The first thing Michael Gove did upon becoming secretary of state was to change the name of his department from “Children, Schools and Families” to “Education”.

This wasn’t just symbolic. The Children’s Plan and “Every Child Matters”, which had been the centrepiece reforms of Ed Balls’ time in office, and were intended to integrate all children’s services with schools, were scrapped.

The focus was placed firmly on improving academic standards both via structural reforms like academies and through a new curriculum and assessment regime.

The biggest mistake of the Gove era

I was a Department for Education adviser at the time and I thought this was the right thing to do. Many of the headteachers we were speaking to were fed up with spending their time in meetings with local authorities that seem to go nowhere.

The bitty and highly centralised approach of the Children’s Plan seemed wrong to me - with little pots of money for all sorts of things that schools were surely better placed to decide on.

Yet I have come to think that scrapping the whole families agenda was the biggest mistake of the Gove era.

Not because the Labour programmes were working well, they did have all sorts of problems, and not because the focus on academic improvement was misplaced, but because schools aren’t islands and they have to be seen as part of a bigger system.

We should have looked at how to do integration in better and more effective ways rather than dismissing the whole idea. (I do appreciate this insight is hardly revelatory or one that plenty of people didn’t have at the time.)

On the other hand, I did have the sense to realise that targeting austerity at support services for children and families and the welfare system was a bad idea, which is one reason why I left politics.

Scrambling to fix a plethora of problems 

We’re now in a position where the government is scrambling around trying to sort out bits of the failing support system for children. CAMHS is barely functioning.

The costs of the special educational needs and disabilities system are out of control, yet parents and schools are deeply unhappy. Children’s social care is in real trouble. And schools end up picking up the pieces anyway.

The last lot of ministers (well, two sets ago) did acknowledge the problems. They commissioned a very good review from Josh MacAlister on social care; put out a flawed but thoughtful SEND Green Paper; and did manage to squeeze out a bit of investment for mental health support workers. We’ve also seen the arrival of Family Hubs, a sort of SureStart on the cheap.

But there’s no integration across any of this, nor with the multi-academy trust regulation plans set out in the White Paper.

If the new ministerial team want to do something genuinely useful, given the financial constraints they’re operating under, pulling all of this into a coherent Children’s Strategy would be extremely valuable.

Just setting out what different bits of the system are responsible for would be a start.

Improving engagement 

One element such a strategy could look at is how to engage parents more in education.

The “Parent Pledge” in the White Paper was the first serious mention of working with parents since the Children’s Plan was scrapped. But it falls well short, as the promise of support for children falling behind doesn’t come with any new cash or expectations for schools.

We know that the extent to which parents are able to support their children’s achievement makes a big difference to outcomes.

In a discussion paper for the Campaign for Learning, published today, I’ve taken a look at previous government attempts to encourage parental engagement and what a new approach might look like.

Unfortunately, as with so many topics in education, the quality of evaluation is poor, so we don’t have any definitive answers. There is some evidence that parent support advisers in schools had a positive impact and, from the US, on family learning programmes where parents learn alongside their children.

The pilots of similar programmes here have been blighted by low attendance. We do have a gold standard study showing that even texting parents can make a month’s worth of difference in the classroom, so it must be possible to gain even greater benefits from this approach.

A sector-wide approach is required

Given this, it makes sense to give academy trusts the space to develop their own approaches but have some level of national or local coordination that allows these different approaches to be tested and evaluated.

As most trusts are still quite small, it would make sense to provide some guidance and support around different models and to make it a requirement that trusts had a families strategy.

While we don’t want prescription and fiddly requirements placed on schools, a real “Parent Pledge” would make sense.

At the moment, the experience of education for parents, especially with children in secondary schools, is luck of the draw, a priority for some schools and trusts and ignored by others.

A new coordinated approach to families needs to happen at the school level, as well as within the Department for Education.

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government