2012 future models for youth final oct 20121

ALDCS Association of London Directors of Children’s Services

Future Models for Youth A review of London Boroughs’ youth provision in London,

April – August 2012

This report was funded through the Leaders for London programme and

facilitated by Helen Hibbert (Partnership for Young London), Keith Shipman (London Borough of Merton) and

Sharon Long (Children England)

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Future Models for Youth – Summary This review was sponsored by Yvette Stanley (Director of Merton’s Children’s Services), funded through the Leaders for London programme and facilitated by Helen Hibbert (Partnership for Young London), Keith Shipman (London Borough of Merton) and Sharon Long (Children England). The review consisted of 23 London boroughs who participated in either interviews or an online survey and the feedback was collated over a five-‐month period, from April to August 2012. Key Findings

• There was a diverse range of creative responses to current financial challenges, with involvement of young people strongly embedded in change processes.

• Models of commissioning were varied, ranging from wholesale outsourcing, to Mutuals and in-‐house provision.

• Services are largely focused on targeted provision, and within this challenges around delivery across both the social care and education paradigms.

• This linked strongly into target setting and measuring outcomes. • There are ongoing challenges balancing the Localism agenda with centralised

policy and funding targets. • Ongoing focus, in many areas, on the engagement of the voluntary and

community sector in service design and delivery.

Questions for ALDCS

What do you want youth services to achieve – is it a prevention service or a personal development service? These are not mutually exclusive.

What model of outcome measure will you require to assess the sector’s ability to deliver on these aims?

Significant changes are being made – how will you monitor the impact over three years?

Demographic changes in population size and make up are happening: what youth service capacity is necessary to achieve the outcomes required, and what workforce development to support quality delivery?

How developed is the wider youth work market locally, and can it reconfigure effectively?

The youth sector is clearly creative and innovative: how can that be enhanced and maximised?

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Future Models for Youth Project 2012 Section One Introduction The Future Models Project was funded through the Leaders for London programme to review in detail current planning for youth provision and commissioning in a number of boroughs. The aim of this report is to provide an overview of the benefits and challenges of the various models, to inform ALDCS’ thinking on youth provision. The process Case studies were completed with 11 boroughs, through telephone conversations and meetings. An online survey was circulated to all boroughs who were not interviewed, with a response from 12. Full and detailed case studies have been agreed with participants; a short summary is included in Annex One. More detailed case studies are available on request. In any survey across London, there are inherent differences between boroughs (e.g. size, population, Inner/Outer London, political perspective, etc.) and the report recognises the difficulty of making comparisons in these circumstances. The greatest common denominator was that all bar one were facing a huge reduction in funding. The report is framed within the following context based on the learning from the Leaders for London programme: Public Value Triangle – Professor Mark Moore1 created the Public Value framework to help public sector managers understand and operate more effectively within the constraints and opportunities of their organisations in creating outcomes of public value. It is based on the relationship between two of the points of the triangle in creating the third: the authorising environment categorises the factors that influence service development, e.g. political, policy and other drivers; the operational capacity covers the resources available to deliver; both of these affect the development of services with measurable social value. All three become interdependent.

1 Moore, M. (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic management in government, Cambridge, MA, Harvard

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We have used the triangle as the structure for this report to analyse and give consistency to the process that local authorities have gone through to achieve their desired change, knowingly or otherwise.

Getting on the Balcony – following the adaptive leadership theory of Irwin Turbitt, we have tried to step away from the issue and see what it looks like from above, impartially, taking a pan-‐London view. Wicked or tame problems – Professor Keith Grint has developed a topology of issues that face organisations: Crises – that require a command and control approach; Tame – that require a common operating model and Wicked that require us to listen and respond in partnership to the breadth of the issue. The drivers for the development of services for young people include (but are not restricted to) budget pressures, increasing expectations to evidence impact in a wide variety of areas, inspection models, policy changes alongside, rising demographics, and increased need. In most cases, boroughs have seen this as a wicked problem and devised a range of solutions; a few have seen it as a tame problem and taken a system approach. The uniqueness of each borough's answer would suggest that most boroughs are listening to their local issues and dynamics.

