Children's services merger pays dividends

While the creation of an independent children's trust in Doncaster has been the topic of much debate over the past year, the launch in April of a new body to deliver children's services in the London boroughs of Richmond and Kingston, independent of local authority control, has gone largely unnoticed.

But six months on, Nick Whitfield, the chief executive and director of children's services at Achieving for Children, says the social enterprise company is starting to deliver improvements that would have been hard to achieve through the status quo.

Restructuring children's services across two local authorities is a mammoth organisational task, but Whitfield says it was something that was necessary to properly achieve the aim of an integrated service that meets the needs of communities.

The service structure is based on locality teams tailoring support around the needs of individuals, with the emphasis placed firmly on early intervention to avoid concerns escalating.

"One of the simple changes we made in the very early days of Achieving for Children was to devolve budgets to the professionals in these locality teams so they can make quick decisions and put in place solutions immediately. That may be buying a child a school uniform or getting a washing machine for a family," Whitfield explains.

"We have cut back on the bureaucracy and empowered our workers to find solutions and make decisions based on their professional judgment and knowledge.

"That's because they have the most knowledge about the family's needs because they are working with them, often on a daily or weekly basis."

Integration

A key priority for the new organisation has been to improve safeguarding services in Kingston following its "inadequate" Ofsted rating for safeguarding and the decision by the Department for Education to issue the local authority with a formal improvement notice.

To address this, Whitfield says that permanent social workers and managers have been recruited, and timeliness of care assessments have been improved, as has the quality of care planning.

From an organisation perspective, the integration of services across the two authorities has delivered savings in management costs and, according to Whitfield, enabled a "wider pool" of professionals to work across the two boroughs.

He says: "Through joint working, we have also been able to retain, and in some cases develop, specialist practitioner roles that as single local authorities we would not have been able to justify or afford.

"Early in the development of Achieving for Children, we decided to retain separate social care services. However, we have integrated our systems and processes and have now developed an integrated adoption service."

Workforce

With more than 800 staff from both councils transferring to the employment of the social enterprise, Whitfield admits it has been an "unsettling time for many" as they get to grips with new ways of working and service structures.

"We have been very conscious about consulting our workforce and involving them in the decisions that affect their jobs and the services they provide," Whitfield says.

"Recently, we have consulted them on how they would like to be involved in the direction and management of the new organisation. This has included work with frontline staff on reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and developing innovative solutions to their daily issues."

A key freedom under the Achieving for Children model is the opportunity it offers for generating income by "growing" the services it delivers, Whitfield explains.

The organisation is in the "final stages" of a tender process to deliver integrated children's services on behalf of two other London local authorities, he adds.

Service expansion and delivering profit directly benefits the frontline, Whitfield says. "As a community interest company, any profit we make from our trading activities must be ploughed back into improving services for children, young people and their families. And so winning new business is a great opportunity for us to protect and enhance our frontline services."

Barriers to overcome

By his own admission, bringing together the services of the two local authorities has been "more challenging" than Whitfield expected.

"While the two local authorities are very similar in many ways, their organisational cultures are very different," he says.

"Rather than adopting the Kingston way of doing things, or the Richmond way, we have developed the Achieving for Children way, so that we have our own set of values, behaviours, policies and practices.

"Embedding this new way of working across the whole organisation and helping staff to feel confident and comfortable in their roles is our priority over the next six months, but we do realise that this will take time," he adds.

The reorganisation process has also thrown up numerous practical problems.

The social enterprise has been working with the Department for Education to overcome obstacles in devolving some of the local authorities' statutory children's social work services to Achieving for Children.

In addition, managing the change process alongside the day-to-day responsibilities of running services has been a struggle, Whitfield says.

The challenges of operating across multiple sites and using different IT systems have also needed to be overcome.

Despite the challenges, Whitfield is adamant the model is one others should consider.

"I think the community interest model and the approach we have taken could work well for other local authorities," he says.

"It is just one solution, though, to a problem that all local authorities are facing: how to protect services for children at a time of major financial cutbacks."

At-a-glance guide to Achieving for Children

• It is a social enterprise owned by Richmond and Kingston councils
• It was launched on 1 April 2014
• More than 800 staff work for it
• It is responsible for early help, adoption, education and health integration services
• It can bid to run services for other local authorities