The Return to Social Enterprise ; Preparing the Staff for a New Understanding
Social Enterprise Research Conference, July 2008, London South Bank University.
June O’Sullivan
Westminster Children’s Society (WCS)
121 Marsham ST
London SW1P 4LX
020 7834 8679
Introduction
This paper aims to tell the first part of the story of WCS attempting to return to its true roots as a social enterprise and the impact that has had in terms of staff perception, business development and relationship with existing commissioners.
To do this the following issues were considered:
· Why was WCS considered a social enterprise?
· What was the perception of staff?
· What are we doing differently?
· Is social enterprise the way forward for WCS?
Why was WCS considered a social enterprise?
Westminster Children Society (WCS) was set up in 1903 to support the local community to provide the best for their children and their families. The initial emphasis was on health and diet and WCS organised classes and groups to help parents (mostly mothers) learn to cook healthy food and to make suitable clothes for their children. Westminster had, even then, a large population of transitory refugees moving and staying in the borough where there was already significant poverty in the community. Mothers were the prime target audience and they paid up to a shilling for the service.
WCS has always prided itself as being a flexible and responsive organisation. It shifted emphasis according to need, moving in the 1930s to providing mother and toddler groups to encourage parents to learn about play and gain more understanding of how they could help their children meet their full potential. During the Second World War, WCS provides access to low fee nurseries to enable women to work locally. WCS was also the first gas mask fitting centre for children and continued to support parents during the very difficult war times. Since then, the nurseries continue to grow and there are currently 18 settings across London providing some 900 childcare places to local children.
WCS continues to work particularly with low income two parent families, because these are the families that fall between two stools and as a consequence take the longest time to get out of poverty. Traditionally, these families have relied on poorer quality cheaper childcare because of their financial situation. Consequently, the children hit three barriers to their future success in one go, poorer home lives, longer working hours and poorer quality education and care which combined limited their chances to succeed and probably trapped them further in the very situation they were trying to escape. Our main method of helping is by keeping our fees as socially inclusive as possible which means subsidising them with other income. Currently parental fees equate to 60% of our income and the other 40% is earned through contracts and minimal fundraising. However in terms of social return on investment the Government benchmark is a useful starting point. Grunewald an economic analyst suggest that in monetary terms if the Government invest substantially in parenting and enriched daycare there can expect a rate of return 3:1 to 7:1 and expect to achieve a return of 17:1 by the time the child reaches 21years. The social benefits are also significant and include reduction in crime and prison, better educational attainment, healthier adults and reduced levels of obesity, reduction in welfare dependency. According to Alan Sinclair
“…early engagement pays a very high rate of return. The dividend is 12 – 16% per year for every £1 of investment – a payback of four or five times the original investment by the time the young person reaches their early twenties and the gains continue to flow throughout their life.”
Sinclair (2006) pg 5
WCS operates a set of five values which underpin everything that is done in the organisation. The first value is that the child must remain at the heart of everything we do. All the services have to be developed beginning with the child. This is often a dilemma as many initiatives focus on parents without always looking at the needs of children. WCS wants to make a difference and give children the skills and knowledge to overcome their initial difficulties so they can contribute fully to society in the long-term.
To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.”
Te Whariki
Different philosophies, programmes, structures, and research contribute to the distinctive ethos of WCS which is then translated into the organisational culture. This includes ensuring nurseries have a WCS feel. Most WCS nurseries are kept small (despite the costs) and will always be sited right at the heart of the community. The environment is very natural and sensory as we believe that a sensory approach to learning reaches all the different types of learners. The WCS curriculum places a huge emphasis is placed on developing children’s social and language and communication skills so they become confident learners. Professor Melhuish in his report A Literature Review of the Impact of Early Years Provision 2005 notes that for children over threes the evidence is consistent that preschool is beneficial to educational and social development of the whole population. However, he stresses that the positive effects are greater for those children facing disadvantage but only if the childcare is of the highest quality.
We therefore believe that ultimately, the choice of pre-school care and education for children is a vitally important one for society as a whole one that carries with it a moral and social responsibility. The main goal of the WCS cultural perspective is to help parents see their own lives and lifestyles in a larger and more realistic perspective and to challenge their assumptions about the ways in which the rest of humanity lives. We want to articulate and embed these values into the children and their families and staff and commissioners and ultimately to change cultural attitudes to the importance of social justice through social capital for small children. Any developed society would take special care of youngest members and there is also a growing wealth of compelling evidence from neuroscience to support the idea of a critical period of learning in the very earliest years.
“Getting the early years right benefits the whole of society. Through economic research, psychology, biology and neuroscience, the answers came out the same; treat what happens in the first years as gold.”
