MULTI-AGENCY WORK IN THE NEW CHILDRENS SERVICES

by gula_01 (student)

MULTI-AGENCY WORK IN THE NEW CHILDREN’S SERVICES

Background

In 2000, a young girl called Victoria Climbié died at the hands of her carers – a great-aunt and her partner – after an extended period of horrific mistreatment. What made Victoria’s death particularly distressing was that she was known to a range of local authority and other children’s agencies – housing departments, social services departments, the police, hospitals and a charity – who between them failed to arrive at co-ordinated effective action to save her. The subsequent independent statutory inquiry, chaired by Lord Laming, concluded that Victoria’s death was the consequence not simply of the actions of her carers, but of “a gross failure of the system”. (Laming, 2003: par. 1.18). “I am in no doubt,” Lord Laming stated,

that effective support for children and families cannot be achieved by a single agency acting alone. It depends on a number of agencies working well together. It is a multi-disciplinary task.

(Laming, 2003: par. 1.30)

The Government’s response was not simply to strengthen child protection procedures, but to view the Climbié affair in the wider context of the role that children’s service might play in combating ‘social exclusion’. In the same year as the Laming report, it issued a Green Paper with the title Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003a), proposing sweeping changes to these services:

We want to put children at the heart of our policies, and to organise services around their needs. Radical reform is needed to break down organisational boundaries. The Government’s aim is that there should be one person in charge locally and nationally with the responsibility for improving children’s lives. Key services for children should be integrated within a single organisational focus at both levels.

(DfES, 2003a: 9)

Every Child Matters went on to propose a framework of desirable outcomes for children which might form the basis of common assessment systems, shared working practices, and, above all, shared goals for childhood professionals. A year later, the Government legislated, in the Children Act, 2004, to:

1. create integrated children’s services departments by combining education and child and family social care functions;

2. bring these new services together with health and other childhood services by establishing Children’s Trusts locally;

3. develop a set of shared working practices across these services; and

4. increase the mutual understanding and common skills base of childhood professionals.

On the face of it, this was an entirely rational response to the failures in the Climbié case and the Government’s wider social inclusion agenda. The Government’s thinking appears to have been that children depended, to greater or lesser extents, on the services provided by the state and the voluntary sector. Currently, the quality and effectiveness of those services was severely compromised by the organisational barriers between different services and the professionals working within them. If those barriers could be broken down and professionals with different disciplinary backgrounds encouraged to work more closely together, not only would catastrophic failures be avoided, but all children would receive a better deal.

However, rational responses of this kind have a chequered history in this field. As an early review of the evidence base for the Every Child Matters proposals concluded:

Structural reorganisation has traditionally been the dominant method of reform in children’s services. It has mainly involved adjustments to the administration and management of the organisation, including greater or lesser decentralisation, increased or decreased specialisation, the separation of the purchaser from the provider and divisions of responsibilities based on geography or function…In places, Every Child Matters is in danger of perpetuating the assumption that modifying the structure of services will result in a change of culture and better services for vulnerable children (pp.59, 70f). This cause-effect relationship is not supported by much evidence, however.

(Warren House Group at Dartington, 2004: 8)

In the remainder of this paper, we will examine more closely whether these fears are justified. We will suggest that the pursuit of multi-agency collaboration is more complex than a rational perspective might seem to suggest. We will also examine what seem to us to be significant ambiguities and contradictions in the Government’s agenda. However, the picture is not entirely negative. The Dartington review quoted above concludes, not that multi-disciplinary collaboration is impossible, nor that structural reorganisation is irrelevant, but that “reorganisation is only ever part of the solution” (loc. cit.). We will, therefore, also explore some promising developments that seem to suggest what else needs to be done within the context of structural reorganisation to make collaboration both possible and effective.

The problems of multi-agency collaboration

Whether facilitated through structural reorganisation or not, the history of attempts at multi-agency collaboration suggest that it is fraught with difficulties. This is not necessarily because there is hostility or opposition to the idea of multi agency work from those who participate in it. As Farrell et al. (2006) have shown, for many years professionals working with children have valued the opportunity to work with other colleagues and have appreciated the added value that this can bring to improving services for children and families. Payne (1998) also argues that:

…the case for treating social problems in a holistic fashion is overwhelming. People know, in a simple every day fashion, that crime, poverty, low achievement at school, bad housing and so on are connected.

(Payne,1998: 12).