It is important to note that this is a snapshot in a period of time:

o The focus for ALDCS and Heads of Service should be on listening to emerging practice – how do you deliver high quality outcomes on less money?

o A period of monitoring is required to see how the changes lead to demonstrable impact.

o Boroughs are largely at the point where they have listened locally and have designed new models; this has taken 1 – 2 years and the majority are at implementation stage.

Section Two Context The Authorising Environment The most striking aspect of the models we reviewed was the division between the social care and education paradigms, indicative of who is leading on the agenda from the core local authority perspective or indicative of the power of that paradigm in the local authorising environment. Under the social care paradigm youth services are of public value when they help safeguard or prevent escalation of families within the system. The education paradigm gives value to youth services in relation to how much they help young people achieve. This can be academically in schools or colleges – i.e. through reduced exclusions or improved attendance/ or not being NEET. Although the social care model seemed the dominant model, education attainment came out consistently strongly in the survey. There was however limited evidence of the direct contribution from youth work to school attainment. The focus was largely on early intervention and prevention for social care and youth crime.

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Given the relative paucity of statutory duties relating to them, services for young people are having to play to all sides to sustain themselves, highlighting their contributions to other disciplines, particularly in relation to social care and inspections. Where the social care model is dominant, funding for services for young people is vulnerable, as the statutory services take priority. A common response has been commissioning services out which has the effect of ring-‐fencing the budget for the duration of the contract. There is a sense in which each authority is working out how to protect its youth budget for three years and trying to identify where the most leverage is – social care outcomes or education or both. This has resulted in a variety of models being developed. Across interviews it was noted that the social care paradigm is dominating because of its statutory requirements, potential costs and largely centralised delivery and the associated embedded elements in central government policies:

o Safeguarding o Inspections o CAF o Working together o Troubled Families

The Education context is less dominant in that it has fewer drivers in this context, the most important of which are:

• The raising of the age of participation (RPA) • Increase in academies and free schools • The removal of local authority control • Changes to examination systems

Although Raising the Age of Participation (RPA) will have a significant effect on destinations for young people and the support they need to get there, it was not significantly mentioned in the survey or the interviews conducted for this report. Active drivers The drivers that are principally affecting the direction of services for young people can be summarised in the following list:

• Embedding the requirement for youth engagement in Positive for Youth

• The need to run better quality services on reduced funding • Views and engagement of elected members • Youth crime – the causes and outcomes of the 2011 riots, and the role

of youth and community work in rebuilding neighbourhoods • Changing role of YOTs, which are tacking the implications of the

Munro Review, and have pulled back from integrated youth support services in some areas.

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• Targeted areas, with clear, measurable outcomes – working with gangs, youth crime, the prevention of entry to care, and a focus on employability and jobs – are driving the shape of services and the flow of funding.

• The Localism agenda ‘Our strategy is to have a few neutrally located 'bigger, brighter' youth centres; stronger support to the voluntary sector to provide estate based and other local youth provision; more detached youth work; strong links with targeted and specialist support for young people via co-‐located services; 'efficiency savings'

• Encouraging the growth of other sources of funding i.e. match funding Conflicting Drivers The issues presented in the Authorising environment are leading to some significant conflicts that authorities are responding to differently, and which have not yet been resolved; these can be broadly summarised as the dichotomy between centralisation and localism:

• National commissioning, such as ESF programmes, the Youth Contract, the Work Programme and other top-‐down employment initiatives, don’t fit with the localism agenda, in particular the active and genuine engagement of smaller voluntary sector organisations. Local authorities retain responsibilities for tracking young people’s educational or employment status, the September Guarantee, and for the provision of positive activities, while not having any real control over the delivery of the services to achieve them.

