Features

The art of commissioning

2 mins read Commissioning
In the first of a series of articles, commissioner Richard Selwyn outlines the key principles of good children's services commissioning.

Welcome to a new monthly feature all about the art of commissioning. If you have found yourself becoming commissioning-curious, then don't hide it, dive on in. First up, everyone knows what commissioning is, so remind me again…

The History

The 1990s saw booming investment in the public sector - growth in the scope and size of provision (remember that?) and more government funding to the frontline. But politicians soon noticed that the outcomes that should come from this investment were small at best. At this point, we realised it wasn't just about the amount of money you throw at problems, but how we understand outcomes, change services and monitor performance that matters.

My personal involvement in commissioning began a little later with Ministry of Defence smart procurement and the Royal Navy. The principles translated well to children's services, informing the Department of Health/Department for Education Joint Planning and Commissioning Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services, which we wrote with 200 friends from across the sectors. The new framework was a complicated nine-step process, but helped to redefine commissioning as an art instead of a bureaucracy.

The next phase of government development was the commissioning cycle - suddenly everyone was an expert and an internet search reveals 33,000 pages and snazzy diagrams describing different cycles. Almost all of these diagrams boil down to a very simple business cycle model of: understand, plan, do and review. This is what I should have started with in the Department for Education. Of course, life is a bit more complicated than that, and we began to see that what we were describing in commissioning cycles and frameworks looked a lot like systems thinking. And this is where good commissioning really starts to take off.

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