Case Study: Setting up Woodside Children S Centre, Telford and Wrekin

Case study: Setting up Sutton Hill children’s centre, Telford & Wrekin

The Sutton Hill children’s centre is part of the Jubilee Sure Start programme, which has been running since 2003. The centre itself is due to open at the end of July 2005. This case study describes the different stages and issues that the Sure Start team have been through in developing the centre.

The Sutton Hill centre will serve a local population of about 3,000 people, of whom around 700 are under five years old. It one of the most deprived wards in the country, ranking among the highest 10% in the index of local deprivation. Public transport links to services such as hospitals are poor and there has, historically, been a lack of facilities for young people and parents.

Within walking distance of the new children’s centre building is a primary school, a community centre and a new medical centre. Together these will offer local residents access to a wide range of services within a small radius.

Building the centre

The Sure Start programme manager, Jane Clark, has overseen the development of the new site. For her, the physical environment is very important. One of her goals has been to ensure that the site is fully child and family friendly. It has a large reception area, with a receptionist to meet and greet families, access to drinks and an open plan space with a play area for children. The team hope that the design will help convey to families that ‘the centre is for them’. In addition, there is a large training room which will be used by a number of providers; a health room to be used by the health visitor, midwife and others; a number of smaller rooms for therapeutic work on a one-to-one and small group basis and a nursery for 42 children with a large outdoor play area.

Vision and goals

The Sutton Hill centre is in Telford & Wrekin, a unitary authority with a strong vision for children’s services. Over the last three years, as part of its work as an information sharing and assessment (ISA) trailblazer, it has developed a vision that all services have signed up to. Their overarching goals are the five set out in Every Child Matters:

Being healthy
Staying safe
Enjoying and achieving
Making a positive contribution
Economic well-being.

Telford & Wrekin is working to achieve these goals through a vision which puts ‘children’s services at the heart of communities’. This approach requires those working in this area to:

Ensure there is an equal focus on home and school life
Make sure all professionals identify children with additional needs at an early stage
Provide local mechanisms for professionals to share information and work together to provide early intervention
Provide support as necessary from specialist services, for example child protection training or speech and language therapy.

Within this overarching vision, the aim of the children’s centre is to provide local families with the services and support they need in a friendly environment, to achieve better outcomes for themselves and their children.

Staffing and services

The children’s centre will offer a range of services to local families, including:

Childcare
Early years learning, including literacy support
Speech and language therapy
Lifelong learning
Healthcare support and advice, including access to the community paediatrician, nutrition advice and help to quit smoking
Family support and parental outreach
Play facilities

At the moment, there is a core staff team with the following skills:

Food worker
Speech and language therapist
Family group coordinator
Smoking cessation worker
Health visitor
Home Start coordinator
Literacy support worker
Project worker

There are two coordinators, one for outreach and family support and one for community involvement. There is also a team of outreach workers based nearby who support families in the area. These staff are part of the local Sure Start programme and they will liaise with the children’s centre staff when necessary and encourage and support local families to use the services on offer The team includes a former teacher, a social worker, nurse, nursery nurse and a family support worker.

Jane has taken a case by case approach to staffing, seconding from partner agencies where possible and recruiting directly where staff shortages have meant there was not enough resource to meet the children’s centre requirements. The core staff team work part-time and all share an office base. Jane and the community involvement coordinator has made sure that they are all together on a Wednesday, as they feel it is important from a team-building perspective that there is at least one day in the week when everyone is in.

The nursery provision has been contracted out to an external provider, who will work within a service level agreement. There are also service level agreements with health partners. These agreements set out clear targets for the area of work and procedures for monitoring and review. They also set out arrangements for sickness and holiday cover and conflict resolution procedures. In addition to this formal arrangement, the development team will work with these partner agencies to develop a shared vision and shared policies which reflect the ethos and requirements of the children’s centre.

The children’s centre will also host a range of other agencies who will use the centre as a base from which to deliver community services, for example the LEA lifelong learning team, voluntary sector providers or teenage pregnancy services. A formal booking system will be in place to ensure the management is aware of the all services being delivered, and what these involve.

The community paediatrician has agreed to hold a monthly clinic at the centre, which will help families access specialist advice and identify when a hospital referral is necessary. This is an important development in an area with poor transport links to the local hospital. It has been facilitated through the new strategic structure in Telford & Wrekin, where five sub-groups oversee children’s services. Each of these correspond to the one of the five Every Child Matters outcomes, and Jane is a member of the ‘health’ sub-group. The community paediatrician is in the same group, along with other health staff who she would previously not have known.