• The National Citizen Service (NCS) to some degree also embodies this dichotomy, with its specification for a common national delivery structure and nationally commissioned and local community engagement and action.

• The localism, prevention agenda and council procurement procedures were seen as in conflict at times.

• In some areas there was a desire to support the local voluntary sector as this supported the community that was being served – however council procurement systems pushed against this towards models that assumed a developed external national market to achieve value for money. Partnering, Consortia and Payment by results are all being explored which affect and challenge the voluntary sector to organise and deliver differently.

• As schools, academies and Clinical Commissioning Groups operate beyond local authority control, co-‐production with young people in designing and delivering services to meet their needs are potentially at odds.

• Increasing requirements from commissioners for contracts to be delivered by partnerships and consortia, which are sometimes but not always in the best interests of local groups.

The challenge locally is to manage these various elements and produce a coherent local structure and vision. How do we get local impact from external central funding which is high value and can distort the local picture?

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Missing drivers It was noticeable that some expected drivers that might have been predicted in either the survey or the interviews were missing. One of these can be summed up as central policy from DfE, probably as a result of the reduction in ring fenced funding or statutory duties attached. Thus Positive for Youth, NCS, and MyPlace were generally not raised by interviewees. Positive for Youth – where it was mentioned – had positive support for articulating a role for youth; as it had no statutory or regulatory power it had not shaped local models. One missing driver that we felt was particularly significant was imminent demographic changes. This is clearer in the schools agenda, where the shortage of primary school places is becoming acute necessitating rapid school expansions. There is no evidence of the implications of this for five or ten years into the future when the need for young people’s services will increase dramatically, and it is not clear how present arrangements have been designed to meet this need. Other missing drivers include:

• Services were clear about the need for quality assurance; however, the increased requirement for services for young people to demonstrate evidence of their impact needs further development;

• Olympic legacy – the role of leisure and sporting heritage; where sport fits into new service arrangements, especially with targeted services; the relationship with public health; how sports bodies are able to make the most of the high profile of the Olympic legacy, and for how long this can be sustained. (These interviews were conducted before the success of the Games)

• Changes in health and schools are the need for services for young people to engage in the new commissioning partnerships

Operational Capacity For the purposes of this report, operational capacity covered the following elements; commissioning models, participation, workforce, quality and other partners. Commissioning models Feedback on commissioning illustrated a range of approaches but there was not an agenda to outsource everything across all the boroughs responding. Greenwich was profiled as one borough where all youth provision had been outsourced but feedback from across the region covered a diverse a range of models, from whole scale change to in-‐house modifications and included the following:

o Transformation and development of existing In-‐house services o Movement towards mutuals and co-‐operative models o Area based commissioning models with locality teams o Total outsourcing of all provision o Grant making

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The localism agenda was cited as a key element of commissioning processes, with a focus on sustaining and developing a local market, building the local economy and local well being. No cross-‐borough commissioning models came through the survey and interview feedback. The balance between open access and targeted services was raised across many of the interviews, with a recognition that in the current environment the emphasis would be more on driving up the level of provision to ‘top end’ or more targeted services. Commissioning out to save money was unsurprisingly a consistent feature in many of the interviews. The significance of voluntary sector engagement and partnership working was raised throughout the review process, both in terms of informing commissioning processes through co-‐production as well as through direct contracting and provision. Overall, there was a strong commitment to sustaining local services and not contracting out to large providers, with good engagement and stimulation of the local market, but a range of challenges was highlighted:

• Consortia and Collaboration o Capacity building needs, with collaborative bids being seen as critical

for the future o The role of lead agencies in supporting smaller organisations to

maintain their market position • New Payment Structures

o Payments by results, with and the challenges of moving the financial risk to providers and the impact on smaller providers

• TUPE costs of commissioning out statutory services • Outcomes frameworks

o Outcomes targets in line with the social care and education paradigms

o Monitoring and evaluation systems to measure impact across providers

o In-‐house skills and capacity within contracted services • Workforce skills and capacity

o Changing focus of youth practice towards targeted provision o Time and capacity to train an often part-‐time workforce

