Tackling the Effects of Neoliberalism? Integrating Services at Barnardos New Zealand

Hal B. Levine
Cultural Anthropology
Victoria University of Wellington

Abstract

Like most voluntary organisations, Barnardos New Zealand has faced a number of challenges as a result of changes in the way the Government funds social services. It found itself in economic difficulties as it scrambled for contracts and faced real doubts that the organisation would be able to sustain its founding mission of providing welfare services for children in New Zealand. Led by a new chief executive (CEO), Barnardos began an ambitious programme of renewal by integrating services. Seen as a way of countering fragmentation, service integration has a long history but an ambiguous record of success in bringing about its desired ends. This paper, based on interviewing and focus groups, looks at integrated services from the perspective of staff at Barnardos New Zealand. It reports their views on whether this particular restructuring exercise is something worth doing, how it is happening and how to advance it further. The article uses Bourdieu's critique of neoliberalism to put some of the doubts and expectations regarding integrated services here into a wider context. Uncertainties notwithstanding, service integration still has considerable appeal.

Background

New Zealand … has gone the furthest toward a contract state model and it is here where the transformation of third sector voluntary organisations into agents of the state is no longer simply a theoretical issue. The New Zealand Department of Social Welfare has: reduced its direct role in service delivery, increased its use of voluntary agencies, and altered its existing relationship with the voluntary sector by abandoning a grant model of funding and adopting a contract model. This has led to a more accountable system and more delivery at the community level, but has been criticized for the burdensome nature of the accountability regime and the failure to adequately protect and nurture the unique qualities of voluntary agencies. (Evans and Shields 2006, citing Canada West Foundation)

Barnardos New Zealand is one of those voluntary agencies whose unique qualities have changed. In fact they changed to such an extent during the advance of the “contract state” that the organisation began to falter. Informants told me that it was losing both money and its sense of purpose when the founding CEO retired.

Describing itself as the country’s leading welfare agency for children and families, Barnardos was established in New Zealand in 1972. By that stage the parent organisation in Britain had provided homes for destitute children for over a hundred years, and set up branches in Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand when poor British children were sent overseas. Barnardos New Zealand runs a raft of programmes locally, including family counselling, support, homes, a parent helpline, social workers in schools, a supervised contact service, treatment centres for adolescents involved with sexual abuse, after-school care programmes, home-based child care and crèches. Its $40 million expenditure is funded by fees for some services, public donation, and contracts from the Ministry of Education and Child Youth and Family (Barnardos New Zealand 2008). With a new CEO appointed in 2003, Barnardos began to reconfigure itself, embarking on a programme of planned renewal in 2006. The first goal listed in the organisation’s change document (Barnardos New Zealand 2006) is to “Develop and implement an integration plan for all Barnardos services”.

The idea that a coordinated approach to clients of welfare and service organisations would serve them better than a series of disconnected programmes has a long history. It became a central facet of Lyndon Johnson’s great society initiative in the 1970s. As plausible as the idea sounds, it was never evaluated adequately or shown to have benefits for clients.¹ Despite this lack of evidence that service integration has any real value, it reappeared as a central issue in policy debates in the 1990s because it seemed so necessary to control the fragmentation caused by privatising and contracting social services (Milward 1995).

This paper looks into the programme of planned change by means of integrating services at Barnardos New Zealand.  It focuses especially on how service integration is seen by staff in the context of recent changes in internal and external conditions. What is particularly interesting is that some staff say integrating services is a fundamental change, designed to bring Barnardos back to its roots as a cohesive child-centred charitable organisation, while others are more sceptical and view it as a management tool to better cope in the new environment. Indeed, there is room for doubt over what service integration is designed to accomplish.