Despite this, many questions remain unanswered. For instance, the term ‘multi-agency collaboration’ covers a range of organisational forms and practices (Audit Commission, 1998, Wilkin et al., 2002). We can see this in the Every Child Matters reforms, where the same professional might well find her/himself employed by a local authority through its integrated children’s services department, delivering services commissioned strategically by a Children’s Trust, working for some or all of the time in a children’s centre or school where professionals from different agencies are co-located, and contributing to ad hoc

teams supporting particular children and families. Each of these organisational forms is a site for collaboration, yet the legal status, governance, resourcing and working practices of each is different. If we add to this the legitimate local variations in these forms –Children’s Trusts may have different partners in different places, children’s services departments may have different degrees of integration, and so on – it becomes clear that the structures within which multi-agency collaboration take place are highly variable, even within what seems like a coherent set of reforms.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, roles and responsibilities within multi-agency collaboration are equally variable. A study by Atkinson et al (2002) is unique in attempting to systematically examine the scope and success of multi-agency activity in which Education Authorities were then engaged. Frequently, respondents described roles and responsibilities as either ‘simply evolving over time’, or being ‘the result of joint discussion amongst those involved’. On this basis it is understandable that ‘confusion over roles and responsibilities’ and ‘competition between agency and individual priorities within the initiative’ were amongst the most frequently reported challenges to multi-agency working.

This points to an ambiguity at the heart of attempts at collaboration. On the one hand, collaboration requires professionals to move beyond existing working practices and procedural arrangements in order to engage in the sorts of evolutionary and negotiated approach to role definition indicated above. This in itself may result in considerable role ambiguity, inter-professional tension, and the temptation to work beyond professional competence Rushmer and Pallis, 2002, Wasoff et al., 2004). Moreover, even where the structures of collaboration are clear, there may be considerable ambiguity over its purposes and working practices (Stewart et al., 2003; Percy-Smith, 2005). Webb and Vulliamy (2001)

On the other hand, there is considerable research evidence that setting up collaborative arrangements does not in itself overcome the cultural differences between professionals from different backgrounds (Easen et al., 2000, Cameron and Lart, 2003; Harbin, 1996; Wilkin et al., 2003; Wasoff et al., 2004; van Eyk and Baum, 2002; Coxon, 2005; Johnson et al., 2003). Craig, Huber and Lownsbrough, 2004). There may therefore be limits to which professionals from different backgrounds are willing to renegotiate their roles, and fundamental differences in how they see the purposes of collaboration. Again, looking specifically at the Every Child Matters reforms, simply creating integrated children’s services departments does not in itself guarantee that teachers, social workers, educational psychologists, family support workers, youth workers and the rest will see the world in the same way.

These problems may be exacerbated by the practicalities of finance and resourcing (Atkinson et al., 2001; Sammons et al., 2003; Cameron and Lart, 2003; Johnson et al., 2003, Wilkin et al., 2003; van Eyk and Baum, 2002; Tisdall et al., 2005). Where partner agencies remain separate, there may be disputes over who contributes what resource to the joint venture. However, even within the single organisational and funding structures envisaged by Every Child Matters, there is no reason to suppose that there will not be internal disputes about the resourcing of different activities. Moreover, when, as in the current ...

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All of these issues are to do with the difficulties of collaboration for the managers and professionals involved. However, what is perhaps more worrying is that the evidence for the impact of collaborative arrangements on outcomes for children and young people is far from convincing. Partly, this is because most studies have focused on the processes of collaboration rather than on its outcomes. As a recent review by Brown and White (2006) concludes:

…there appears to be limited positive evidence on outcomes from integrated working with much of the current work focusing on the process of integrated working and perceptions from professionals about the impact of such services’

(Brown and White, 2006, p. 16)

Other reviews of the literature have come to similar conclusions. Cameron et al. (2000) felt that the few evaluations that had been carried out were methodologically weak, leading to a paucity of meaningful evidence, while Sloper (2004) found ‘little evidence on the effectiveness of multi-agency working itself or of different models of such working in producing outcomes for children and families’ (p.571). Dowling, Powell and Glendinning (2004) suggest that the literature on partnership working in the provision of care that overlaps Health and Social Services has followed a similar path, in that research has focused largely ‘on process issues, while much less emphasis has been given to outcome success’ (p.309).