There was an expectation that both contracted and in-‐house services would move towards business like models of delivery, but with concerns about the realism of achieving income generation targets within the current climate. There was limited feedback about engagement with businesses, although some examples profiled links with local business. Very limited feedback was given on engagement with Leisure Services. The future implications of this on targeted services, alongside of the impact of new communities, highlights the need and role of commissioning to support small fledging organisations and community based organisations to pick up on targeted

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needs. Taking into account a range of future issues there is a strong need to retain flexible commissioning models. The feedback from many respondents was that the model of local authority large-‐scale commissioning doesn’t work for youth, with outcomes being less tangible, very few statutory requirements in place, and the longer-‐term nature of engagement. Assessing the costs of commissioning and whether or not the new structures present clear value for money was not clear. Key learning for commissioners (from Survey)

• ‘Not to be afraid of wholesale service change. Don't scale down if change is the best but more difficult option. Reduced funding brings opportunity to do things completely differently Take staff with you but don't get tripped up by historic ways of doing or thinking youth services. Listen to providers and to the local community and engage at earliest opportunity. Take time to think through the cross portfolio dimensions of youth support’

• ‘The need to develop a comprehensive joint and integrated commissioning framework with associated infrastructure. This area also features as a transformation work-‐stream’

• ‘To ensure documents are clear in relation to outcomes required and quality assurance issues’.

• Big Society is a newish concept and so we are learning as we go along and need to think how local authorities can work most effectively with VS on this.

• ‘The consultation has highlighted the value children and young people place on the relationships they have with staff over any activity that might be on offer.’

• Capacity of the third sector to engage in short term bidding processes • Need to support the market. The importance of local providers. Difficulties of

long-‐term development without funding certainty. • How are requirements for small organisations to work in consortia being

tackled? What more needs to be done on this, and how? • How are changes in ethnicity and demographics going to affect services in the

future? Are these changes being taken into account? Projections for numbers of young people, and of the new emerging communities need to be addressed in planning future services.

• Awareness of crisis in primary school placements needs to translate into increased numbers of young people in the near future – not just for secondary school placements, but all other services.

• Increasing movement of young people affects planning – whether through care placements, or relocation of young offenders from inner to south London (which is not solving problems, simply moving them), or, in time, through changes to housing benefit policy.

Participation The engagement of young people throughout the process of designing, commissioning and reviewing of services was a strong and consistent feature across

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the review. A range of good practice examples was highlighted including: youth councils, young inspectors, young commissioners, and peer review processes. The majority of the case studies and survey feedback highlighted integrated participation and engagement structures in line with Positive for Youth. There was limited reporting on parental and family engagement although some family models were cited as emerging. Workforce Workforce development was a core theme throughout both the commissioning processes and the models of delivery discussed. Issues raised included:

• Relevant skills and capacity amongst staff to work effectively in new structures

• A strong focus on outcomes • Sustaining staff motivation and continuously enhancing skills.

The focus from the interviews and survey was on developing creative solutions to safeguard services and supporting the workforce to engage with this was vital. Its is important to note that how this impacted on front line staff was not covered as part of the review, Quality Quality Assurance and Quality Marks were consistently noted in all feedback with the London Youth Mark (among others) being listed in a number of commissioning specifications. The link between quality assurance and improved outcomes was less evidenced and this may well be due to the time frame of the review period. Other Partners Engagement with wider partners was raised in a number of areas, particularly linked to health. Health outcomes were highlighted in a range of the case studies and they largely focused on, drugs and alcohol and teenage pregnancy, with a more limited focus on mental health. There was not yet any significant observable progress on youth being linked to wider changes in health such as GP commissioning or Public health. Links to health outcomes were more historical. Outcomes The focus on preserving services has emphasised justifying youth services in terms of associated outcomes for example social care and youth justice. Services are looking at open access and targeted youth interventions as part of a wider prevention agenda. ‘Cost efficient service for young people in line with budget constraints and the positive for youth agenda the service will be targeted with some open access.’ There was less evidence of youth services’ outcomes being measured in terms of young people’s personal development for its own sake. The online survey showed very strong support for raising attainment was as a driver for change, but there