Bourdieu says that people involved in administering and delivering social services experience the contradictions of neoliberalism most directly. “The left hand of the state”, those who spend money on hard-won social programmes, is opposed to, and by, the technocrats of finance ministries and banks, comprising the state’s “right-hand”. Sent to the front to repair the damage of market-led policy, he asks how the constituents of this weak side could “not have the sense of being constantly undermined or betrayed?” (1998b:3). Subject to restructuring, line management, performance appraisals, contracts, audits, competition – the full panoply of mechanisms designed to make alternatives to its “reforms” impossible − how could Barnardos cope with neoliberalism? This paper argues that despite the reasonable doubts held by some staff, and by scholars who have examined service integration more generally, it constitutes a real attempt by Barnardos New Zealand to survive neoliberalism by tackling the forces that undermine the coherence, internal solidarity and mission of the organisation.

Research at Barnardos New Zealand

People working for Barnardos have a vision of what the organisation stands for, what it does and how it should work. They obtain that vision from a variety of sources - personal, professional and organisational. The research this paper draws upon consists of interviews with a variety of Barnardos staff who articulated their thoughts on organisational development and change to me, and attendance at organisational meetings at Taita House and a management "road show" about integrated services in Wellington. A reference group of interested management staff in Wellington oversaw the research. We met regularly over the course of the project (almost two years) to evaluate results and plan future directions. Barnardos staff were uniformly supportive and helpful at all phases of this research.

I interviewed 17 people for about an hour each at Barnardos offices in Wellington, Lower Hutt, Auckland, Manukau and Hamilton, and conducted two-hour focus group sessions in Wellington, Porirua, Lower Hutt, Manukau and Palmerston North, with five or six staff in each group. These loosely structured interviews and focus group discussions explored perspectives on Barnardos's direction and its current situation. We also talked about whether staff perceived the need for this change to be genuine, or saw it as imposed by senior management from Barnardos head office in Wellington. In the course of these discussions a picture emerged of a group of people who were united by their commitment to children but simultaneously divided by professional allegiances, organisational dynamics, and the requirements of government funding and auditing of their programmes.

In addition to these activities with Barnardos staff, I interviewed two clients (fewer than hoped) and two Ministry officials recommended by Murray Edridge, Barnardos's CEO. I also visited a number of early childhood centres, where I talked to staff, and a home for adolescent sexual offenders.

Although my sample was not representative, it did cover the views of a number of individuals in a range of situations sufficient to discover the main themes that integrated services raised for the organisation. A summary report was provided to Barnardos, who gave feedback on its contents and the CEO gave permission to release the data collected for publication without further monitoring.

Why integrate services?

I asked interviewees why they thought integration had become such a high priority at this particular time. One manager said there had been "lots" of restructuring over the years, driven by growth in contracts, but problems kept surfacing nonetheless:

"It's endless, Hal. I've lost count of how many times I've been restructured. I've had five titles and five different responsibilities in five years. We grew very rapidly. I was an area manager for three years and split the unit three times in three years because we were growing so fast. One lot was coping with that growth … A second lot was around how we managed. We had the same CEO for 27 years. Like many people in a position where you grow something from nothing to something very big, he had to change his leadership style and the structure had to change. And then we got a specialist contract for residential services for high-risk kids, which … required more expertise than we had before. Ian (the long time former CEO) brought that [programme] from England with nothing. It wasn't an area of expertise [for] this organisation and how he managed to get the government to get Barnardos to set that up is beyond me. It's the best facility in the country for at-risk kids. Ian fought every step of the way to get the best for those kids … It's probably the most important work that we are doing in terms of the future safety of children in New Zealand … So we went down a pathway of restructuring. Then we went through a period of new people coming … the leadership changing. The organisation was in some financial difficulty. There was a need to rethink if we'd be there in the long term."