Sinclair (2006 pg 5)
Hence at WCS we strive to achieve excellence and that means that we try to spend as much as possible on training staff and supporting them with good working conditions to provide the best, most well researched service possible. We do this by involving the staff in the development of the organisation in many ways including trying to foster a culture of listening to employee opinion.
We seek staff views through a range of methods and fully involve them at the annual staff conference to get feedback and input into strategic organisational direction. We are constantly considering external benchmark against which to measure performance and to help provide an internal benchmark against which to measure progress including informing organisational initiatives such as IIP. Recently, the CIPD report on ‘Employee Turnover and Retention.( July 2006.) found that employees of social enterprises had the most commonality between the employees and employers with regards to their pride in what they do and their agreement on the mission and goals of the organisation. In fact the majority of the questions pertaining to this subject achieved a rating of ‘strongly agree’ for more than 50% with some topping 60%. The most impressive was a 66.7% rating on the part of social enterprise employees saying that they ‘understand the mission and goals of their organisation,’ as compared to the composite rating of only 30.3% agreement for the other three sectors.
Other questions provided similar results for social enterprise employees as compared to the other sectors. 56.4% of social enterprise employees compared to 27.3% of other employees who shared the goals of the organisation with their employers, and 59% social enterprises as compared to 27.3% for being proud of where they worked.
WCS is a very diverse organisation and this is reflected in our parent group. The WCS creative approach is used to support parents where we will take many risks to give parents a chance to shine and move forward. There are accredited learning support programmes designed for parents as a means of increasing their training and development and routes to employment. For example parents can train to become independent learning support assistants to work with children with special needs in any setting. We also train parents to become crèche workers so that they have an immediate skill. Other parents can complete the technical certificate to climb the first rung of the professional childcare ladder. We develop and fund these programmes from our surplus and then get them to a stage where we can sell the programme so it becomes self funding and we can develop new programmes. In this way WCS contribute to local regeneration and job creation and reaffirms its purpose to secure social justice for by providing education irrespective of social or economic status.
What was the perception of staff?
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gat her wood, divide the work and give orders, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint Exupery ; the Wisdom of the Sands
At the 2007 annual staff conference as CEO I reconfirmed WCS original social enterprising ethos and explained how I thought WCS could develop this through its business model underpinned by our five values which influence every thing we do. I confirmed that in reality these values translated into
· Shared belief in the potential for growth and development
· Community interconnectedness
· Distributed leadership
· Investment in staff development
· Emphasis on high quality personal relationships
“When you’re value led you’re trying to help the community. And when you’re trying to help the community, people want to buy from you. They want to work for you. They want to be associated with you. They feel invested in you success”
Cohen & Greenfield (1997) p29
For us to embed the concept of social enterprise, we needed to understand the process of change. Change is vital for organisations to survive and grow and involves a journey from an existing strategic and operational business position to a more desirable and effective one. The success of this journey is judged by how quickly the identified business benefits are realised. For example we wanted the staff to realise that by going through a social enterprise route we were more likely to be sustainable and could make a greater difference to children. Only then could the WCS staff accept and embrace whatever change needed to make this happen as well as us articulating the expected benefits it would bring.
It was important to remember that an organisation may go through a number of stages to ensure full implementation of the processes necessary to the success of change. However, this also requires consideration of people especially as they would be our best advocates and if our people weren’t preaching about us, then we would be missing out on a large proportion of potential converts. We realised that in the future our staff would be our greatest sales force but on the other hand could also be the greatest saboteurs of what we are trying to achieve.
William Bridges introduced the notion that it is not in the actual change where issues and resistance arise as this is only situational. Instead it is in the transition: the psychological process that employees go through in coming to terms with a new situation. Such transformations can lead to extreme change in the way in which individuals perceive, think and behave at work. This is because the change processes involve modifying something which is culturally well integrated into the personality and social relationships of individuals. Therefore I wanted to check that WCS had addressed the situational factors along the change journey so I could measure if the change had been implemented successfully.
One method of managing change we have always used at WCS is to use the new term, in this case, social enterprise into the daily WCS culture and conversation. We adhere to the Freiere idea of moving from unconscious awareness to conscious awareness to unconscious awareness so it becomes part of the organisation fibre. However, unless we check at regular periods we have little ways of really knowing if this is happening. We needed to
“…seek new insights ; to ask questions and to assess the phenomena in a new light”
Saunders et al (2003) pg 96
In order to find out what staff thought we followed guidance from the Work Foundation which is summed up below:
A sample of respondents were identified recognising the compromise between a sample and getting 100% accuracy . According to Van der Velde (2004)