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would need to be stronger evidence on a pupil-‐by-‐pupil basis of the linkages between participation in services and raised attainment. ‘Young people's attainment becomes the focus as achievement, employability with a move from NEET to EET with guidance from workers.’ Some areas had used this in their needs analysis, which evidenced that they were targeting those of most academic need, not that progress was made because of that participation. There was an interest in a range of frameworks, but no consistent picture emerges of tracking or of evidence based models for tracking personal progress. What was being collected was participation and accreditation linked to key target groups, in an effort to ensure continued funding and even growth. There was significant evidence of the use of quality kite marks through commissioning and of the development of in house systems to ensure quality delivery, e.g. visits, dip sampling, peer reviews, young inspectors, observation of workers, staff appraisals. Each borough could show how that had improved practice locally and there was a clear drive from within services to improve. There was an assumption that quality delivery results in effective impact, but there is a need to show both their relationship and separation. It was felt that there had been less progress in this area than elsewhere in children’s services. As the resource base reduces for youth provision there was still a focus on ensuring quality delivery not just funding the front line. ‘More evidenced based work, which achieves pre-‐determined outcomes’ The types of outcomes listed include

• Reduced rates of youth unemployment • Increased participation • Decreased first time entrants to the youth justice system • Reduced rates of reoffending • Improved use of workforce and assets I • Involvement of community in local service delivery • Raising attainment

• 100% commitment to it as a driver, but how is it being done? • What is the evidence for real improvement in educational attainment,

beyond the Feinstein et al research, which doesn’t really tackle the issue of class?

• Should youth focus on soft skills or hard attainment?

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Concluding Comments What is striking about this review is the creativity of officers and variety of responses given the common issues faced by boroughs. Many of the solutions are temporary – looking at three years as a way to protect services. Others are structural, looking at the long term ownership and delivery of local authority services, and are less focused on cost. Involving young people came out strongly in all boroughs, there were well developed and impressive systems for engagement and decision making by young people. The driver that young people should help shape youth provision was embedded across London. Co-‐production is vital – people affected by the problems need to be involved in the solutions. Models of Commissioning

• There is significant change happening to service for young people across London: more than just the expected level of service improvement.

• There are examples of boroughs where services are being wholly commissioned out; where targeted is being commissioned and open access kept in house; us e; there are examples where youth services have had small amounts of growth and others where open access has almost ceased to be offered.

• There are greater expectations on partnership and collaborative working across and within all sectors.

• There is a renewed debate about what youth services achieve and how that can be measured; this debate includes the asset and deficit models of approaches to young people.

• Many services are still using participation, accredited outcomes and then wider Education and Employment data. Increasingly there is a focus on working with the most appropriate individuals as evidence of effective targeting of services. But there is no consistent agreement on effective measurement.

• Some authorities spoke of seeking commissioning by schools, but this was not developed. The education provider market did not appear to have impacted on the provision of youth services yet. Where commissioning out was taking place, neither schools nor academies were significant players in that market.

• The move away from large Connexions contracts had reduced the size of contracts and thus providers were smaller and more local in the youth market. However there are challenges to the local voluntary sector youth providers of collaboration, merger, partnering and subcontracting models. Further exploration would need to be done to see how very small providers are responding to this agenda.

• Through outsourcing or partnering some authorities hoped that additional funding would be generated to sustain youth services – this includes where services are positioning themselves to be commissioned by other authorities.

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As this report is a snap shot in time there was little evidence that that this additional funding was happening currently.

• There was little evidence of any new impact of the private sector becoming involved in supporting youth work.

