Multi-agency workshop

Multi-agency workshops bring together people from many different agencies for young people. They provide an important opportunity to understand how services are currently working together to deliver effective targeted youth support. This keeps a focus on young people, their outcomes and their experience of services.

This workshop is often the beginning of the process of delivering improved multi-agency working, by helping generate communication and respect between frontline practitioners.

"The process has hugely increased the engagement of the workforce in the agenda. It has directly helped the development of the 0-19 commissioning strategy and alignment of services underneath it. In the past, discussions around this would be in silos; as a result of the process they are now integrated," says Alan Dinning, Deputy Director Integrated Children's Services, Hertfordshire.

The workshops can be one large event or, when it is difficult to get everyone present at one time, a number of smaller events. As the workshops involve a lot of participation, strong facilitation is a necessity.

The multi-agency workshop helps identify where there are gaps and problems in current processes, for example, around communications, assessments, thresholds and referrals. It focuses in particular on young people, their needs, their life experiences and their experience of the service activities that are going on around them.

The young person's journey and the service provision they receive is represented visually as a process mapping on brown paper. Green and red flags are used to symbolise areas of strong and weak practice, for example around the quality of support a young person is receiving.

The most significant red flags are analysed in depth, using techniques such as fishbone or five whys analysis, to identify the underlying causes of the problem. The workshop ends with service providers sharing their vision for the future of targeted youth support.

Where appropriate, it is powerful to have young people attending the workshop.

Click for other activitiessupporting the Discover stage of the targeted youth support change process, or for an overview of the Discover stage.