A staff member in the national office expressed some scepticism that this particular effort would do anything fundamental to change the way Barnardos operates. Nor did he expect from the integration efforts he had experienced thus far that it would come to have more benefit for clients:

"What frustrates me is that for some [people who work in Barnardos] integration is just seen as putting things together. Or all in one place, but they are still the same services and people. But it's to think how putting things together might create something different … It's not inherent in how we work or what we do. It's not 'let's start with getting a good start with understanding the needs of the family and how we can meet those needs' … I haven't heard anyone talking creatively about how we fund our services. We don't pool our funding in any kind of creative way. Each discrete bit of what they are funded for is funded in that discrete bit. I can understand that that's about needing to account, and they are all from different agencies, but, as an agency that has significant fund-raising income and discretion about where we put that income, we haven't thought about how we could create increased flexibility about how we could respond to family needs … We top up, but we don't apply that money creatively to wrap services together."

The goals of working together rather than separately and creating new and more effective programmes while remaining flexible seem to be widely shared. Some people relish the opportunity to change in this way but are not sure that all in the organisation are comfortable with the streamlining of management this requires, or that the structure currently in place can accomplish something really meaningful. A manager in Auckland said that for some people it is "scary". A few individuals did feel a need for a clearer idea of what they were supposed to be doing and more direction in how to go about integrating services.

Another aspect of integration and its meaning is that it entails a return to how Barnardos operated in the past. When the organisation was smaller and had a less diverse range of programmes, people worked together and coordinated their activities in a natural way. This still happens in smaller centres, but it is difficult to achieve in a larger, more diverse Barnardos that competes for contracts in a market-oriented voluntary sector.

Factors that inhibit integrating services

Atwool (2003) highlights the major difficulties that confront services integration in the context of recent government-supported initiatives in New Zealand. The Agenda for Children, Te Rito New Zealand Family Violence Strategy, Youth Development Strategy Aotearoa, Care and Protection Blueprint, High and Complex Needs, and Strengthening Families “are based on interagency cooperation and partnerships between State funded services, third sector organisations and families. All contain Action Plans that use the language of partnership, cooperation, and integration. The Government’s Agenda for Children … promotes a whole child approach which clearly cannot be achieved without integrated service delivery” (2003:31). There are, however, substantial barriers to making integration work. Atwool identifies a “lack of communication between policy, organisation and intervention levels” (2003:32), a focus on output classes for government contracts, and the “silo mentality” of competing government departments. The non-government organisations (NGOs) and government departments that are supposed to cooperate are simultaneously competing for funding and operating independently of one another.  

Some of the adaptations of Barnardos to the realities of this situation resulted in a fragmentation of programmes and services that, like the more general situation mentioned in the quote by Milward above, made the need for increasing integration so apparent and appealing. Staff who have been with the organisation for a long time gave personal examples of how unity in the organisation had declined during their tenure. One person working in the area of foster care said that originally all clients’ children used Barnardos childcare:

“And I came to all their play groups and introduced myself. If the coordinator in Kidstart saw a family that needed my services she would refer them. That was ten years ago and I suppose that’s what they’re getting back into today. We had it in the past. What stopped it was that Barnardos funded that service [from sources other than contracts] and was looking for outside funding … We would ring up Access [an inside division] if we felt a family needed some services. But I don’t see us using it that way anymore now.”

Indeed, another staff member said that Barnardos is moving further away from integration despite clear messages to the contrary from the CEO. He said this is a result of the rebranding of the early childhood services. The new brand, Kidstart, was designed to widen the market for Barnardos services in an increasingly competitive childcare market by changing the perception that their target audience consisted of mainly underprivileged clients. The problem seems fundamental, as the CEO acknowledged in our interview. Home-based care started out as a social service for needy parents, and developed into an early childhood business after it came under the oversight of the Ministry of Education. Different professional expectations and standards for early childhood teaching added more funding streams for the more diverse programmes Barnardos ran and drove a wedge between those that are commercial and education-based, like Kidstart, and the more social-work oriented initiatives. This division “creates competition between the services”, but clients’ needs are often multifaceted and transcend such divisions:

“Theoretically, when they go to Family Support they are meant to have a plan, meant to know what the goals are. They’re supposed to have a plan bringing in the other services outside of Barnardos to provide that. Unfortunately, they can’t come to us for care, because we only take referrals from Child Youth and Family. However, there’s no reason why that couldn’t happen if somebody funded us. If Barnardos had funding for their Family Support service so that it funds respite care we would work in an integrated way. Either we would be key worker or Family Support would be a key worker. We would say Barnardos foster care is providing respite care, she will go to budget advice there, put the package together and we would be part of it.”

