Child-centred services
When Darlington borough council's youth service asked the young people they work with to "spend" their annual budget, the feedback was surprising. They didn't want bowling, ice skating or DJ decks. Instead they asked for a subsidised bus service. The result was the Darlington Teen Card, which costs just £1 and allows young people in Darlington to use all bus routes at off-peak times for 50p.
As youth workers in Darlington found, achieving the best outcomes for children and young people is about developing effective services, which reflect the needs of the people who use them. To accomplish this, children, young people and their families have to be part of the consultation process. Also crucial is joined-up thinking.
One such example is Sunshine House, a dedicated children and young people's centre for children with special needs and disabilities in Camberwell, south London. In the past, children and families had to visit numerous health and social care settings, week in, week out. Now, partnerships with hospitals, child and adolescent mental health services, social work and other services, means much of the help and support they need is accessible on site. "It's all about wrapping the team around the child," says Kerry Crichlow, assistant director of strategy and support at Southwark council.
The introduction of children's trusts, which bring together all services for children and young people (such as child health services, schools and youth offending teams) in a local area or district, has made working in partnership far easier.
Children's trusts were created in 2004 following Lord Laming's inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié, the young girl who was abused, tortured, and eventually killed by her legal guardians. In response, the government introduced a national programme, Every Child Matters, aimed at safeguarding and improving outcomes for all children and young people, underpinned by the legislative framework of the Children's Act.
Improvement strategies
Different children's trusts work in different ways, but all should have a strategy for improving children's lives in their area and priorities clearly set out in their children and young people's plan (CYPP) which reflect the needs of their local area.
The CYPP is a statutory local authority plan. Under new legislation to strengthen children's trusts, every area would be required to have a children's trust board which would have legal responsibility for producing the CYPP. For Paul Kennedy, strategic commissioning manager for the London borough of Hillingdon, this would represent a positive move. "Shared accountability is important. It focuses people's attention on joined-up working. This is particularly significant now that children's services are being inspected by Ofsted."
The Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act, which has just gone through parliament, places a legal obligation on local authorities to provide education and training for 16- to 19-year-olds (and up to 25 for those with a learning difficulty).
Under these new ways of working, a fresh approach to the commissioning of services is required. On a simple level, commissioning is the means by which a local authority, service or organisation, chooses to invest money and resources to achieve a particular set of outcomes. The creation of children's trusts means budgets and resources can be "pooled" with other partners in the trust.
In Southwark, a joint commissioning project, involving police, probation service and various voluntary organisations, aimed at tackling violent crime in the borough is ringing the changes. As Jonathon Toy, the council's head of community safety, explains: "The children's trust has formalised the need for partnership and shared accountability. Difficulties at home, low educational achievement, drugs or alcohol misuse ... all of these factors, and more, can contribute to a young person getting involved in criminal activity. All partners in the children's trust have a role to play in preventative work."
A briefing paper published by the Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF) and the National Youth Agency (NYA) in July highlighted the role of commissioning in providing positive activities on Friday and Saturday evenings for children and young people – a key part of the government's 10-year youth strategy, Aiming High for Young People.
Kirklees Young Peoples' Service is already ahead of the game. They have two (soon to be three) football projects running in community venues, for up to 200 16- to 19-year-olds each week where police, youth and drug and alcohol workers are on hand to chat with young people, identify needs and refer them to other services where appropriate. The project is expensive to run (around £800-900 a week per centre), but incident rates have reduced by 85%. "We know it works because young people come back, week in week out," says Umar Rafiq, operations manager for young people's service.
Measuring whether outcomes have been met is crucial, but this has not always been part of the commissioning process, says Crichlow. "In the past, we didn't always close the circle. Right from the start, you have to keep asking 'how will we know whether we've made a difference?' Until recently, we were talking a lot about outcome-based commissioning. Now we're talking about commissioning for impact."
The Commissioning Support Programme (CSP), launched last November, is sponsored by the DCSF and the Department of Health and aims to help children's trusts plan, design and implement services more effectively, through a range of support services from online networking to national and regional conferences. The programme will run until April 2011, and will cover commissioning of all services for children, young people and their families.
"There are great opportunities to help improve outcomes for children, young people and their families," says CSP programme director Lorraine O'Reilly. "Working with commissioners we have made a really positive start, but we recognise that there are also some big challenges in making sure that we make a real and lasting difference."