Government programme aims to transform commissioning

The three-year Commissioning Support Programme will be launched by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) later this year.

It promises to transform the way services are commissioned by providing tailored training and development for council and children's trust staff, to increase the number of expert commissioners in local areas.

Initiatives to encourage peer networking and service user participation will also form part of the programme, and the DCSF will create an online forum to encourage practitioners to share best practice.

Janet Rich, children's services development officer at the National Care Association (NCA), the union for the independent care sector, is among those campaigning for better local authority commissioning. She said commissioning is currently the most important issue in the public sector.

"Commissioning has the great potential to do good or do bad. This programme will benefit the sector if it promotes good partnerships between all stakeholders," she said. "It would be awful if it turns out to be a bureaucratic waste of money, but at the moment we are welcoming it."

Rich said the programme also needs to support regional commissioners. "Regional commissioners are potentially good but they have so much power," she said. "The programme needs to offer good-quality information, which has been lacking, so that commissioners can work out what is good value and what is just expensive."

A DCSF spokeswoman said: "The Commissioning Support Programme is being developed to assist children's trust partners to improve the quality and consistency of their commissioning. It will be a key implementation programme to assist children's trusts in delivering the five Every Child Matters outcomes."

The DCSF is consulting stakeholders to help them decide how to deliver the programme.

See feature, p20.