“If families come through Family Support there is recognition that there is a need, but looking at the early childhood services how do you recognise there is a need and approach parents in a way that’s non-confrontational non-judgemental and doesn’t appear to scrutinise them and makes people feel it’s okay to get involved in these services?”

“We shouldn’t be competing; we should be collaborating. One of the difficulties [is that] the two services have different fee structures that create a barrier for parents going from one to the other because they get two separate bills. In this day and age services should come under the one bill, but we can’t.”

Social workers, counsellors and teachers work to different professional codes, and their contracts often demand different performance measures. Reporting to an outside agency on a specifically defined aspect of child welfare can undermine the unifying focus of a child-centred outlook contributing to the fragmentation discussed above. One staff member had very little to do with anyone outside her immediate unit:

“I’m not sure that most of my services can be integrated. The services are run as specialist social-work-only services. [Interviewee describes how the service being discussed is limited by contract to providing immediate care for the children, not having anything to do with what happens to them further down the track.] For demand management we don’t carry any of our recommendations through. A lot of the services we might want to involve are not services Barnardos runs, like drug and alcohol treatment, women’s refuge. We might suggest our programmes, where appropriate, but at the end of the day it’s not our choice.”

A number of complaints were voiced about how hierarchical Barnardos is. Managers are not accessible enough, nor are they familiar with what is happening on a day-to-day level. For example:

“Few people have hands-on experience at all. The lack of awareness. They know the policy. We actually take care of a lot of Māori children, but I was at a meeting where they said oh!, iwi social services won’t apply to you because you don’t take care of Māori children.”

Managers also have problems connecting up staff doing such widely diverse jobs:

“I don’t have one day when they are all working at the same time. That’s one of the barriers for Barnardos within itself. And the capacity is limited by the fact that, for example, the child psychotherapist is only here 10 hours a week. We offer great services on small hours with part-time staff. We don’t get to know our colleagues out there in the communities and in the wider Barnardos because we just don’t have that contact with them other than on a PC, and it’s just not the same. Here in Auckland this was the mother centre, the hub where everything started happening, until we had all these other offices and things like that and there isn’t just that personal contact anymore other than being on a PC, and we do get together every once in a while when we feel it’s needed.”

“There are so many different services provided, and that’s what brings on the fragmentation. You have education and family services and we have children [in] supervised contact and parent education. Now hopefully all the services in Manukau we can bring together with a lot of … consultation with each other … I can see a picture like that, but I can also see what’s happened in the past – fragmentation because we’re so busy just getting stuck into and doing our business and not having the time to consult wider to see how it can actually work.”

“There is some possessiveness of services that don’t want others to come in. Ownership, patch protection. Integration should be about helping people out in the community, not our agenda. Before we can achieve integration people in the different services need to know what the organisation does and I don’t think that is the case. I hear staff from other Barnardos services who don’t know where to refer clients. We can’t go to other communities if we don’t have that knowledge internally. Not all staff know what we do as an organisation. Things have changed so much so some of us need to go back and revisit what others are doing. I have seen some staff in other parts of Barnardos using outside agencies when we are in here. Why is that happening? Our own internal website is so wishy-washy, outdated.”

