Can Brown's talent bring sharper action to the UK prevention agenda?

What do Gordon Brown’s first weeks in the premiership mean for UK children’s services? Is it the same team with the same game plan playing with the same resources? Just a case of substituting the manager at half time? Well, not entirely.

On the plus side, there seems to be healthier underlying scepticism of the outgoing administration’s claims that all the problems of disadvantage are close to being solved, bar those afflicting the bottom two per cent – what Europeans call 'socially excluded' children.

In place of the propaganda, there appears to be broader interest in life chances, with a cabinet committee devoted to the subject. Collaboration across adult services and rebuilding the connection with children's services has evidently been a recurring topic during the many 'away days' arranged by and for reappointed policy makers.

“We have talked about a sort of Every Child Matters [1] for adults,” said one insider, referring to the policy document that shifted children's policy towards an outcomes agenda.

Significant shifts towards prevention are also mooted. The potential to reform the long-established and highly-regarded universal health visiting program for new-borns is being discussed. Also on the table is a fully-integrated public health and early intervention program for children and families. Whether this will be a case of yet more organizational change rather than well-measured improvement to service delivery remains to be seen.

The new season is beginning in familiar style with more legislation and more reorganization – not the best feature of the Blair years. The autumn Queen's Speech – the point in the parliamentary year when the new UK program is announced – promises three new Bills: one to keep children in education until their eighteenth birthday; one focusing on children in care; one intended to secure financial support for children when their parents split up.

The major organizational change is the creation of the first UK Government department devoted to children, to be headed by the PM’s closest ally Ed Balls. Balls has said of the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) initiative: 'It’s the children who define our mission. It’s schools that are at the centre of delivery. But it’s families who have the most important influences on children’s life chances'.

Sceptics have observed that the new department is none the less all about schools, and say it is destined to be reunited with higher education and science in some future reform.

Elsewhere, there has been confirmation that the money supply will continue and announcement of new funds in areas promoted by the previous PM. For example, Sure Start, the flagship early years prevention program survives, despite uneven evaluation results. Re-badged on the notion of ‘Children's Centres' it will pay more attention to children's health.

Indeed, the Comprehensive Spending Review has been much more generous for children than many expected, and one source of cash for prevention innovation, the Children's Fund, is being resurrected with an injection of £400m to see it through the next three years.

Many of the original New Labour preoccupations remain on the agenda: for example, cutting crime, safeguarding (the new word for child protection), teenage pregnancy, diet and nutrition and curriculum development.

Many of the old players survive, too. Even insiders have been surprised that funding streams have not been stopped or redirected – and that they still have Government jobs to go to. One said 'a Government of all the talents (Gordon Brown's pledge on his succession) means working with people who supported his old sparring partner.'

But there are a few welcome disappearances. The Respect Agenda for example, arguably the apotheosis of late-Blair folly, is folded in with the DCSF. Thankfully, its name won’t appear on the new label.

Some thorny problems will not go away whoever is in power, and they will continue to be immune to what Tony Blair used to call modernization, and what others would describe as government tinkering. The predicament of children in state care and issues to do with child maintenance, for example, continue to require radical surgery, not fresh bandaging.

The goalkeeper's fear of the centre-forward

If ‘all the talents’ really do get to grips with prevention innovation, the worry will be that they resort to centralization as a mistaken means of achieving it. In his first speech (and here alluding not to soccer results but to the UK's place in the European child poverty league), Ed Balls said, 'the scandal is not England v Sweden, but Blackbird Leys vs Headington. It’s Harehills vs Roundhay. It is North Kensington v South Kensington'. See Ed Balls's speech to the UK Business Design Centre [2]

If he means that the center will tell Blackbird Leys, Headington and the others how to put their houses in order, then the failures of the last decade will only be repeated. Getting the relationship between the center and the local right at every level of government should be critical to the new mission. Not all of the talents are in Westminster.

Also needed is a transformation in the use of evidence to allow it genuinely to inform, evaluate and question assumptions that underpin much policy. It sounds obvious; but what the UK has seen in recent years has been evidence commissioned and wrung out to support what policy makers have already decided to do, or to demonstrate that what they have done is effective.

If evidence is to prove its value then more time, consultation and reflection will be required. It was impossible to keep up with the new initiatives coming out of Tony Blair's officer. Gordon Brown might show how less can mean much more for British children.

• Prevention Action keeps up with new UK policy thanks to a service run by Birmingham City Council for its employees and partners. Every new policy or Government report regarding children is expertly summarised to ensure an effective local response. In the first months of Brown's premiership, over 50 needed to be written. Too much output, and too little input might be a reasonable diagnosis of an incipient problem.