Integrated Working

These new ways of working shift the focus from dealing with the consequences of difficulties in children's lives to early intervention and effective prevention. Every Child Matters sets out a children's trust model for whole-system change, with integrated frontline delivery, processes, strategy and governance.

Integrated working focuses on enabling and encouraging professionals to work together and to adopt common processes to deliver frontline services, coordinated and built around the needs of children and young people.

The delivery of integrated frontline services to improve outcomes for children and young people will need to be supported by more integrated processes and tools which drive multi-agency working.

The Common Assessment Framework
A national, common process for initial assessment to identify more accurately and efficiently the additional needs of children and young people at risk of poor outcomes, which will reduce duplication of assessment, produce a shared language across agencies and improve referral between agencies.

Lead professional
To act as a single point of contact that children, young people and their families can trust, and who is able to support them in making choices and in navigating their way through the system; ensure that children and families get appropriate interventions when needed, which are well planned, regularly reviewed and effectively delivered; reduce overlap and inconsistency from other practitioners.

ContactPoint
ContactPoint will be the quick way to find out who else is working with the same child or young person, making it easier to deliver more coordinated support. This basic directory will be available to authorised staff who need it to do their jobs. It is a key part of the Every Child Matters programme to improve outcomes for children.

eCAF
This system will allow authorised practitioners to electronically create, store and share a Common Assessment Form (CAF). A CAF records information about a child or young person with additional needs.  eCAF gives practitioners from different sectors, easy access to key information concerning the assessment to allow them to plan, monitor and review a co-ordinated approach to the delivery of the most appropriate services.

Children’s Service Directory
Online local-area service directories enable practitioners to access up-to-date details of the services available to meet the needs of children and young people. A service directory is a comprehensive online information-bank of all types of children’s and young people’s services available in a local area. It should be easily searchable, and should include a broad range of preventative services from providers in voluntary and statutory agencies. Ours is called WightChYPs.

Click below to access leaflet re WightChYPs:

More about these processes and case studies from Trailblazer Local Authorities can be found in the booklet Making It Happen

Please contact mark.paine@iow.gov.uk Children’s Service Information Sharing and Assessment Officer, for more information about Integrated Working