Just the right fit
When Peter Duxbury arrived at Lincolnshire county council four years ago to take up his role as director of children's services, he counted 27 different projects to improve outcomes for children in the area. Part of his job has been to streamline those projects and create a more integrated approach: "Whereas in the old days you might have had the youth offending service, social services and education running different projects on parenting, now we've got a single parenting programme that fits the bill for what the youth offending service want to do with parents of offenders, what social care wants to do with their parents, and so on."
In his top role, Duxbury is responsible for heading up Lincolnshire's children's trust. The starting point for every children's trust is the set of five broad outcomes for children identified by the government's Every Child Matters green paper: be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution; achieve economic wellbeing.
As each local authority has its own particular needs, broad priorities for the area are decided by a local strategic partnership (LSP): a non-statutory body, led by the local authority, that brings together representatives from relevant local organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Local strategy
Each children's trust, which derives the bulk of its funding from the local authority, with a smaller amount of funding from its partners, translates the priorities into the specific outcomes for young people that it wants to improve. Typical outcomes might include reducing obesity, reducing youth offending rates and improving educational achievement. "One of our key priorities is around prevention, getting services in early to reduce the need for services later," says Duxbury. An initiative to tackle obesity might look at the amount of sport being offered in school, or at how parent support advisers are helping parents to prevent their children becoming overweight.
The particular priorities may vary in differentparts of the county. "What the partnership does is to work in its commissioning cycle with local children's partnerships on the delivery of improved outcomes in their area," explains Duxbury. "So there may be an issue about teenage pregnancy or obesity in one part of the county but not in another. The mantra is 'central direction, local delivery'."
The trust board tackles each goal by commissioning organisations from inside or outside the trust to work on specific projects. Grants are sometimes available from central government, but projects can also be funded on a quid pro quo basis. "We'll say to a school, 'We'll let you have either a social worker or education welfare officer or equivalent salary in exchange for you delivering on no exclusions and increased attainment'," says Duxbury.
The benefits of the multiple-partner approach are already becoming clear. Murray Rose, director of children's services at Darlington borough council, cites a pilot project to reduce crime rates by bringing police and schools together. He says: "We placed a police offer in a school full-time to work with the pupil community, the staff, the broader community and parents, to tackle anti-social behaviour, early onsets of offending behaviour and so on. The measurement showed that the police input had significantly reduced the number of people from that community who went on to offend."
Although the police do not have the resources to place an officer full-time in each school, the scheme has been extended and every school now has a named police officer as a contact. "We realised that the visible police presence being known to all the parents and families in a particular community could reduce crime, anti-social behaviour and school exclusions," says Rose. The data collected by the authority on these indicators shows that the scheme is achieving exactly those outcomes.
Measurement of outcomes is a key part of the commissioning cycle; successful projects can be expanded, while unsuccessful ones can be stopped and resources directed elsewhere. A benefit ofthe new integrated approach, says Rose, is the introduction of standardised ways of measuring achievement. He says: "What children's trusts have done has been to lead on getting all agencies to agree on a common set of priorities, a common set of targets, a common set of performance indicators and a common reporting cycle. So now it's much easier to commission a set of services across a range of agencies or providers."
Long-term goals
Potentially the greatest benefit of multiagency working is the ability to have an impact on several outcomes simultaneously. In Darlington, there have been small-scale projects to provide intensive help to small numbers of needy families, with the long-term goal of reducing the number of children in care, reducing truancy, improving educational attainment and reducing youth offending rates. Investing in such projects could result in long-term savings that could be reinvested elsewhere, rather than having to find new money for each initiative.
The Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act, which has just gone through parliament, strengthens the role of partners in the trusts if it becomes law, giving them final sign-off of the children and young people's plan. It is a change that Rose believes will "substantially improve the way all partners' resources can be used".
This is part of a continuing process to move from a fragmented approach to tackling problems to an integrated one. As Duxbury puts it:"Whether you're employed by the NHS, the police, or another member of the partnership, we work as if we are one organisation."