, SE and Volunteering Charity Times, August 2009 (p6)

11. 3 The Community

12. The big risk: what community? “…informal networks of shared meaning which hold some intrinsic value for their members” Craig & O’Leary (2005, p137)

13. If you are poor and live in a bad neighbourhood, here are your chances…

14. 4 A Social Enterprise Pedagogy

15. What do we want from education? • Is it to secure social justice through a focus on the rights and needs of the individual and so designing a system that responds to each person irrespective of social or economic status? • Is to maximise the economic well-being of society by maximising the number of highly qualified individuals who are ready for employment? • Is to ensure the transmission of cultural norms and values from one generation to another through a focus on the historical and moral inheritance? Gardner (2006, p43)

16. Is social capital the basis for a social enterprise childcare setting? “…Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital…trust, networks and norms of reciprocity within a child’s family, school, peer groups and larger community have wide ranging effects on the child’s opportunities and choices and , hence behaviour and development” Putnam (2000, p296)

17. Will it produce children fit for purpose? • Literate, numerate and comfortable with information technology • Capable of gathering, organising and deploying information • Able to analyse, synthesise and construct an argument to demonstrate understanding • Able to think creatively and be comfortable with change, innovation and problem solving • Confident about his or her own identity and value as a person and able to respect this in others • Secure in personal relationships, able to work in groups and can contribute to the wider community • Able to articulate personal values and spiritual understanding • Able to demonstrate a deep respect for humanity and what it means to be human

18. What needs to be in the SE Curriculum? • Lead Differently • Healthy Relationships at the Centre • Empathetic Attachment • Food for Thought • Cultural Capital • Empowering the Community • Collaborative problem- solving • Education and Employment

19. A Basic SE Offer • A local childcare service • Strong community roots, more able to reach the vulnerable • Local involvement through volunteering • Flexible, innovative and responsive to filling gaps • History of multi-disciplinary working • Training and qualification offer • Local employment • Intergenerational programmes

20. 5 Next Challenge

21. What Next? “Of course, though, people with long-term stakes don’t always act wisely. “Often they still prefer short-term goals, and often again they do things that are foolish in both the short term and the long term. That’s what makes biography and history infinitely more complicated and less predictable that the course of reactions… “Leaders who don’t just react passively, who have the courage to anticipate crisis or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. “So can similarly courageous, active citizens practising bottom-up management.”

22. Let’s go forward “Our task is to inspire a movement for change by addressing the fundamentals, showing that there are viable alternatives, that problems can be solved and the world can be a better place.” Wilkinson; Radical Economics (Issue 41, 2009)