1 Introduction

This report provides a profile of Children's Trust arrangements and services for children and young people within this Children's Trust area. It draws together information obtained from commissioners and providers of children's services in the 2009/10 children's services mapping exercise.

CSM is a voluntary exercise and therefore not all local authorities chose to take part. Few LAs would regard their map of services as complete, some choosing to limit the scope of what they mapped. This means that the data reported should be regarded as work in progress and may not be complete.

Further detailed information can be found on the CSM website at: www.childrensmapping.org.uk/results

2.1 Introducing Children's Trusts

Children's Trusts are central to the reform of children's services as set out in Every Child Matters: Change for Children agenda, underpinned by the Children Act 2004. The most recent guidance 'Children's Trusts: Statutory guidance on cooperation arrangements, including the Children's Trust Board and the Children and Young People's Plan' (DCSF, 2010) defines a Children's Trust as:

"The Children's Trust is the sum total of co-operation arrangements and partnerships between organisations with a role in improving outcomes for children and young people" (p. 6)

2.2 Governance: Children's Trust Board

The Children's Trust Board became a statutory body as of April 2010 (Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act, 2009). "The purpose of the Children's Trust Board is to bring all partners with a role in improving outcomes for children together to agree a common strategy on how they will co-operate to improve children's well-being and to help embed partnership working in the partners' routine delivery of their own functions. It also provides a strategic framework within which partners may agree to commission services together, with pooled or aligned budgets, but delivering the strategy remains the responsibility of the partners, both individually and together." (DCSF, 2010: 7).

An indication of who chairs the Children's Trust Board is given below.

2.3 Partners in the Children's Trust arrangements

The Children Act (2004) identifies statutory partners, who are placed under a 'duty to cooperate in the making of arrangements to improve well-being' (section 10 (1) (b)) and 'other persons or bodies' (section 10(1) (c)) that should be included in the Children's Trust as appropriate. There is no statutory duty for the latter agencies to co-operate with the arrangements but they are identified as essential to the effective governance and should be represented at Board level as appropriate. Involvement will vary between local areas.

Partner representation on the Children's Trust is as follows:

3.1 Children and Young People Plan

The Children and Young People's Plan (CYPP) is "the joint strategy of the Children's Trust partners on how they will co-operate to improve children's well-being (across the five outcomes)." (DCSF, 2010: 8). From April 2010, the Children's Trust Board has responsibility for preparing, publishing, reviewing and revising the CYPP (DCSF, 2010: 47).

The status of the Children's and Young People's Plan for this Children's Trust is as follows:

4.1 Joint Strategic Needs Assessment

Strategic planning and commissioning arrangements are a central component driving the cultural change required across all services. These should be based on a combination of the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, a thorough knowledge of the needs of local families, children and young people, and a clear vision of the quality of childhood to which the local area aspires and of the ways different services can best deliver improvements. (DCSF, 2008: 37)

The elements of the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment completed for this Children's Trust area are as follows:

Domain 1: Demography

Domain 2: Social and environmental context

Domain 3: Lifestyle and risk

Domain 4: Ill health and disability

Domain 5: Services for children, young people and families

Domain 6: Voice

5.1 Spend and budget by commissioner

All of the statutory commissioners for this area are identified, along with their spend and budgets.

5.2 Spend and budget by provider

Only the top 10 providers are listed here. Note that these are all providers who are commissioned directly, jointly or through specialist commissioning.

5.3 Joint commissioning

All Children's Trust partners should pursue commissioning activities jointly and pool budgets, wherever appropriate, to shape local services to meet the needs of children, young people and families (DCSF, 2008: 40)

The following joint commissioning arrangements were in place in this Children's Trust.

5.4 Type of commissioning

In some cases organisations may commission some services together, either through joint or specialist commissioning as shown.

6.1 Delivery of core offers

In the Children's Trust questionnaire, local authorities were asked to report on the agreements that they had in place for the delivery of core offers for particular aspects of children's services.

Children's centres

Extended schools

Disability

Parenting support

Targeted youth support

Pathways UTS

7.1 Staff summary by provider

In this table we see which statutory providers are working in the area. The number of distinct services is shown, along with the total staff (whole-time equivalent) which work in those services. Because some services will work across other areas as well, the last column gives an apportionment of the total staff according to how much of its effort is spent working in this area.

Note that regional and national services are not included in this list, but only those services which have indicated that their catchment area is based around the PCT/LA or localities within that.

7.2 Total staff by primary service category

Each service is asked to define a primary service type for its provision from a list defined nationally. Whilst no such classification can work perfectly for every situation, it provides a useful comparative template across a wide range of organisations and types of provision. This graph shows how may staff have been mapped to which type of service.

7.3 Staff Groups

Within the staff apportioned to this area, the following graph shows the different types of staff involved. To get more detail on the breakdown of this, click the data table button at the bottom of the page.

8.1 Disability Services

Some basic data about services for children with disabilities.

8.2 Age range of services

Each service can choose one or more age bands that it provides for, these are shown below.

8.3 ECM Outcomes

The 'Every Child Matters' (ECM) outcomes framework has five high-level outcomes as indicated below with 25 sub-outcomes. Services are asked to record which sub-outcomes they primarily aim to address and these sub-outcomes are aggregated into the high-level outcomes in this graph.