One issue that the children’s centre development team is currently considering is how to that all services are delivered in an integrated way, so that anyone working with a child or their family is aware of other work that is going on within the centre, and things are not duplicated or missed. The development team will hold regular meetings to ensure that there is effective communication between all stakeholders involved in delivering services to families. At a more formal level, the Sure Start programme also has a monitoring officer who manages a database to show which families are receiving support from which agencies.

Multi-agency working

There are three things that Jane believes are vital for successful multi-agency working:

A clear, targeted vision
Excellent team building
Shared problem solving

This can be difficult to achieve in an environment like a children’s centre where different staff will be in on different days of the week and a range of services will be using the centre. So the development team has set about addressing this in a number of ways:

By being clear about the need for the core team to spend some time each week together, which has meant agreeing with all partner agencies that Wednesday will be one of the days that any seconded staff will work at the centre.
By having a month’s lead-in time at the centre, both to get services and equipment ready and to help people develop as a team. This induction period will provide an opportunity for team building and help all staff develop an understanding of different working cultures and structures
By providing training for the core team in action planning so that everyone is using the same format and working from the same starting point
By having regular staff meetings, both within the children’s centre and as part of the broader Jubilee Sure Start programme
By having a shared staff room for all staff and providers to help build informal links

Jane has also found that, when they are working in new ways, people generally want clarity and clear parameters around the work that they do. So, she has made sure that job descriptions are clear and that there is a strong management framework in place, including regular meetings with the children’s centre management as well as managers in the home agency (where relevant).

The experience of the Jubilee Sure Start programme suggests that it can take up to six months for someone to fully adjust to a new role in a multi-agency service. Jane uses this as a benchmark for people joining the service, to reassure them that it can take time to adjust to new ways of working, and to encourage them to give themselves time to adapt and reflect.

Integrated work is supported by the practitioners’ toolkit that was developed as part of the ISA project. The cornerstone of the approach is the ‘team around the child’ (TAC) for children with additional needs that require support from more than one agency. The TAC brings together parents and practitioners, regardless of agency boundaries, into a small, individualised team for each child who requires it. The functions of the TAC are to:

Agree the needs of the child and family
Agree the family support needs
Support the child to meet their identified needs
Arrange, as necessary, additional referrals based on a common assessment, as a pathway to targeted and specialist services
Review the support given to the child and family
Report, as required, to other review meetings or resource panels

The TAC approach has been piloted and is now being introduced across the authority. Five new ISA coordinators are taking up post, and will train staff in all children’s services in the TAC approach. This will include staff working in the Sutton Hill children’s centre, so that they can provide this kind of support to children with additional needs, as required.

Governance arrangements

For individual staff and providers there are a range of management and accountability arrangements in place. Staff on secondment are jointly managed by the home agency and the children’s centre. Service providers which are funded by the programme have a service level agreement in place which sets out the relationship between them and the centre. Currently, the centre is overseen by the Sure Start programme manager who reports into the multi-agency Sure Start programme board. However, these arrangements are currently being reviewed as part of the Change for Children programme in Telford & Wrekin.

Challenges and solutions

1. The need to foster community development skills. Because of the range of backgrounds that practitioners come from, many will not have had experience of working directly with the community. This kind of work requires a responsiveness and a flexibility that is very different to the approach taken in clinic-based practice. These skills can be developed through training and the induction period is an important time to do this. The induction period at Sutton Hill will cover skills such as group work with parents, providing information and publicising services, to help ensure that all staff develop a positive relationship with parents and carers from the start.

2. The need for managers in partner agencies to understand the implications of multi-agency working for their staff. As well as helping practitioners make the transition to working in children’s centres, Jane believes it is also important to help managers in their parent agencies understand what these staff will be doing and what support they will need. For example, regular joint meetings are often necessary, and very much welcomed by practitioners. Managers also need to understand the overall TAC approach, and the implications of this for resourcing, case management and line management and supervision. The authority-wide approach being taken in Telford & Wrekin to help people sign up to a common vision for children’s services and the development of ‘community clusters’ of all those agencies providing services for children and young people in a given geographical area will help ensure that more managers get involved in the development of multi-agency working and understand its implications for their staff.

3. Getting the right balance of management for the centre. The role of the children’s centre manager is likely to be a complex one, given the range of ways that services will be delivered through the centre – from directly recruited professionals through to sizeable contracts with local providers, such as nursery providers. The manager will have to help everyone working in the children’s centre to work within the Sure Start ethos and to deliver a coherent and integrated set of services to the local community. Jane and her team are currently working through these challenges to develop an appropriate governance and accountability structure for the centre, as well as identify a manager with the skills to manage a programme like this.

Further information

For further information please email Jane Clark at