• Several models are looking at a greater focus on targeted young people, working in a more focused case work model or specifying outcomes. It was less clear that there was a structured approach to workforce development to enable youth workers to adapt to these new expectations.

• Financial re-‐modelling is providing a reason for reshaping services and for improving outcomes, but few new sources of funding are being accessed, so unless youth work can be delivered at a much lower cost we can assume that delivery is reducing across London.

Social Care versus Education Paradigms • A diversity of approaches was a positive outcome of the pressure on

resources, and seems to stem in part from the interplay of a variety of ways of working and thinking in boroughs. This diversity of approaches could be seen as a healthy position in solving wicked problems, and as a concern that any one paradigm, and particularly the social care prevention paradigm, could easily dominate. Youth work has a role and purpose in itself as outlined in Positive for Youth.

Localism versus Centralism Localism – there was a clear view from officers and some members for the need to build local models of youth service provision – this could be based on a need to increase volunteering; the need to engage the electorate in community ownership; the desire to support the local community/voluntary sector. We would include under this models of staff ownership as a form of localism. In these boroughs partnership and commissioning models were developing strongly. A variety of mechanisms were being developed to try and evolve greater local engagement. Questions for ALDCS

What do you want youth services to achieve – is it a prevention service or a personal development service? These are not mutually exclusive.

What model of outcome measure will you require to assess the sector’s ability to deliver on these aims?

Significant changes are being made – how will you monitor the impact over three years?

Demographic changes in population size and make up are happening: what youth service capacity is necessary to achieve the outcomes required, and what workforce development to support quality delivery?

How developed is the wider youth work market locally, and can it reconfigure effectively?

The youth sector is clearly creative and innovative: how can that be enhanced and maximised?

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Annexe 1 Abbreviated Case Studies Barking and Dagenham Members have traditionally been very supportive of the statutory youth provision for the borough, comprising 4 youth centres, volunteer-‐led youth clubs and a youth bus, and there is no desire to outsource everything. The belief is that commissioned provision can address the gaps and enhance the statutory provision. To date, there have been limited cuts to the statutory provision and some funding has been reduced for commissioned activity but the focus is to sustain this commissioned activity across the following areas:

• Teenage pregnancy • NEET • Positive activities • Substance misuse

The model is a mixture of both in-‐house and commissioned activity, with the universal services being delivered largely via the statutory in house provision and the commissioned activity focusing on the targeted services. The commissioned activity links with the 6 multi agency locality teams – which are largely based in secondary schools with youth workers attached to the teams Camden A key driver has been budget reductions due to grant fall out. Camden is creating 3 area partnerships that will have local governance by local organisations and local young people. Each of these partnerships will in time commission youth work in that area. The voluntary sector can bid independently of collectively to work in an area and would work alongside the council run youth sector in that area. There are now forums where council and voluntary sector staff meet in each area to discuss common deliver to young people. One of the key aims of this approach is to see how the youth sector can meet the changing community needs they serve more flexible – their needs analysis highlighted this as an issue. Each area will have a ring-‐fenced budget. This is no proposal to outsource, but this designed to reduce duplication and achieve improved value for money and impact. The open access service is seen as the 1st tier of prevention for adolescents. City of London Initially, the principal drivers were considerations of cost and quality. The new service would be an asset model, based on the assumption that young people add value to society. The City is too small to have anything but a commissioned-‐out model, with a requirement for really good outcomes. As part of the co-‐production model, young commissioners have been trained, and have mapped, visited and assessed all the available provision in the City and on the fringes. This will lead to a report, which will identify which universal services should be signposted to (e.g. Scouts) and what then needs to be purchased. A zero-‐based budgeting exercise is happening now; tendering is scheduled for September, with the model going live in March. Young people will decide the model, which is likely to include funding single organisations, and grant giving. It is possible that locally organisations might decide

