Children’s trusts will help to deliver better services and outcomes for children, young people and their families. They are the Government’s preferred model for achieving local integration. The Children Act 2004 proposed that by 2008 councils should have a children’s trust. A council will normally lead children’s trusts.
A children’s trust will have three core features. These are:
- Clear short and long term objectives. These will cover the five Every Child Matters outcome areas. These are:
- Enjoying and achieving
- Staying safe
- Being healthy
- Making a positive contribution
- Economic wellbeing.
- A director of children’s services who is in overall charge of delivering these outcomes. This person is responsible for:
- Services within the trust
- Co-ordination of services outside the organisation.
- A single planning and commissioning function. This is supported by pooled budgets. It would involve developing an overall picture of children’s needs within an area. Provision is then developed through providers to respond to those needs. These providers could be in the public, private or voluntary and community sectors.
The trusts will develop a number of key characteristics. These are:
- Co-located services. These could be services such as children’s centres and extended schools.
- Multi-disciplinary teams and a key worker system
- Common assessment framework across services
- Information-sharing systems across services. This is so that warning signs are aggregated. It will also allow children’s outcomes to be measured across time
- Joint training with some identical modules. This means that staff have a single message about key policies and procedures, such as child protection. This allows them to learn about each other’s roles and responsibilities
- Effective arrangements for safeguarding children
- Arrangements for addressing interface issues with other services. These could be services such as those for parents with mental health problems.
Children’s trusts are a response to the current problems and examples of good practice within children’s services. These include:
- Children’s trusts have been created because of the fragmentation of responsibilities for children’s services.
- The evidence that emerged from the Victoria Climbié inquiry. This confirms many of the messages from previous inquiries into similar child protection failings. Children’s trusts have been developed to address these messages. The messages were:
- seeing and listening to children
- responding to children’s needs
- improving the quality of communication
- joint working.
- There is a need to build upon and formalise the joint work that has already been going on in many councils. Good examples of this work include:
- Sure Start Children's Centres
- Children’s Fund
- Connexions
- Behaviour and Education Support Teams
- Children and Young People Strategic Partnership
- Youth Offending Teams.
Both the Kennedy report and the Victoria Climbié inquiry are very clear about a number of issues. Children’s trusts need to respond to these issues. They include the need to:
- integrate
- improve communication
- ensure better accountability in children’s services.