BELL: The decision to restructure the government departments was made by the new Prime Minister when he came into Downing Street in June 2007. I think the underpinning rationale for the Prime Minister was the need to, at the same time as focusing on school attainment, link other services that would make a difference in what children achieved at school — link those services together. So I think that was the underpinning rationale.

To develop that a bit further, we know that what happens in school is terribly important for children’s attainment. For many youngsters, it's the influence of out-of-school factors that will determine how well you succeed in school. Therefore, we felt that at the national government level we should try to link services together, in the same sort of way we're seeing increasingly in local areas.

We believe that this is the right way forward. We believe very strongly that every child has the right to succeed. For some children and young people it's harder, because of family or other circumstances. Therefore, we need to ensure that all services that can make a difference to a child or young person or a family are aligned, so you don't have a situation where you get one kind of service for a child and then you have to search for another kind of service. We're trying to align the services around the child, around the young person, and around the family.

BELL: Absolutely. We have what are called public service agreements, which are essentially the government’s ambitions across all our states of policy. There are five that are particularly pertinent in our area, which we as a department are responsible nationally for, and those are: improving the health and well-being of young people; improving children’s and young people’s safety; raising the educational attainment of all children and young people; narrowing the gap in educational attainment between children from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers; and then, finally, increasing the number of young people on the path to success.

These are high-level ambitions that we have, and underneath those are a whole set of indicators and targets that tell us how well we're doing to achieve those ambitions.

Our Secretary of State — that's the member of the government responsible for children, schools, and families — said that his ambition is to make this the best country for children and young people to grow up. That's a big ambition. But we think that by laying out these public service agreements and indicating what needs to happen, that's our best chance of achieving this ambition.

BELL: We do that in a number of ways. At the level of the individual school or college, for example, our school inspection agency, Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services, and Skills), is responsible for holding schools to account for their performance. Increasingly, we are not just looking at educational attainment, but we will look at the extent to which schools are enabling young people to be successful, to be happy, to be safe, and so on. So I think what you do when you are looking at separate institutions, you hold them to account for a wider range of outcomes.

We also look at services in a complete locality. We might look at the services in the city of Manchester or the city of Leeds and see: What's the role of the local government authority, working with other agencies, including schools, to achieve these outcomes in their area? We actually agree entirely that if you're going to have bite to this system, your accountability framework needs to be lined up behind [it]. There's no point in saying we believe in linking these services to achieve a wider range of outcomes if you only focus your accountability system on one set of outcomes.

BELL: I think that's why these public service agreements I referred to are so important. Because these will highlight what our national expectations are. So it might be, in one locality, the way the schools work together with the health system or work together with social services is different from the way it operates in another locality. But those different localities will still be focused on achieving local and national goals.

So we have the national goals set, but people are free to decide how to organize themselves, and we also have the accountability system I described to ensure that we have a check on performance.

BELL: Yes. One of the things we've done through our reforms is create what are called children’s centers, particularly focused on the under-fives. These are physical buildings, sometimes based in schools or health centers, and sometimes brand-new, where we will bring together a number of services. You'll have education, child care, health provision, mental health support for parents, advice on aspects of bringing your children up, and so on. We have the co-location of those services, and we certainly have found from the research evidence that we are now seeing improved outcomes on the part of the children who are taking part in or using the children’s services.

The other interesting thing for us on the children’s centers is that there's not just the focus on the children, but also the adults. Actually, these children’s centers will also have advice on work, on benefits, on getting back in education and learning, on training courses, and so on. So I think with the co-location of services in one place, you can benefit both children and their parents.

BELL: Too early to say based on the changes to the government structures at national level, but I think it's safe to say that over the last decade or so we've been moving much more in this direction. We know, for example, that more children are achieving better qualifications in school than has ever been the case before; more children are leaving primary school with the basics in English and math, better than ever before. We know that more children are leaving school and going into further education and higher education, and the percentage of those who are not doing that is dropping.

So we have a whole set of measures that we think demonstrate that these policies are paying off. What we don't have enough of is a new range of targets, so we'll never contend, because obviously, as you understand from the U.S. perspective, our young people, as your young people, are growing up in a world where it's not just how they're doing against their local competitors in one part of the country or another, it's actually how they stack up against international competitors. Therefore, we make no apologies here for continuing to raise the bar for what we expect from schools and other services.

BELL: I think we're moving some of the changes forward. For example, we are asking ourselves [about] the local health system: how do we get children’s health services to be more tightly embedded in what we're trying to achieve? That's one that we can ask at the moment.

We're also asking ourselves, how do we ensure that school principals have the range of skills and talents that they need, obviously to be first and foremost concerned with children’s education, but also to understand how they make good links with other professionals? That's important for us to change.

I also think [we need to examine] just the whole set of expectations around what schools and other services do. You don't just concern yourselves with children at your school or in your playgroup. Actually, in a local area, you need to be concerned with the interests of all children and young people. You have to be prepared to work with everyone in your locality to secure those best outcomes.

I think we understand what we have to do in these different areas. We haven't quite done it. I think we're on the right lines. We're actually tackling the right problems in the system.