Delivery of the plan will take time, resources and a shared commitment to improve outcomes for children and young people. It recognises our commitment to working with our partners and communities to ensure our children grow up loved, safe, and respected so that they can realise their full potential.
This change programme aims to deliver sustainable services and better outcomes for vulnerable children, young people and their families. It will ensure service improvements are realised whilst continuing to respond to the financial challenges that are being experiences across the public sector.
The What Would it Take programme will consider the following strategic aims:
- Safely shift the ‘balance of care,’ reducing the number of children looked after away from home.
- Strengthening the contribution of universal services, for example health and education.
- Outcomes are improved for children and young people by increasing; community-based supports when children and their families need them.
- The need for the workforce to align to the service demand.
- Implement the changes within the Nurtured Delivery Implementation Group.
- Implement the Care inspectorates’ recommendations.
- Projects are led by data including the Children’s Strategic Needs Assessment.
- Services are sustainable and delivered within the available budget.
- Across health visiting, school, nursing and social work services ensure early help is delivered locally, providing the right help in the right place to meet the identified needs of children and young people. We will collate and measure any gaps in service provision and annually report on identified gaps in service provision through our Area Resource Group.
- Ensure all children have the best start in life. Children of all ages will thrive through loving and consistent living arrangements supported by access to early learning, family support and childcare to make sure we get it right at infancy through multi-agency planning.
- Implement the Early Child Development Transformational Change Programme.
- A family first approach ensures children and young people stay with their birth family whenever possible, following a rights-based approach in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It values relationships with siblings, extended family, and the community. For the small minority who cannot remain with their family due to harm risks, the approach provides local support and aims to keep them within 15 miles of their home community.
- We will minimise children’s exposure to harm with fully embedded Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) principles and approaches supported with robust assessment and planning including chronologies to support analysis.
- We will strive to Keep families together and develop services to ensure the ‘scaffolding’ of support helps to enable families facing complex and enduring challenges is available through use of reserves and redesign of our service provision and commissioning’.
- We will ensure services are relational and not transactional.
- Support employees by ensuring training is in place to show what a ‘good conversations’ is with a focus on outcomes and SMART care plans ensuring that this becomes part of employee’s core practice; and
- Through the use of data, consultation and evaluation we will develop, improve and evaluate our services, with the voice of those who use our services having a meaningful part to play in our service design.
Most of the changes in this programme involve adjusting current employees and financial resources to support WDHSCP's goals and help our children and young people. Identifying changes early will ensure that individual contributions and concerns are considered from the beginning of the organizational change process. It is important to communicate these changes in a timely manner to allow for consultation with employees and union members, addressing any concerns in an organized and systematic way.
The programme is projected to reduce the number of placements, and make signification savings in spending, upwards of £3.5million, by 2029.