The Ministry of Education move to make early childcare providers teachers, who follow a curriculum and assess performance, provides a specific illustration of how government policy has driven a wedge between social services and education, and this has caused problems for providers of home-based care. The women who are now providing educational services say that prior to the formation of Kidstart they felt like mothers who volunteered to look after children in their homes. Now they have been turned into Kidstart contractors, who have to chart the children’s educational progress yet get paid very little for their new professional role as educators. These women said they felt comfortable with their former role as volunteers who did mothering, but they bridle at being turned into teachers:

“The writing we do is basically what a kindergarten teacher used to do. For example, if a child is on the bus I could just say she went on the bus. But they want to know what she did on the bus and I really think that’s not important … Every Kidstart caregiver I’ve spoken to has the same issue with the books … you often do it on your own time when you’re not being paid. I write it down in a diary every night or sometimes in the morning and the end of the week. I struggle with the babies. How do you write a learning story about a five or six-month-old baby? The book goes to the visiting teacher and the parent gets to see it. The purpose of this is to monitor and say they [Kidstart] are following the early childhood education guidelines.”

The various issues raised in this section on the factors that inhibit the development of integrated services at Barnardos show how general aspects of neoliberal restructuring play out in a specific organisational context. Discussing The Essence of Neoliberalism, Bourdieu (1998b:3–5) refers to repeated restructurings, autonomous divisions, individualised careers and performance appraisals as tools used to promote the reach of the market economy and destroy the groups that could resist its advance. This seems a good way to summarise what my various informants said works against integrating services at Barnardos. Although they are under considerable centrifugal pressure, integration is by no means seen as unattainable at Barnardos.

Integration is happening

Staff who work in offices where they are in regular contact with their colleagues feel that, the aforementioned divisions notwithstanding, they are already operating in an integrated way:

"For me, for our two home-based services, it's an easy answer. We are co-located so it's pretty much as integrated as you could be. So, we see that if the parents need could be transferred from one to another service then that happens in terms of integration, because their friends are working with each other in the same team."

"Integration is quite a new buzzword … We have really good communication with other services … Hopefully integrated services would just make it better … networking, understanding people's roles and qualifications."

"[The team working with sexual offenders] must have found a way of overcoming professional differences. You have counsellors, psychiatrists, teachers, cooks, managers, administrators, social workers. How are they achieving that? Some of the smaller regional sites probably have worked in a really holistic wrap-around way."

"We asked the parents what they want. They want an OSCAR [out of school care] service so we are working on putting one in. We have a contact service and want to widen out to a weekday service. We're working with the medical centre next door to see what sort of services they want. We approached the dental services, who want to set up a preschool dental service. We're setting up in Mangere what that community wants to support its children rather than what Barnardos sees as the need. Interestingly enough, we probably have a 50/50 split from the people involved on how we should do that … What I'd rather see happen at Mangere is that there is no rule book. We're going to have to make it up as we go along. We'll make decisions based on what each child and individual family needs rather than what the book tells us we have to do. It's a scary way for some staff to work."

One service user appreciated how he was dealt with by Palmerston North Barnardos:

"It happens really quickly … My boys benefited in a short period of time. They started with parenting courses and then assessed the boys. And it does happen so fast … That tells me that that this place works. They have got good networks. They know these people."

In Mangere, Hamilton, Palmerston North and the other centres where services are housed together, staff seem to have moved from querying the meaning of integration towards taking steps to operationalise it. Although the process is in its very early stages, the individuals I interviewed who were working in these situations were enthusiastic about services integrating.

Ideas to increase integration further

Most of the comments from staff about how to increase integration further focused on communication between different staff and services, staff and clients, as well as with other organisations that work with children and families:

“When I’ve seen services work really well together it’s because there’s been a high level of trust between the staff involved and the client. We’ve almost got the directive (message). And now what we need is better communication between staff.”

“From what I’ve read about integrated services it works well when there is a high level of trust and respect and there is no competition for funding internally within the team.”

“If the relationships that we have with those other organisations, if we didn’t maintain those and have respect and value for what they do, we couldn’t integrate.”

“I think it’s really important to do what we can do well. Rather than little bits and pieces and pretending that we can be all things to one person, but to be the primary worker to make sure that all the things happen for a person to have that knowledge in the community. You offer integrated services within your community and go broader than just the organisation.”

