Integrated working
Click to download the latest information
sharing and assessment update.
Integrated working focuses on enabling and encouraging professionals to work together effectively to deliver frontline services.
Improving outcomes for children and young people involves changes to culture and practice across the children's workforce. The Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme sets out a model for change with integration at every level. It also sets out how services for children and young people need to be coordinated and built around their needs.
The Children's Plan: Building Brighter Futures (December 2007) describes the Government's vision of a system-wide reform to the way services for children and young people work together. It describes how, by putting the needs of children and families first, we will provide a service that makes more sense to the parents, children and young people using them, for whom professional boundaries can appear arbitrary and frustrating. By locating services under one roof in the places people visit frequently, they are more likely to find the help they need. And by investing in all of those who work with children, and by building capacity to work across professional boundaries, we can ensure that joining up services is not just about providing a safety net for the vulnerable it is about unlocking the potential of every child.
Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children's Workforce (April 2008)reiterates the importance for everyone working with children, young people and families to: understand the difference they can make to children and young people's outcomes; know how they need to work with other professionals to ensure that services are integrated and personalised to respond to the needs and strengths of individual children; and have the skills, knowledge and expertise to do their job to world class standards.
Alongside the publication of this document, the Government is setting up an Expert Group of workforce champions to ensure that the experience of people who work with children, young people and families directly informs the development and production of a long term strategy for development of a world class children's workforce to be published in the autumn.
Chapter four sets out what we mean by integrated working, including the new expectation that Children's Trusts will, by 2010, have in place high quality arrangements for early intervention for children and young people with additional needs. The chapter looks at the progress that has already been made in implementing integrated working practices and assesses the main challenges ahead. It asks the Expert Group to consider:
- How we develop and build consensus around a vision for integrated working
and ensure accountability for delivery of that vision;
- How we support Children's Trusts to meet the 2010 expectation;
- How we achieve culture change across all children's services, including in schools and health.
Click on the links below for tools, training materials or a series of exemplars, or download a series of overarching resources for integrated working from this page.
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Delivering
services
The Government has developed a set of tools and processes for local areas to use to facilitate integrated working, which you can access from this page.
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Integrated
working training
The full set of integrated training materials.
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Integrated
working exemplars
Integrated working exemplars describing a child or young person's ideal journey through a range of children services.
The Children's Workforce Development Council is responsible for implementation of integrated working.
Documents
Building
Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children's Workforce
This document sets out the actions which the Government is taking to build on
investment so far, and the achievements of the 2005 Children's Workforce
Strategy, to improve further the skills and capacity of people who work with
children, to deliver the high quality, personalised and integrated services
described in the Children's Plan.
Effective
integrated working: Finding of the Concept of Operations Study
Findings and conclusions of a short study, established in December 2006 to
identify the common operational features of effective integrated working.
Supporting
Integrated Working: Implementation Roadmap
A high-level view of what is required to implement the processes and tools
that support integrated working.
Tools
to Support Integrated Working - Presentation
This presentation focuses on the key tools and processes which help
managers and practitioners in children's services to work
together.
Integrated
working factsheets
Describing integrated working and all the components
Integrated
Children's System, the Common Assessment Framework and ContactPoint - an
overview
A short essay on harnessing information for ECM
Making
it Happen: working together for children, young people and families
A booklet with information about integrated working in practice.
Integrated working
explained
CWDC has published a booklet designed to provide an overview of what is
meant by integrated working, the different tools, advice and guidance available
and how it can benefit you.
This page was last updated on 01 September 2006