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to collaborate, but there is no obvious intention to specify this at this stage. The offer will include a spectrum of targeted and universal provision. Enfield Enfield have had an increased budget for youth services and have had many services retained. Elected members are clear that they see and effective youth service as key prevention element in Enfield – this has grown from reflection on serious youth violence and last year’s riots. They made significant savings in previous years. Enfield‘s focus has been on ensuring that the council or voluntary sector is working with sufficiently targeted young people. To that end they have invested heavily in Management information and track that data very monthly against project specific targets. Through this they can see how many young people of any target group are participating or achieving accredited outcomes. This is evidence of impact to support those in most need. They are exploring adding bonuses to contracts as a means to introduce payment by results. Enfield has a peer inspector’s program of annual inspections to drive up quality. Greenwich The Greenwich focus has been on commissioning out the whole universal youth service and the process has been taking place over the last year, with contracts in place by April 2012. This budget included in-‐house management costs (following some savings being taken) and front-‐line posts. The commissioning unit is managing contracts. Contracts have been divided into three lots: Year round provision (88 sessions over the year) provision for disabled young people and summer provision. For the former Charlton Athletic Community Trust won the contract with sub-‐contractual arrangements in place with 25 sub contractors. Greenwich commissioners worked with local infrastructure to develop the local market and support organisations in developing collaborations. The commissioning process put a high premium on providers showing local knowledge and using a local workforce, as well as securing excellent outcomes. The outcomes framework for the service specification was designed in partnership with short-‐listed bidders. Young people were involved in the process throughout and will also be engaged in checking provision as part of the contract monitoring and in the returns required by contractors to evidence their achievement of outcomes. Hackney Young Hackney is a mixture of re-‐modelling existing statutory services alongside of commissioning. The focus has been the re-‐alignment of existing services into key areas for development; Active and Achieving, Safer and Thriving as well as Young Hackney Units establishing a triage system to manage referrals. Commissioning is underway to provide positive activities and community reparation as well as targeted funding of My Place in Hoxton and Hackney Marshes to provide a hub and spokes model of outreach. Commissioning processes are half way through currently and support has been facilitated with the VCS to engage with the process. Further work is being developed looking at commissioning targeted gangs provision.

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Harrow The formulation of youth policy in Harrow has grown from a central drive to unify services into one coherent targeted service delivery model focused on early intervention and prevention. There has been a clear vision of targeted centralised services from the local authority aimed at collective prevention. There is still a commissioned Connexions service, which schools will be commissioning from 2012, with externally commissioned summer programmes and work with the My Place to deliver a small amount of universal open access youth work. These services will be covering NEET tracking and participation. The key changes are that targeted youth, Connexions, education welfare, family support and early years have been merged into team around the family intervention teams. The youth workers and adolescent workers now work in one family service with clear criteria of referral and clear outcomes for interventions. All services share one database with one collective set of outcome measures – including young people and parent feedback. Hammersmith and Fulham A youth commissioning task force was established to look at service remodelling and the local authority has a strong focus on enhancing its commissioning functions. An estimated 2,800 young people were identified as those needing help though targeted opportunities. This is a fully commissioned model now, with outsourced services, although youth involvement is retained in house. The majority of the services are being delivered through voluntary sector providers across 8 sites with five schools-‐based commissioned services also in place. Providers were prepared for transformation through a number of capacity building programmes; this included the creation of a preferred provider list. This support enabled organisations to be ready for the shift and able to tender for contracts. Quality assurance is being supported through quality frameworks and workforce requirements within all contracting processes. Key learning to date has highlighted that the commissioning processes have pushed up quality, created new provision in schools and improved unit costing for specified services. Havering Havering is redesigning its service with three overarching elements Safe, Social and Successful. There have been cuts of over 1 million pounds and this remodelling aims to change the delivery of services into statutory provision supporting a way of working out across other providers. Havering is developing an assets based model for youth work linked to the Young Foundation capabilities – 12-‐15 assets underneath each element. Restructuring of existing statutory services will be aligned to adolescent teams and children’s centres as well as culture and leisure services. Further targeted support is being aligned with MyPlace in Harold’s Wood to develop it as a community asset. Currently this is out to consultation for three months on the model and the assets approach. Work is also taking place with young people through the Ambassadors programme and the voluntary sector, faith sector and housing providers to ensure that the model is cascaded out across all services

