Essex County Council has embarked on consultation on controversial proposals to rearrange its children and young people's service from September next year into teams of "generic children's workers", overseen by a children's manager (YPN, 22-28 November, p3).
These workers, divided into 25 to 30 "teams around schools, children and communities" (TASCCs), would deliver both universal and targeted services including youth provision, alongside other services including social care, education, welfare and parenting support.
The workers will develop a common set of skills and knowledge and be expected to work across traditional professional boundaries.
This may sound like a perfect model of the integrated working envisaged in Youth Matters: Next Steps. But Essex appears to be going a little bit further. The Government's Next Steps document refers to youth support being delivered in "multi-agency" teams. Essex's model is based on "multidisciplinary" work, which means dissolving the boundaries between occupational groups.
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