All of this would seem to confirm the conclusion of the Dartington review ( Warren House Group at Dartington, 2004) that structural reorganisation can only ever be part of the solution to providing better services for children. Encouraging or requiring professionals and their agencies to work together may create opportunities for productive collaboration. However, it also generates significant anxieties, tensions and ambiguities. As we turn now to the detail of Government policy, we shall see that conceptualisation of collaboration within New Labour reforms does nothing to resolve these and may, indeed, exacerbate the,

The ambiguities of government policy

Although we suggested above that the Every Child Matters agenda constitutes a rational response to the failures in the Climbié case and the wider concern with social in/exclusion, that is, perhaps, something of an over-simplification. The apparent rationality of breaking down organisational boundaries to promote multi-agency collaboration in fact conceals a good deal of ambiguity in current policy.

This ambiguity is evident in the origin of Every Child Matters. The Climbié case was a catastrophic failure in extreme and – fortunately – rare circumstances. The Government at the time was very certain that there was a synergy between strategies for avoiding such failures in future and strategies for improving the well-being of all children:

As Lord Lemming’s recommendations made clear, child protection cannot be separated from policies to improve children’s lives as a whole. We need to focus both on the universal services which every child uses, and on more targeted services for those with additional needs. The policies set out in the Green Paper are designed both to protect children and maximise their potential.

(DfES, 2003a: 5)

However, such a statement begs the question as to whether the improvement in children’s services ‘as a whole’ is a means to the end of improving children’s lives ‘as a whole’, or whether it is simply a necessary basis for effective child protection procedures. For professionals on the ground, this raises questions about where the focus of their collective efforts should lie, which professionals should take the lead on which issues, and where, if at all, particular professional groups should recede into the background on issues of little direct relevance to their work.

The same ambiguity is evident in the formulation of desirable outcomes for children which provide a framework for professional collaboration. All children’s services are expected to contribute to achieving five outcomes for children:

- being healthy: enjoying good physical and mental health and living a healthy lifestyle

- staying safe: being protected from harm and neglect

- enjoying and achieving: getting the most out of life and developing the skills for adulthood

- making a positive contribution: being involved with the community and society and not engaging in anti-social or offending behaviour

- economic well-being: not being prevented by economic disadvantage from achieving their full potential in life.

(DfES, 2003a: 6-7, emphases in the original)

Whilst this formulation appears straightforward, it is, in fact, anything but. Whilst health, safety and achievement relate fairly clearly to aspects of children’s lives in which particular services (health, social care and education) might be expected to take a lead. It is less clear in the cases of ‘economic well being’ or ‘making a positive contribution’. The former (which in any case rapidly became ‘achieving economic well being’) begs the question about the role of economic, welfare and labour market policies, which lie outside the remit of even newly-integrated children’s services. ‘Making a positive contribution’, on the other hand, seems to be less of an outcome for children than a particular view of how adult society might like its children and young people to behave. Meanwhile, it is difficult to see where social development and personal relationships fit in, or why economic disadvantage is singled out as a barrier when ethnicity, gender and location might be equally disadvantaging.

Above all, Every Child Matters offers a list of desirable outcomes, but no indication of how these outcomes relate one to another. Which takes priority? Which ones form the necessary basis for which other ones? How do they support one another? Are there any points where they are in conflict? Such questions, no doubt, are perfectly capable of being answered, but they do mean that, for children’s professionals on the ground, the outcomes framework offers much less clear guidance to practice than might be expected. In particular, they do little to ensure effective collaboration or to end territorial disputes when, say, education professionals argue that all other outcomes are subservient to ‘enjoy and achieve’, or health professionals that other outcomes are subservient to ‘be healthy’.

The problem is compounded by the accountability of different professional groups for achieving different sets of targets. The system of public service governance set up by New Labour takes the form of centrally-devised public service agreements for each government department. These are translated into a series of measurable targets which are then passed ‘down the line’ through intermediate bodies, such as local authorities, and so to front-line organisations and professionals (Dyson, 2007). The perverse consequences of the culture of ‘performativity’ (Ball, 2003, Broadfoot, 2001) created by this system have been well discussed in the education literature (most recently in the Primary Review (Review, 2007). However, from the perspective of multi-agency collaboration, the problem is not simply that professional practice is shaped and constrained by often narrowly-conceived targets. It is that different agencies and professionals either are accountable for different targets, or, where targets are shared, have different levels of responsibility for achieving those targets. In principle, for instance, social care workers carry some responsibility for children’s educational achievements, just as teachers carry some responsibility for children’s health. In neither case, however, are these professional groups likely to see themselves as having prime responsibility, or to put their more immediate concerns (child protection, or test and examination results) at risk to discharge these responsibilities.

