Councils aim to share burden of reform

There are currently few constants in children’s services. Councils must fathom root-and-branch reforms of the health and education systems, at the same time as overhauling and refocusing social care and early years provision.

In a bid to help professionals navigate the melée, the Children’s Improvement Board has taken the changes in social care and early years as the starting point for a sector-led improvement initiative.

A total of 15 “development demonstrator” sites comprising 27 councils have agreed to chart their experience of redesigning services, nine in light of the Munro review of child protection and six in relation to shifting early years policy.

Colin Hilton, director at the Children’s Improvement Board, says the sites will provide professionals with a real taste of the challenges involved with restructuring services, as opposed to showing off “excellent practice”.

“The demonstrators are on a journey, but are willing to share that journey and their learning,” he says. “They don’t pretend to have reached their goal.”

Development stages
The sites are all at different stages of development, meaning professionals will be able to learn from a variety of experiences.

“In the Munro sites, for example, the London Borough of Barnet has done a significant amount of work around the systems approach to serious case reviews and focusing on the voice of the child,” Hilton says. “Others are at an earlier stage. Cheshire West and Chester have just come out of an improvement notice, which has taken a lot of their focus, but they’ve been trying to combine the Munro implementation with that bigger journey.

“Hampshire on the other hand has taken the Hackney social work model as its starting point. Taking a model that works in urban London and transposing it into a large shire county is a good example of trying to test transferability.

“In the early years sites, they are testing how their early years infrastructure is developing in the new environment of payment-by-results, financial constraints and different ways of commissioning, for example.”

Tracey Ellison is principal manager for systemic practice at Stoke-on-Trent Council, one of the Munro demonstrator sites.

“We’ve tried to implement Munro across our service, so have totally redesigned how we work,” she says. “We now have a system of 45 small social work units called pods, in which practitioners share responsibility for cases.”

The council has also appointed a principal social worker, who is focused on her caseload for three days a week, but is dedicated to championing the voice of her colleagues on the other two.

“We’ve been in the process of making the changes for a year,” Ellison says. “It has had its challenges. For example, we are still managing high referral rates and caseloads, but we want to share the knowledge that we’ve gathered over the past 12 months. It’s a chance to showcase where we’re up to, but also to learn from others, so we can be the very best for our families.”

Challenges ahead
Steph Douglas, head of birth-to-five services at Lincolnshire County Council, is leading on the East Midlands early years demonstrator site, which includes nine local authorities. “We are involved in the government pilots for the payment-by-results trial in children’s centres and the new Early Years Foundation Stage profile, so we’re keen to share that,” she says.

“Almost a third of Lincolnshire schools have been part of our EYFS profile pilot, so we have experience of working with schools and settings on moderating it.

“It’s a real challenge to change an assessment system that everybody had become comfortable with. But it’s going to be very profitable for us to learn from others’ experience and share our expertise.”

Hilton says Ofsted and the Department for Education are increasingly recognising the value of sector-led improvement, particularly for local authorities whose services are falling short. 

But he admits the jury is still out as to when the sector-led approach could mark the end of centrally imposed improvement notices for struggling councils.

“That’s still a little way off,” he says. “There’s a certain comfort for the Secretary of State in continuing with that kind of structure. We are starting to see more flexibility on notices, but it’s an evolving picture rather than something that’s going to shift radically in a short timescale.

“We’re working in a constrained environment, with pressures across the system. The demonstrators are one way of doing things differently.”


The Development Demonstrator Scheme

• The Children