TRANSFORMING CHILDREN'S SERVICES

Delivering our Children and Young People's Plan

To develop an integrated children’s service, in which statutory services and the voluntary and community sector work together to improve outcomes for children, it will be necessary to change the way services are delivered. Our priorities in this area are organised under the headings of

Front-line delivery
Processes
Strategy
and Governance
which are the four areas for service integration and transformation.

Our priorities for transforming services for children:

Integrated front-line delivery
23. To improve and increase the locations across the city where a range of children’s services are provided on the same site (e.g. children’s centres, extended schools, etc).

Integrated processes
24. To develop our joint working to improve our planning, review and inspection processes.
25. To improve services to children and families by introducing the Common Assessment Framework and the role of Lead Professional across the city.
26. To improve in the ways we enable children and young people to have a say in the way services are designed and delivered.

Integrated strategy
27. To jointly develop and implement a Preventative Strategy which will offer more effective help to vulnerable children and their families.
28. To produce and implement a Workforce Development Strategy which makes sure our staff are equipped to deliver high quality services.
29. To join up our information and recording systems to enable us to work better together.

Integrated governance
30. To strengthen the management arrangements for the Children’s Trust to ensure good leadership to achieve our priorities.

Making best use of our resources
31. To audit and review all the resources in children’s services, and plan how to maintain successful projects where short term funding is coming to an end.
32. To improve the way partners work together to commission services which will have the most impact on achieving our priorities.

Performance management

Performance management involves measuring how well we are doing against our priorities. Effective performance management is at the heart of Sunderland’s drive to continuously improve services.

Our performance management framework:

• is based around the 5 ECM Outcomes, our inspection criteria, and annual self-assessment process
• monitors a core set of performance indicators using a traffic light monitoring system

Performance is monitored at different times by:

• The Director of Children’s Services
• The Children’s Trust Steering Group and Board
• Cabinet members with responsibility for services for Children and Young People
• The Sunderland Strategy Thematic Partnership groups, particularly the group for Lifelong Learning.
  

Self assessment also takes place each year, and this is reported through the Annual Performance Assessment for Children’s Services.