Introduction

This chapter considers the assumptions and implications of policy developments in multi-agency working over at least the last 30 years for the support of disabled children and young people. I look at three policy strands: post-Warnock statutory special educational needs (SEN) assessment; inclusive education; and the Every Child Matters agenda. My focus is on education, and although the actual policies referred to would vary in other contexts, the overall argument will, I claim, apply to all. There has been a constantly renewed call to improve multiagency working and, more recently, for far-reaching structural changes to integrate services. However, it is questionable as to whether this has been for the benefit of disabled children and young people. I make the case that problems in multi-agency working have been repeatedly conceptualised in ways that do not tell the whole story and, therefore, do not make it easy for improvements to happen.

Multi-agency working has been understood in terms of ‘what works’, looking at systems and communication, rather than in terms of the complex politics around the professional role and relationships. The perspectives of parents and young people on how services should work with them have been ignored or ineffectively included. In this chapter, misconceptions of multi-agency working are traced through some key policy developments leading to different kinds of thinking that might take us in other directions. I propose an understanding not of multi-agency working per se, but rather one that focuses on relationships, of professionals, practitioners, young people and their families working together. This is a method of organising services that finds a way for the different knowledges of all involved to have agency and is adaptive and flexible, recognising parents to have changing and differing kinds of needs and to be in a position to negotiate their own preferred identities. Professionals would aim to be ‘privilege cognisant’ in challenging normative practices. It places the professionals in a range of roles. Instead of understanding what professionals do as enacting a kind of composite expertise around a child, relationships with agencies are seen as supporting the child and their parents in actively becoming the kinds of young people and families they are seeking to be.