We have argued elsewhere (Dyson & Raffo, 2007) that these ambiguities and contradictions are anything but accidental. New Labour has tended to conceptualise disadvantage in a distinctive way. Using, particularly in its early years, the concept of ‘social exclusion, it has argued that disadvantage is the result of a multiplicity of factors in people’s lives. Poverty, which might historically have been regarded as the root cause of disadvantage, has been reduced in status to just one of these factors, alongside, for instance, poor housing, lack of employment, low aspirations, poor health-related behaviours, and low educational achievement. The appropriate policy response, therefore, has not been to make a concerted assault upon some supposed underlying cause, but to tackle each of the contributory factors separately. The locus classicus of this approach was the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, in which no fewer that eighteen separate ‘policy action teams’ (PATs) were detailed to formulate responses to the social exclusion experienced by people living in the most disadvantaged areas (Social Exclusion Unit, 1998, 2001).

This notion of separate factors coming together in particular places and in the lives of particular groups, families and individuals has major implications for New Labour’s conceptualisation of professional collaboration. So long as these factors are seen as essentially separate, they call for separate interventions from different agencies and professional groups. Those interventions certainly need to be co-ordinated so that duplication of effort is avoided and professionals can offer each other mutual support. However, this does not necessarily imply any deeper sharing of purpose in the form, say, of a common approach to what is seen as a fundamental problem. Significantly, ‘joining it up locally’ was simply one amongst many PATs in the formulation of the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy (National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, 2000), charged, significantly, not with developing the conceptual basis for responses to disadvantage, but with finding ways of rationalising essentially separate policy responses at local level.

Taken together, these characteristics mean that multi-agency working is not as straightforwardly rational as repeated government exhortations might make it appear to be. Partly, this is because the partners in such working remain bound by separate targets and/or lines of responsibility. Partly, it is because the common frameworks within which they are expected to operate are somewhat loosely coupled lists of desirable outcomes or disadvantaging factors, offering no clear guidance as to priorities or relationships between the separate items in the lists. In these circumstances, collaboration may mean no more than a form of more-or-less enlightened self-interest, in which different agencies work together insofar – and only insofar – as this enables them to pursue their own goals more effectively – what one local authority officer described as like a set of ‘cuckoos living in one nest’ (Ainscow et al., in press). Alternatively, collaboration may involve partners in meeting the formidable challenge of doing what national frameworks singularly fail to do – that is, developing their own ‘vision and strategy’ (Geddes, 2006, National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, 2000) – that is, a sense of how outcomes fit together, how disadvantaging factors interact, and how some coherent shared response can be made.

What this analysis suggests is that New Labour’s apparently rational commitment to multi-agency working may in fact be badly under-conceptualised and under-specified. It offers accounts of desirable outcomes for children and young people, and explanations of why those outcomes fail to materialise for many. Yet these accounts and explanations are less convincing on inspection than they seem at first sight. It mandates collaboration, but fails to align other aspects of policy – notably, of accountability regimes – with this imperative. And it sets up collaborative structures, yet it is difficult to see what has been done to address the known problems with collaborative working that we identified in our review of the literature above. To those of us who have lived through the New Labour years, the pattern is, in fact, depressingly familiar – a high level of policy activity at the centre and an overwhelming desire to manage working practices on the ground, without the corresponding capacity to think issues through in depth or deliver workable solutions to practitioners. As in the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy the absence of a fully-worked out ‘vision and strategy’ at the centre leads all too often to an injunction to practitioners and decision makers at the local level to ‘join up’ the fragmentary mandates of national policy.

Despite this gloomy picture, it may not be entirely without hope. Precisely because national policy is under-specified and under-conceptualised, it creates ‘spaces’ within which local practitioners and decision-makers can begin to work their way towards their own solutions. In many cases, no doubt, this space is one which the ‘cuckoos’ use to try to turn each other out of the nest. However, there are cases where this space is used productively, and which illustrate what multi-agency collaboration might look like in the right circumstances. It is to one of these that we now turn.

