Targeted youth support: redesigning services - collaborating to support transitions

Issue

Despite collaboration and joint working between agencies at key transition stages in Nottinghamshire, many children and young people are still in need of additional integrated support at key times.

Background

The Connexions partnership and other agencies such as social services, educational psychology, educational welfare and the pupil referral unit had encouraged multi-agency working in Nottinghamshire at key transition stages.

This joint working was predominantly active between services working with young people over the age of 13. For example, the numbers of young offenders moving into employment, education and training has increased due to more joined-up working with youth offending services and education.

There was an awareness that many of the problems presenting post-13 could have been identified and potentially dealt with by universal services at an earlier age.

Local schools though had little involvement in collaborative and preventative work and required more support for pupils with the most challenging behaviour. Also, the youth offending service was part of community safety partnership and not the children's trust, which limited its integration with other services for children and young people.

Actions prompted by the targeted youth support change process

Through targeted youth support (TYS) multi-agency workshops and change teams, frontline staff from a range of agencies have forged a better understanding of each other's services and developed a shared language. This has helped shift some of the cultural boundaries between individual staff and services.

In addition, a number of primary school staff are involved in the TYS change team exploring identification and earlier intervention. Among other benefits, their input is increasing general service recognition of the need to improve seamless support for the transitions between 8-12 and 13-19 years.

Benefits and results

All of the involved agencies are motivated and keen to improve multi-agency working. There is also clear recognition of the excellent trailblazing work that Connexions has already established. The TYS change process is building on this strong foundation to include younger children and support their transition from primary to secondary education and beyond.

We already have a good system in place to pick-up and support the most needy young people, but TYS is helping to establish a new system targeted at at-risk children and young people within universal services and reduce the chances of them slipping through the net
Jo Baker, operations director of Connexions and TYS change team member

The impact of these changes is expected to become evident through the results of the Connexions assessment process and through and increase in the number of young people staying in education and making positive transitions.

The local authority

Nottinghamshire is a large county authority. The TYS pathfinder focuses on Ashfield, an area of deprivation. The authority's statistical neighbours include Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Kent, West Sussex and Worcestershire.