These comments seem to correspond to recent Ministry of Social Development initiatives. The Ministry official I interviewed was prepared to assist with Barnardos moves in this direction. He recognised the various disincentives to integration and was involved in attempting to ameliorate them. The Ministry has set up a council of NGOs to facilitate cooperation, and Barnardos is a leading member of this group because of its reputation as a multifaceted provider of good-quality services:

“The community House in Taita – I’ve been out there and am aware of the exercise … to explore the possibility of providing a community hub there. I said to him, “Well now, to my knowledge there is already a community house out in Taita. There may be other community organisations who feel threatened by you suddenly getting government funding to do something in here when there hasn’t been any dialogue …’ Murray committed to quite extensive consultation and dialogue … with the community which is still ongoing, and what we’ve said is that if the community actually think that this is a good idea we’d be happy to support a one-stop shop concept in Taita. We’ve got enough money for 13 of these things in the next 12 months … We quite like the concept of one-stop shops. They work best with collaboration between different NGOs and hopefully government agencies as well. Their success derives from a greater capacity to provide a seamless service. Murray’s keeping me up to date on the way it’s going. I have no doubt that they’re getting the community support. So it’s not an issue.”

Here is a similar view of integration at Barnardos from a manager at the Ministry of Education, the other major government department that funds some of their programmes for young children:

“The kind of advantage that Barnardos has integrating new services and making them available is that they have the opportunity to bring social supports as well as the benefits of universal education to their client groups, which is certainly something that is a strength of Barnardos and has been well appreciated for families. Their ability to take what’s out there and make the best use of it and integrate it. There is a huge advantage of having younger children in their services. When the children are in early childhood you have to be there to drop them off and pick them up. You must have contact with that service. It provides a huge opportunity for integrated services, or the services like Barnardos to have discussions with parents about any range of other things … that might not be directly about the child. The Te Whariki programme looks at children in that holistic sense. There are some real strengths and opportunities that Barnardos builds that are not in other parts of the sector. They’re very strongly for families and they return [earnings from] their services into their business. They have advantages of large NGOs. They know who they are and what they’re about … how they can build their business in the current world … Repealing section 59, which Barnardos strongly supported … [there] need to be [a] whole range of other strategies for parents to use other than physical force … We hear that it’s not only poor parents that have things to learn ... Barnardos has a great raft of services that bring a high degree of value to families in the community. They are a canny, good, strong organisation.”

This Ministry manager’s views of integration closely resemble Barnardos management’s own ideas: that it has the potential to pull disparate things together. The perspective of staff actually delivering programmes every day is considerably more nuanced. From up close it seems that although integration has advanced from a vague and abstract idea towards a series of specific initiatives, there is still some way to go to realise the potential seen by the people who are at some remove from the organisation’s coalface. Fragmentation, silos, hierarchy, some marginal services and individuals all present difficulties for integration that need to be addressed if it is to proceed further. People realise these problems and seem committed to working them through. My overall impression is that the real strength of this organisation derives from three things:

• its commitment to children
• the fact that most of its staff are mothers themselves, who combine their emotional commitment to children with professional qualifications and experience
• leadership that can bring a new vision of Barnardos to fruition and work with government organisations to help facilitate it.

Conclusions

Organisations like Barnardos stand between the economic rationality of the market and the bureaucratic rationality of the state. Making up the "third sector", they provide society with a reservoir of groups that promote "philanthropy altruism, charity, reciprocity, mutuality and the ethic of caring and giving (Evans and Shields 2005:2)". When they depend on government funding, however, the role of these organisations is undermined because they can no longer lobby independently for the people they serve (op.cit.).