Some promising examples

New Labour’s commitment to promoting multi-agency working is embodied as clearly as anywhere in its ongoing development of extended schools. Following from the Schools Plus report for the National Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy (DfEE, 1999), successive governments have piloted various versions of what they call ‘extended’ schools, many of which we have been involved in evaluating (Cummings et al., 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, Dyson et al., 2002). Latterly, the Government has committed itself t a national ‘roll out’ in which every school will be involved in offering access to extended provision. Essentially, extended schools offer services to children, families and local communities over and above their core business of teaching the curriculum. Typically, they offer these services in partnership with other agencies and organisations, particularly those working with children and young people. They are seen, therefore, as key means of delivering the Every Child Matters and, in certain circumstances, on the neighbourhood renewal agendas (HM Government, 2007).

All of this is particularly true of ‘full service extended schools’ (FSESs). The FSES initiative ran for three years from 2003 with the aim in its original form of developing a full service school in each local authority area (DfES, 2003b, 2003c). These schools were to deliver a range of extended services – childcare, out of hours activities, family support, adult learning, support for children and young people, community access to school facilities and so on – and were expected to do so in close collaboration with other agencies, which might well mean accommodating professionals from those agencies on the school site. Since these schools were overwhelmingly based in areas of significant disadvantage, they had the potential to act as hubs for multi-agency approaches to the problems facing many children and families in those areas, and to the regeneration of the areas themselves.

The attempts of these schools to develop partnership working were as fraught with difficulty as our analyses above might lead us to expect (Cummings et al., 2005, 2006). However, as our final report on the initiative (Cummings et al., 2007) showed, some schools were finding ways round these problems. Typically, such schools would have developed more-or-less clear analyses of the situations they were facing, linking the educational difficulties faced by many of their students to issues in students’ families, in local community cultures, and in the demographics and economics of the areas. In many places, we were told that low educational achievement was linked to the disappearance of traditional heavy industries, the collapse of the local labour market, and consequent high levels of unemployment, poverty, ill health and family stress. Local people had lost confidence in themselves. In the absence of any obvious opportunities to find their way out of the current situation, and of any examples of education being used as a path to betterment, they lost faith in themselves as learners, and transmitted this disengagement and hopelessness to their children.

In response, many of the FSESs developed a four-strand strategy:

1. activities aimed at providing swift access for students to a range of personal support;

2. activities aimed at promoting greater engagement with learning on the part of students;

3. extensive efforts to support and engage both families and local people; and

4. activities aimed at engaging families and local people with learning.

The following account (from ‘Hornham’ School) is typical:

A structure has been developed around a weekly multi-agency pupil referral panel meeting, and a learning and support team to deliver intervention and support to the most vulnerable pupils and their families. The composition of this team changes from year to year, but in the past has comprised learning mentors, two family support workers (one of whom is social work trained), a BEST [Behaviour and Education Support Team] manager (from a health background), members of the senior leadership team and an educational psychologist (EP). They work closely with a range of statutory, voluntary and community services and will signpost to other agencies whenever necessary. A wing in the school has been designated a learning support area, and it is from here (and the learning support unit and offsite provision) that learning mentors and other professionals operate for much of their time.

The level of support for targeted pupils is very high. There are nurture groups for vulnerable year 7 pupils, key fund groups, youth engagement strategy activities, a buddy group, counselling support, sexual health clinics, a nutrition group (run by a learning mentor and a health worker), and crime and drugs prevention work (in partnership with a community police officer). The school also has a Connexions-funded positive activities for young people (PAYP) worker who delivers one-to-one and group work support with targeted pupils, and supports pupils following the ‘more appropriate’ curriculum. As part of a trial in the local authority, aimed at reducing the number of pupils falling into the NEET [Not in Education, Employment or Training] category, Hornham has benefited from enhanced Connexions PA [personal adviser] input. So, PAYP pupils are offered ‘entry to employment’ placements at the end of the summer term and engage in work based learning to develop skills for employment…There is also BIP [Behaviour Improvement Programme] first day response provision for pupils at risk of exclusion…

Parent and community oriented provision includes: an outreach parent support group; lifelong and family learning provision; intergenerational work in partnership with Age Concern; environmental projects involving pupils and community members; and a police drop in for community members. Hornham has developed a close partnership with the local community centre and offers residents access to its web portal (which provides information on FSES and other provision in the area) from there.

