Scotland’s children’s tsar handing over the wish list

THERE are two doors leading into Scotland’s “children’s tsar” Kathleen Marshall’s soon to be former offices. One is just an everyday, typical office front door, nothing different or exceptional. Just a door.

Next to it, however, is a little smaller, brightly painted entrance, with a mermaid and a rainbow, a blue and red parakeet in full flight across a brilliant azure sky, a cartoon boy with giant ears, enormous feet and huge grin. And, in its centre, a glass panel featuring a monkey, banana clutched in its paw and a friendly smile across his cheeky face.

“It’s the wishing door,” explains Scotland’s first Commissioner for Children and Young People, as if every office should have one.

It was, she explains, designed by some nursery children: “They wanted butterflies and rainbows, a jewelled handle and a wishing monkey with a silver smile.”

Among the office desks and chairs inside is a wishing tree. On it hangs little labels with personal wishes scribbled on – not by children, but by the outgoing Commissioner’s staff.

Each wish flutters in the breeze as the front door swings open. Yet given the perceived state of our nation’s young generation, the branches seem to be surprisingly sparse.

Teenage pregnancies, feral youths high on booze and drugs, woefully inadequate resources to cope with social workers’ burgeoning “to do list”, junkie parents and a risk-averse PlayStation generation, Kathleen Marshall’s five-year tenure as the nation’s watchdog for all things junior must have been filled with unachievable wishes…

Throw in horrific child abuse cases such as that of 11-week-old Leith baby Caleb Ness and Dundee toddler Brandon Muir and the job of championing the needs of Scotland’s most vulnerable – and perhaps most denigrated – young citizens must have felt just that little bit daunting.

Today she is preparing to leave her Holyrood Road office to make way for her successor, named yesterday as Tam Baillie, policy director of children’s charity Barnado’s Scotland.

It was back in 2004 that respected lawyer Professor Marshall entered the £72,000-a-year post amid upbeat talk of a children’s “Oscars” ceremony, plans for an under-18s think tank and the hope that “children and young people will have a place at the top table in Scottish society… so integrated into our thinking that we do not even question it any more”.

She didn’t realise it at the time, but soon the wish list would be usurped by a backlash on her office for spending £5m in five years – “a drop in the ocean of public spending”, she insists. She would stand accused of dabbling in issues that shouldn’t have concerned her and face criticism for, among other issues, daring to suggest that parents should be banned from smacking their own children.

There’d be further outrage, as it turned out, over misreported suggestions that she wanted to consult eight-year-olds on the age of sexual consent and prevent teachers from raising their voices to pupils.

Prof Marshall, a trim 55-year-old who commutes two hours a day from Newton Mearns in East Renfrewshire to her office next to the Scottish Parliament, adopts a weary look as she sets about “justifying” her five-year tenure.

For she, better than most, knows there are no instant cures for all our children’s woes – just setting up her office took the best part of 18 months, after all.

Which is why, just weeks into the job, she rolled up to the then Minister for Immigration in London, Des Browne, armed with a report highlighting the dreadful impact of dawn raids on asylum-seeking families’ children, painstakingly penned by her own hand.

“He said, ‘well, your staff have been busy’,” she recalls with a broad grin. “And I said, ‘no, I have been busy, I don’t have any staff and I did this by myself’.”

Her views put her on a collision course with those who warned that dabbling in Westminster’s immigration tactics was not her role. Still the softly spoken former director of the Scottish Child Law Centre rigidly stuck to her guns.

“I went to Dungavel and spoke to staff, I found out about the impact these raids had on children,” she explains.

“I met primary school children and it was very emotional.

“A couple of children were crying, talking about turning up at school not knowing if their friends would be there. They were particularly upset about a classmate who had been removed and whose photograph was still on the wall.

“But no-one in authority was batting for these children. “

She became a high-profile supporter of the largely Glasgow-based campaign to end immigration police dawn raids, accusing the Home Office of “terrorising” children and weathering calls for her resignation. Today the dawn raids have reduced to barely a trickle – proof, she argues, of the impact of the Commissioner’s role.

Harnessing other hard evidence of how she has benefited Scotland’s young generation, even she agrees, is trickier.

With no legal clout, her watchdog role has instead resulted in a string of reports and reviews with titles like “Promoting Proportionate Protection” and “Playing it Safe?” which focussed on a ‘risk-averse’ society which sets rules and regulations under the banner of child protection that, she argues, are more about protecting adults from potential blame.

Beneath their clumsy bureaucratic titles, her reports uncovered bizarre examples of how children in care had been prevented from riding their bikes without staff present with first aid and puncture kits, or playing near water for fear they might fall in.

Having raised three children of her own, she immediately recognised the absurdity, called in representatives from social work, voluntary organisations, insurance companies and the Royal Society for Protection of Accidents, and tried to make people see some sense.

“A lot of things that present themselves as child protection are more about protecting adults from blame,” she explains. “But trying to raise that… well it’s like seeing the Emperor’s new clothes, and it was risky to do.”

Riskier too was tackling the issue of child abuse. When Marshall happened to ponder whether Scotland should embrace UN guidelines outlawing smacking, there was outrage.

“The aim was not to criminalise parents,” she insists, admitting that as a young mum she naively struck her own children, unaware that there might be an alternative to physical punishment.

“Instead the hope was to set a standard that children have the same right of protection as adults. It’s a scandal that our law has a clause of justifiable assault of children.

“Brandon Muir was less than two years old and according to newspaper reports, the chap responsible did it on the basis of disciplining him for climbing on a window ledge,” she adds.

“How can you contemplate a society where there is justification for a grown man hitting a young child?”

She won’t comment further on the case, pointing out it is subject to an inquiry. But she does warn that, whatever the inquiry’s findings, cases like Brandon and baby Caleb – despite the reports and analysis that comes in their wake – might never be prevented.

“There is never going to be a watertight system,” she sighs. “There are always new dangers emerging – we have to be careful we aren’t so busy taking lots of action in one direction that we miss things in another.”

Such as Scotland’s love affair with drink and drugs which leaves children festering with parents too spaced out to look after them. She sees the need to rethink our approach to their care in particular, as paramount.

“The emphasis needs to be on getting stability for children at an early age,” she states, suggesting that might mean exploring the role of grandparents and “kinship” carers or shifting to a new tier of childcare that focuses on individual children’s needs.

But it’s not simply a role for her successor to tackle. She believes we all have a role to play in our most precious assets’ futures.

“I think society has to look at putting in a lot more to family support,” she stresses. “Society has to look at what it’s willing to sacrifice so we can invest in child and family services.

“You can’t conjure solutions up out of nothing.”

BAILLIE STEPS UP TO NEW ROLE

THE director of policy with children’s charity Barnardo’s Scotland, Tam Baillie, right, was yesterday named as the recommended replacement Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland.

Currently chair of the Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights, he has led the charity’s policy and influencing unit for six years helping it support more than 10,000 children and families per year across Scotland.

Martin Crewe, director of Barnardo’s Scotland, said: “I am delighted that Tam is being recommended as the next Children’s Commissioner for Scotland. He has been a great asset for Barnardo’s Scotland over the last six years and we will miss him enorm-ously. Tam has always been a passionate advocate for children and young people both in his role with us and as Chair of the Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights. I am sure he will be an excellent appointment.”

The Scottish Parliament is to be asked to approve his appointment prior to him taking up the new role in mid-May.