Putting service changes in place to deliver targeted youth support across a mixed urban and rural area

Overview

Worcestershire is a 2-tier authority with wide and varied needs. This is exacerbated by a variation in service needs between urban areas (eg Worcester City) and the rural areas of the county.

Issue

How can countywide services be delivered, given the constraint on resources across such differing needs between the urban and rural areas of the county?

Action taken

The first action taken was to assume that there are differences between the needs of users in areas of urban deprivation and rural deprivation. To test this, the scope of the pathfinder covered two geographic areas - East Worcester and Honeybourne/Pebworth.

The workshops and engagement of children and young people were structured to gather data that could be analysed separately between the rural and urban areas where possible.

Some difficulties were encountered due to the severely limited resources available in the rural areas. As a result, a decision was taken to focus one of the workstreams entirely on the rural area. The urban area contained a number of workstreams.

Results

Early indications imply that in the rural areas, the delivery of services needs to be across wider age, geographic and service boundaries, simply due to the lack of available resources.

The services delivered are likely to be more focused on improving universal services to an acceptable level, before attempting to address the higher needs of children and young people.

For services in the rural areas to have longer term sustainability, and not be subject to disruption due to short term funding and/or by professionals moving on, it has been identified there needs to be energy put into community capacity building for rural local communities and voluntary organisations from the start.

The personal reflection by a member of the community below [??] is a good illustration of galvanising local interest/energy to capacity build, despite a perceived/actual lack of resources. The TYS pathfinder work has illustrated how a can do partnership approach is making things happen where as previously the project kept stalling. This new can do attitude could be seen as a quick win.

Click to go back to the case studies for the develop stage.