(Cummings et al., 2007: 21-22

As will be clear, this form of response involves a high level of multi-agency working. As at Hornham, schools would often employ, or recruit from local authority services, their own non-teaching education professionals – mentors, counsellors, education welfare officers, education psychologists, behaviour specialists, family support workers – and enable them to work alongside non-education professionals – social workers, health workers, police officers, youth workers – based in and around the school. Often, as at Hornham, these different professionals would share a physical base in the school, and their work might be co-ordinated through some formal team arrangements, complete with mechanisms for assessing cases and allocating tasks.

What seemed to be crucial, however, was that these professionals operated in what one head teacher called a ‘zone in-between’. What he meant by this was that their work was located between the sorts of pastoral and support work schools could traditionally offer, and the more intensive and specialist interventions available by referral to external agencies. Referral, for him, as for many heads in FSESs, was a cumbersome process delivering limited results as agencies sought to guard their finite resources. By contrast, the ‘zone in-between’ approach involved creating the possibility for different professionals to work together at the point of need, responding flexibly and rapidly to problems as they arose. Although traditional referral routes might, in some cases, need to be activated, the multi-professional teams in schools were ‘light on their feet’, able to deliver low level support in a way which averted the need for more formal procedures. They were able to pool their skills and resources, taking the lead on cases as appropriate, or developing joint strategies to be delivered flexibly. Moreover, because professionals from many backgrounds were involved, they were able to bring together packages of support for individuals in response to the complex, multi-dimensional character of the difficulties these individuals were facing.

We were given many examples of this approach in action. The following, provided by a Connexions personal adviser is typical and is worth quoting at length:

[Name of pupil] was referred in year 9. Her behaviour in school was aggressive towards teachers and staff. She wasn’t staying in lessons. She was a substance misuser and had outside issues with boyfriends and relationships with other young people. There was no family liaison. She was disaffected with school and at risk of exclusion. When I spoke to her I found she had very little self-esteem and she was involved in substance misuse. So the work I did involved home visits so parents were involved and I did self esteem and anger management sessions [with the pupil] and linked in with the inclusion team so she could do 4 GCSEs in the unit [the inclusion unit in school where students get 1:1 support to complete GCSEs] and I supported her to and from her work placement. I also referred her to the substance misuse worker who comes into school…The inclusion team and I got her a taster course at a FE college in hairdressing and beauty so her timetable was a flexible package so she did this and had sessions to do her GCSEs. We picked her up in Year 9 and did preventative work to try and get her back in class but it wasn’t working, so in Year 10 I arranged with the school the work placement. I also showed her around different FE colleges to remove any prejudgements. When she left Year 11 she came here [the school] to apply to do an NVQ in early years. Her attendance has been brilliant and now she is looking to work in social care and I’ve linked her with the social worker [in the FSES] to get a grounding in the job…Before this she was being less abusive with staff and said she wanted to come back to school and attend regularly…[Without support] I don’t think she would have finished school. She had no aspirations and wanted to work in the local caf[é]. It’s really boosted her self-esteem and she is now thinking of helping other young people that she says ‘were like me’. It’s so great when it goes like this. It’s the multi-agency staff that’s given this input.

(Cummings et al., 2007: 52-3)

What we see strikingly here is the way in which different professional resources – the Connexions PA, the substance misuse worker, the school’s inclusion unit, the social worker – are brought to bear flexibly at the point of need. In particular, there is a good deal of overlap between their fields of operation: the Connexions PA is involved in school provision, counselling and family support; the school is involved in work experience and provision for disaffected young people; the social worker provides a work taster. Because of the multiplicity of resources and the flexibility with which they are used, they make it possible to respond to the multi-dimensional nature of the young person’s difficulties (substance abuse, in-school behaviour, low self-esteem, low aspirations), to construct new responses flexibly as issues emerge, and to multiply the effects of each intervention separately (so, the work on self esteem and aspirations is strengthened by the availability of vocational courses, a ‘safe haven’ in school, and the personal interest of the social worker).

An emerging model

It is important not to romanticise the sorts of developments we have described above. By no means everything went as smoothly as in the case just cited, and we encountered tensions between agencies and disrupted relationships as well as resounding successes. In particular, one of the main reasons why multi-agency working seemed relatively successful in these contexts was the central role played by the school, yet this also meant that analyses, strategies and partnerships were driven perhaps too much by education professionals and educational perspectives.

