Introduction

According to the Swedish feminist and political radical Ellen Key, the 20th century was to be the ‘century of the child’ (Key, 1900). It is unarguable that in the last 100 years there have been significant improvements in the material realities of children's lives. This is at least true for children in Sweden and Britain who have substantially benefited from the ‘Golden Age’ of European state welfarism. Key's vision encompassed more than material advancement, however. There was hope too for political progress. Now, the ‘century of the child’ is over and there is reason to doubt how far the ‘cultural facts’ (La Fontaine, 1979) of childhood have been transformed and how much progress along the road from ‘marginality to citizenship’ (Wintersberger, 1996) children have achieved.

The questionable success of children in achieving civil status in their own right, as well as being a theme of this and later chapters, is one of a number of factors that make the study of public policy affecting children particularly problematic. Because children have not been significant political actors, they have been unable to define a discrete policy ‘space’ of their own. Consequently, the responsibility for public policy affecting children, today as much as in the past, tends to be distributed across a range of administrative structures, departments and levels of local and central government. The fragmentary nature of public policy and the consequent discontinuities in professional practice are further recurring themes of this and succeeding chapters.

Other European countries have sought to ensure more effective coordination and development of policy that bears on children either by the appointment of ombudsmen or even through the establishment of whole ministries (as in Norway). In the UK, until the appointment of the Children's commissioner for Wales early in 2001, the lack of any kind of sustained political presence for children, and the absence either of direct representation or of centrally placed advocates, has ensured that policy has often developed in a reactive way, frequently in response to a crisis or other ‘special impetus’, without which legislative programmes for children ‘struggle’, especially if there is “the least hint of parliamentary controversy or of serious financial implications” (Hughes, 1998, p 151; see also Drewry, 1988).