Journey-mapping the current top 20 challenging cases for children’s trust partners

The activities in the Discover stage of this toolkit describe how to carry out the young person's journey mapping exercise using pre-prepared case studies that illustrate some of the relevant needs of young people in a local area. 

It can be useful, as you deepen your understanding of strengths and weaknesses in service provision, to look at the real service experience of young people and families presenting the greatest needs, drawing on the current or emerging caseload of partners in a children's trust. This can have the following benefits:

• It makes the exercise very real and relevant, as it focuses discussion on those young people that practitioners are actually working with and who they care passionately about helping. 
  
  
• A quick win for young people. If this exercise can lead to an improved package of services for the young person in the example, then the process is generating immediate benefits.
  
  
• A quick win for budgets. The selected cases are likely to draw on a high proportion of resources from children's trust partners. Examining how a better and more efficient service package might be provided gives an important quick win for budget-holders and strategic managers, particularly where resource is tight and funding for more preventative activity needs to be found from within existing resources.
  
  
• It helps you get the right people at events. Because you know the case history of the young person you know who to involve in the exercise. This is vital in order to maximise benefits and make best use of practitioners' time.
  
  
• It offers the chance to stress-test in reality the local implementation challenges around processes such as the Lead Professional for those young people and families who present the most complex cases.
  
  
• It provides an opportunity to demonstrate to young people and families that the children's trust is actively seeking to improve provision

Click for other activities supporting the Deepen stage of the targeted youth support change process, or for an overview of the Deepen stage.