Nonetheless, it seems to us that something important was happening in FSESs that might have implications for the field of multi-agency collaboration as a whole. To some extent, what was happening was entirely in line with – and undoubtedly supported by – the Government’s own model of multi-agency working. The structural reorganisation services under the Every Child Matters agenda was embodied in the multi-professional teams emerging in FSESs, and the framework of the five outcomes doubtless provided a starting point for their responses to particular cases and their development of more wide-ranging area strategies.

However, FSESs were doing much more, we suggest, than bringing centrally-accountable professionals together within a loosely specified common framework. What seems to be crucial is that they were able to develop a local ‘vision and strategy’, both in relation to individual cases such as the one set out above, and in relation to their wider school population and area agendas. They were then able to create a set of inter-professional relationships and practices based on flexibility and mutual reinforcement. As a result, the potentially competing ‘cuckoos in the nest’ became, in some instances at least, genuinely collaborative partners.

We know from our own work that such examples of local collaboration based on a shared vision and strategy are not restricted to full service schools (Ainscow et al., in press). Moreover, the evaluations of two major multi-agency initiatives of recent years hint – and sometimes more than hint – that the inherent problems of collaboration in current policy contexts can be overcome. Sure Start, for instance, is an initiative in which agencies working with young children and their families in disadvantaged areas have been enabled to come together to deliver their services collaboratively and from shared sites. Initial outcomes from the initiative were highly disappointing. In typical New Labour fashion, the imperative to collaborate was clear, but the forms and practices of collaboration were under-specified, with the result that local programmes struggled to find coherent and effective strategies (National Evaluation of Sure Start, 2005). However, the most recent findings suggest that programmes may be beginning to learn their way towards such strategies, and that the anticipated outcomes are finally beginning to emerge (National Evaluation of Sure Start, 2008).

The Children’s Fund was a similarly lightly-specified initiative in which statutory and voluntary agencies were brought together in local partnerships to tackle the social exclusion of children and young people. The national evaluation here differentiated between ‘stable’ partnership boards and ‘developing’ boards (Edwards et al., 2006: 21ff). The former, in broad terms, did what we might expect from our analysis of the national policy framework, working through a process of limited collaboration, in which different partners were funded to pursue their own targets and few attempts were made to develop new understandings of local situations and strategies to address those situations. The developing boards, by contrast, acted as ‘sites for cross-agency learning’, developing not only new forms of collaborative networks, but also new analyses and strategies.

The implication would seem to be that, despite the stresses and ambiguities of the current policy context, it is possible for professionals and their agencies to work together in something more than a tokenistic and fragmented way. However, as the Dartington review pointed out, structural reform alone is not enough (Warren House Group at Dartington, 2004). What is also needed is the space in which local professionals can begin to make sense of the situations they face and the strategies they need to address those situations. That space can only exist if professionals are free to work not only beyond organisational boundaries, but also beyond the separate priorities and targets that are imposed upon them centrally.

Although we suggested earlier that it was ironic that the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal relegated the issue of ‘joining up’ to one report out of eighteen, that report in fact had much to say that was important. As we have done here, for instance, it argued that:

Holistic government in particular places cannot be imposed top-down from a distance. If frameworks for co-operation are to be effective, they need to be more than lists of externally imposed priorities. They must also reflect the whole needs of communities and the priorities of local people. Joined up working must create room for personal initiative and creativity.

(National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, 2000: par. 1.17)

This does not, it seem to us, demand a total withdrawal of central government from the field. New Labour has made important contributions by reaffirming the central importance of public services to the lives of vulnerable children and families, stating its commitment to multi agency working as a means of enhancing the effectiveness of public services, and creating structures which weaken some of the more obvious barriers to collaboration. It could, we believe, now go further by making a serious commitment to localism, seeing itself as the creator and guardian of spaces for local decision-making, and letting go its attempt to micro-manage services through inflexible accountability mechanisms and multiple projects and initiatives. In other words, the recommendations of PAT 17 some eight years ago, now have to be heeded:

Central government, and in particular the failure of Departments to act corporately, has been responsible over the years for many of the factors which make local joint working difficult. Examples include the fragmentation of delivery machinery, an uncoordinated flow of new initiatives, a proliferation of requirements for issue-led partnerships, too much central direction and regulation, and financial frameworks, performance indicators and measures that tend to reinforce ‘silo’ behaviour. A more co-ordinated framework for coherence and consistency of delivery is needed.

( National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, 2000: executive summary, par. 52, emphases in original)

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