Children's Services Programme Executive Summary
Achievements
- Several regional baseline audits presenting a picture not seen before
- Several options appraisals across range of service areas
- Frameworks/models which can be adapted or repeated
- New/innovative services & support commissioned including shared/collaborative services
- Strong business cases for doing things differently-efficiency & service improvements
- New theoretical models and evidence-based good practice tested
- Comprehensive set of learning & good practice products produced
The most successful Children's Services Projects appear to have the following characteristics:
- Explicit business case with strong evidence based-rationale/evidence of need
- Buy-in from all stakeholders at senior, middle & front line levels
- Quantitative and qualitative measures capable of demonstrating improvement and/or efficiencies and which are realistic
- SMART objectives
- Dedicated Project Management expertise
- Strong Project Steering Group who can offer reality check
- Strong performance management
- Explicit expectations of all parties from the outset-commissioners, providers, stakeholders, beneficiaries, funders, partners
- Payment by milestones
- Consequences for non-delivery
Learning
Projects terminated very early were likely to have one or more of the following characteristics:
- Limited commitment/ownership/buy-in by Project Board
- Reduction in capacity of LAs to deliver projects to targets & timescales
- Key networks not fully engaged in project delivery
Where projects delivered only part of the planned activity, projects had one or more of these characteristics:
- Changed financial and/or policy priorities in LAs (esp post May 11 election) or slippage due to policy and/or funding reviews
- Slippage in timescales/delivery caused by poor co-operation between key delivery partners
General learning points
- Ensure data requests are 'joined up' and that data can be shared to prevent LA staff being asked for the same information more than once
- 'Join up' or merge projects eg health check and recruitment & retention projects -very much operating in the same territory but as separate projects
- Check that projects aren't duplicating products which already exist and are on offer & well-developed eg Leadership modules
- Ask much more rigorous questions of projects at outset eg evidence of need, rationale for model proposed, what else considered
- Set payment against milestones-this was more likely where private sector was used; but much less common in LAs where money usually paid up front
- Understand how to procure & commission services from Universities. Both projects using Universities in this programme ran into serious difficulty as a result of differing expectations, different culture and lack of customer focus
- There need to be consequences for any provider, irrespective of sector, who doesn't deliver their projects
- When commissioning training, ensure participants understand their obligations to complete learning programmes and the impact this will have on outcomes and efficiency gains if they drop out
- Make sure the right people are asked to supply the right data - commissioners, workforce specialists, data collectors & finance may collect and analyse data differently
- Define exactly what is meant when asking for information rather than assuming understanding is shared
- Consistency in data collection/quality cannot be assumed
- A strong business case will not always outweigh risk aversion, inertia or natural conservatism
- For outcomes to be meaningful we need to measure impact on service users/end beneficiaries