At a recent IDeA conference in July 2006 on adult social care, Jo Davidson, Group Director of Children and Young People’s (CYP) Services for Gloucestershire County Council proved a lively and engaging panel member. IDeA followed up this event with a one-to-one interview with Davidson to gauge her views on the broader questions affecting the children’s agenda in Gloucestershire.
How has Gloucestershire County Council managed the separation from adult social care services?
We’ve used the changes in both the children’s agenda and adults’ agenda to look at what we need as a county council for the future. Both these agendas have led to a wholesale restructuring in the council at a senior leadership level. This was to achieve two things. The first was to ensure we had the right focus on the future agenda. Although initially this was driven by the children’s changes, we recognised it was important not to let this become the dominant feature, as it is important to provide services for people irrespective of age.
Secondly, it was vital we had the right balance of responsibilities across the council. In some respects, the CYP side of the equation has had it slightly easier. Children’s services is perceived as media-friendly and there is greater scope for creativity as we’ve consciously attempted to address the CYP agenda from a child or young person’s perspective. This has been positive as this slightly alternative approach can be used to tackle adult services as well.
What has also helped us in the children’s arena is that we’ve had a really strong common cause and the five national outcomes have been really beneficial. We’ve been able to articulate a common cause for everybody and this has meant that our job has been to simplify this by reiterating what Gloucestershire’s common cause is and what we are trying to do to improve outcomes for all our children and young people.
What have been the major challenges in establishing partnerships with other organisations?
The biggest challenge has been to communicate that the changes are for the long term and must happen on the ground. We have to remind people continually that Change for Children is a 10-year change programme nationally and we’re effectively at the end of year one. It is about getting people to look at quick wins and more immediate changes. There has been a cultural challenge of empowering everybody to embrace the change. There has also been the challenge of telling the story to everyone – a challenge of communication. From the bottom to the top has been relatively easy. But the challenge has been to communicate the changes horizontally through organisations to all those who are involved in children’s services.
Did you adopt any innovative marketing techniques to communicate your message through the organisation?
Not specifically. We didn’t use new newsletters as part of our communications strategy as we didn’t want to fuel the concept that this was a short-term project. We have a virtual network of communications people, across all the organisations involved, who are fed the key messages at a strategic level… We have a website and we work very closely with the local media. We have a good relationship with the local press and they have run a series of positive children and young people-related articles.
How have you maintained protection for children throughout the ongoing changes?
We embraced the agenda on the ticket that we absolutely did not want to see performance levels drop in any area. We weren’t necessarily expecting performance improvement as this is notoriously difficult through major change. But we were at least expecting performance maintenance. Inevitably we knew that people would take their eye of the ball during the change process, but we kept a particular focus on safeguarding and pupil achievement. These are two fundamentals for us and we can’t afford to get these wrong.
In the end we achieved performance improvement in almost every area. This was quantified through our performance indicators and local targets. We’ve achieved this not least due to the huge professionalism of our staff in all our services who did not lose sight of doing the day job, while change was taking place.
How did you communicate this to staff?
We had a series of communication mechanisms. These included regular emails, and staff briefings, together with the website. It was essential to have staff briefings as we have over 3,000 staff working in children services alone. These meetings were beneficial as they also identified some emerging weaknesses, which the staff were able to share with the project team.
Are you able to highlight any of these weaknesses?
Yes. In any change of this scale it must be done in phases and we were quite clear at the outset that this was phase one and we would be moving to phase two during 2006/07.
Where the communication weaknesses began to emerge is at the end of phase one where it was felt that there should be a breathing space in order to consolidate. At this point the communication briefings were not as frequent as they had been. Some people were left behind and in fact for some they didn’t realise phase two was happening. The lesson for us was that you have to plan ahead at all times and ensure consistent communication even during the breathing spaces.
Have there been any additional financial pressures since the split from adult social care?
No. I don’t think it’s the split from adult social care that is the issue because in Gloucestershire we didn’t have some of the issues that we know some other authorities have had – such as adult social care subsidising the children’s side.
But where the financial pressures have arisen is to ensure that during the management of the changes, transition costs are built in. To quantify these costs and to ensure that these are kept to the lowest possible amount has been the pressure. Also reminding people that this is a long-term change programme and we’re not going to sort it all out in year one is important. Consequently the multi-year budgeting really comes into the frame at this stage.
Inevitably there are potential pressures from changing dynamics in our partner organisations, not least health. Organisations such as health, the police and the Learning and Skills Council have all been going through change at the same time. It is at this point, that the partnership relationships, in both the informal and formal governance sense, come to the fore as well.
What services are in place to manage the transition from children's services to adult?
We’ve revamped the whole transitions framework. Very specifically this entails very clear protocols on who is leading on what at different stages of the transition from children’ services to adults' services. We are trying to create a safe transition into adult services: a situation where we in children’s services are handing over and, at the same time, adult services are reaching over to embrace the young people coming through as adults.
There has to be clear accountability here. We now have a much clearer framework in place and this is currently being tested, so I’m unable to say how successful this is at present. But it should improve things. There are specific services that have been set up, for example leaving care services. And we are trying to ensure that these are embedded within youth support services. The issue for us as an organisation is to clarify that the children’s agenda is part of the adults’ agenda – they are not separate.
What challenges with respect to the children’s agenda are particular to Gloucestershire?
The challenges that are very specific to us aren’t always recognised in terms of national policy making. We are a county of major contrasts in terms of rural and urban, affluence and poverty. People do not always understand that Gloucestershire has this diversity. Gloucestershire is often perceived as a leafy shire and that everything in it is uniform. But it isn’t like this; it has good transport links and poor transport links.
It is question of managing the tensions of service delivery. For example managing the problems of poverty in inner city Gloucester and Cheltenham is going to be different than those of the rural Cotswolds. You need different approaches. Our challenge is to have a clear strategic vision and framework that is sufficiently flexible to give dynamic delivery on the ground.