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Kensington and Chelsea Kensington and Chelsea’s main driver is the grant fall out and an interest in setting up a Mutual as a way to support what is seen as an excellent in house service. The mutual is being formed from a range of open access and targeted services – including sport and leisure, youth services, substance misuse and teenage pregnancy services and historical Connexions services. It will be set up from the autumn of 2012 and has been a very complex structural, legal and financial shift. The mutual will be able to source funding externally and will be able to bid of contracts elsewhere. It will probably provide the core services and commission/ sub contract to the voluntary sector – but that is still to be finalized. They have involved parents and young people extensively in their redesign and are also shifting what they offer towards employability and reducing serious youth violence along side open access. Lambeth The key driver is the vision to become a Cooperative Council, which means giving the community more influence and control over the services that they use. The youth service is one of the early adopters of this approach, which has involved moving 5 youth centres from direct council management to new community management models. This has involved an 18-‐month process working with service users, young people, the local community and local providers to develop new management arrangements for these services. This has not been a traditional commissioning process, but has been a collaborative process, which has involved significant corporate change in the way services are traditionally procured. Three year funding has been confirmed for the new providers who have been required to submit 5-‐year business plans demonstrating how these services will be sustainable beyond this period. The service requirements and responsibilities of the providers will be clearly outlined in a funding agreement including an outcomes framework. A key aspect of this is demonstrating how the community including young people will be involved in the decision making about their local services.

Our next step is to establish the Young Lambeth cooperative (YLC), which represents a new way of commissioning services for young people, ensuring they are truly responsive to local needs. The YLC will be an organisation, a separate legal entity from the council, which will be set up next year. It will be a membership organisation, which will be run and owned by its members who are likely to include young people, the wider community, providers as well as professionals working with young people. Funding will be devolved from the council to the Young Lambeth cooperative so they can determine the way budgets are spent in certain areas that affect young people. To begin with this will be in specific areas, such as certain play and youth services however if this approach is successful then further areas will be added. Young people will be central to the YLC and the decision making about youth services.

Merton A key driver has been budget reductions due to grant fall out. The Merton Focus has been a reaffirming of the relationship between the council and voluntary sector for the delivery of the Open access service. There is an agreement on what open access

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is designed to achieve called the design principles and the Borough has been divided into 3 distinct areas, each with a budget based on need. In each are partnerships of organisations will be encouraged to bid collectively to run a local youth offer. They will be expected to increase the level on income above that which the council is committing in its 3-‐year contract. A core of central services will support the organisations, and this will include a community development function to enable the partnerships to work. This approach challenges the autonomy of organizations, but is designed to create a more coordinated and unified offer locally. They are running a pilot in one area in 2012 and will commission their second partnership from 2013. All area partnerships must make young people’s voice central if they are to be commissioned. Southwark This is a period of transition for Southwark; previously it has taken an historical grant funding approach, with limited focus on outcomes. The current driver is to push up standards in both commissioned and in-‐house services. The current focus is on re-‐branding the in-‐house services, driving up standards, marketing the offer and refurbishing the centres. Developing policies and procedures and robust performance management is a core function of the work being developed strategically. This is part of the 16-‐month process and has been strongly supported and endorsed by members. Pilot commissioning processes are in place for a year for the outsourced services, with a review period aiming to be fully commissioning a range of provision across the borough within 1 year. A quality assurance focus and outcomes framework is being developed and tested.

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Annexe 2 Feedback from Survey Monkey

2012 future models for youth final oct 20121

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Transcript of 2012 future models for youth final oct 20121