The director of the Hammersmith and Fulham trust was Andrew Christie, who had been assistant director of children's services for the previous three years. Since then the borough has become known as one of the leaders in the development of services, and is one of only two authorities in England charged with piloting the involvement of youth justice agencies in children's trusts.
The process wasn't simple, though, as Christie, who last month stepped up to become the director of children's services, recalls. "Although some of us at the centre had a vision of what it was we were trying to achieve, that understanding wasn't shared by everyone," he says. "So we had to do quite a lot of work."
This was a success, and Hammersmith and Fulham now has a well-developed trust, with pooled budgets in some areas, co-location of services, and joint commissioning. The idea was always to create a structure that would deal with all problems faced by vulnerable young people. Christie's challenge in his new job is to extend this model for targeted intervention to universal services.
"We have a well-developed children's trust board," he says. "The next stage is to extend its remit and that of children's trust arrangements to cover all children's services. It will become the children and young people's senior strategic planning body, and we will extend its membership to include head teachers."
The structural aspect of arranging a children's trust is fairly simple.
The complicated bit, as Christie acknowledges, is getting meaningful co-operation between agencies. "It's relatively easy to co-locate services," he says. "But how you then go beyond that to get youth services working alongside the youth offending service is a next step on."
The trust faces other problems with its expansion plans. Funding is, as always, an issue. Christie says the only way to get more cash to invest is to improve efficiency and early intervention.
Being in London also brings problems, particularly around recruitment and retention. Christie says more needs to be done to allow ancillary staff, in schools for example, to train and become fully qualified in other services.
Schools in general, and London's secondary schools in particular, also present challenges to the expansion of children's trusts. "Half the children from Hammersmith and Fulham go to schools outside the borough, and a lot of pupils in our secondary schools come from outside the borough," explains Christie. "That creates real challenges if you are trying to deliver joined-up children's services based around extended schools."
The other issue with schools, as children's trusts embrace universal services, is the lack of any requirement on schools to co-operate. "There is an inherent conflict between the notion of schools with more autonomy and the notion of co-operation that is implicit in the Every Child Matters agenda," says Christie. This problem, however, is a familiar one to anyone who has been involved in children's trusts over the past few years. "If you are really going to be effective on the Every Child Matters agenda you have got to be good at engaging a whole range of partners, including schools," says Christie.
"My experience is that schools are genuinely interested and can see the benefit of getting involved in collaborative working, because they know they can then get the support services that many of their pupils need."
FYI
- The west London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham is one of the smaller authorities in the capital, with a population of about 165,000
- It has a diverse population, with extremely wealthy areas in the south of the borough, but considerable deprivation in the north and other pockets
- It got a three star rating from the Audit Commission's most recent comprehensive performance assessment, including a three star rating for children's services.