The sub-title of Bourdieu's incisive critique The Essence of Neoliberalism is that it constitutes "a programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic". New Zealand is a country whose government embraced that logic in the 1980s more firmly than most, with widespread social and cultural implications that have hardly been investigated. Craig and Porter (2006:219) argue that by 1999 widespread opposition to the solidarity-destroying reforms resulted in a more inclusive kind of neoliberal government coming to power: "The result was a strange new hybrid … partnership and competitive contracts, inclusion and sharp discipline, free markets and community … (creating) impossible transaction costs and slippery multilevel accountabilities." Policy, now perceived as a means to higher ends, moved from a focus on accountability and cost-cutting to poverty alleviation, social cohesion and sustainability. Like the situation in the United States, integrated (joined-up) services seemed to offer a chance to undo the widespread fragmentation of the preceding years. However, the new government soon realised that "closing the gaps" required more to be done than putting the pieces closer together and integrating services dropped from the policy scene (Craig and Porter 2005:240). In line with Bourdieu's characterisation of neoliberalism as a destroyer of the conditions that could support a viable alternative to it, Craig and Porter say in a number of places in their monograph that "humpty dumpty (the disintegration created by the contract regime) could not be put together again".

Klees (2002) asks whether contracting for external funds has turned NGOs from promoters of progressive ideas and practices into tools of neoliberal expansion. In the course of my research I found that Barnardos has been asking itself a similar question. Of course the answer is far from settled, and we don't know for certain how integrated services will work out for this organisation or its clients. What the data presented here do show us is that there are real challenges, incentives and disincentives, doubts and hopes, sceptics and believers, within and outside of Barnardos.

This research shows that the policy of integrating services is still taken seriously in New Zealand in at least one prominent NGO and in the parts of the Ministries of Education and Social Development that work with it. This, in itself, constitutes a hopeful sign that some alternative to, or amelioration of, the most destructive aspects of neoliberalism may develop. Barnardos New Zealand is clearly trying to return to an "old order", in this case its role of provider of comprehensive services to children who need them. While approaching this in terms of integrated services - an idea with a long history and uncertain track record - may look outmoded and conservative, it at least constitutes a possible programme of "resistance to the establishment of the new order" (Bourdieu 1998a:4). If it proves viable, what Barnardos New Zealand is attempting might show other NGOs a way of "firing back" (Bourdieu 2001) to tackle the effects of neoliberalism.

References

Atwool, N. (2003) “If it’s such a good idea, how come it doesn’t work?: The theory and practice of integrated service delivery” Childrenz Issues, 7(2):31–35.

Barnardos New Zealand (2006) Critical Stepping Stones 2006/2007, Barnardos, Wellington.

Barnardos New Zealand (2008) Services We Offer

Bourdieu, P. (1998a) Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Bourdieu, P. (1998b) The Essence of Neoliberalism, mondediplo.com/1998/12/ 08bourdieu.

Bourdieu, P. (2001) Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2,The New Press, New York.

Craig, D. and D. Porter (2006) Development Beyond Neoliberalism: Governance, Poverty Reduction and Political Economy,Routledge, London.

Evans, B.M. and J. Shields (2005) The Third Sector: Neoliberal Restructuring, Governance, and the Remaking of State Civil Society Relationships, Report No. 18, Policy Matters,CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre, Toronto.

Evans, B.M. and J. Shields (2006) Neoliberal Restructuring and the Third Sector: Reshaping Governance, Civil Society and Local Relations

Gray, A. (2003) Review of the Centre: Integrated Service Delivery: Regional Co-ordination: Final Workstream Report

Klees, S.J. (2002) “NGOs: Progressive force or neoliberal tool?” Current Issues in Comparative Education, 1(1):49–54.

Milward, H.B. (1995) “Review of Integrating Services for Children and Families: Understanding the Past to Shape the Future by Sharon Lynn Kagan and Peter R. Neville” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 14(4):641–644.

Footnote

¹ Gray’s review of the literature indicates that service integration benefits “tend to accrue to participating agencies in the form of improved processes, better relationships and a clearer sense of direction” (2003:38). Her report also suggests service quality is affected by the positive climate of service providers. So it seems that integrating services can help children and families indirectly by motivating service providers to improve the quality of their programmes.