Integrated frontline delivery
- More integrated, accessible and personalised services built around the needs of children and young people, not around professional or service boundaries
- Shift to prevention and improved safeguarding
- Services co-located in places like children's centres and extended schools
- Workforce reform to ensure sufficient, suitably trained staff. All staff working with children have a common core of knowledge and understanding about children's needs and increased understanding and trust between professionals
- Development of multi-disciplinary teams and lead professionals
Improving outcomes for children and young people involves changing the behaviour of those working with children, young people and families, so that children, young people and families experience more integrated and responsive services, with specialist support embedded in and accessed through universal services.
Children's trusts aim to refocus delivery of local children's services around the needs of children, young people and families, not around professional or service boundaries. Better integrated, more accessible and more personalised services will lead to a shift to prevention and improved safeguarding of all children and young people.
Schools will offer pupils personalised learning to meet their needs and help them reach the highest possible standards of which they are capable. Health services will offer increasingly high standards of care in line with the standards and expectations of the National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services and encourage children and young people to develop healthy lifestyles as set out in the children and young people's chapter of the public health white paper.
Co-locating different services, in children's centres and extended schools, and the development of healthy schools, will mean more professionals working closely together, increasing the likelihood of identifying risk factors earlier and providing easier access to targeted and specialist support for children with additional needs within universal settings such as schools. Schools will benefit from hosting these multi-agency teams. Teachers will be freed up to concentrate on teaching, and barriers to learning will be more easily overcome - helping to raise standards.
Key to success will be workforce reform, in particular ensuring the availability of sufficient, suitably trained staff, development of the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge for the Children's Workforce and increased understanding and trust between different professionals.
The programme also includes the development of multi-disciplinary teams and lead professionals: bringing together staff from different agencies and, in the case of children and young people whose additional support needs require input from several specialist or agencies, a lead person to maintain an overview of the case.
This page was last updated on 10 May 2005
