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Events 2007

The Higher Education Role in Integrated Children’s Services: Preparing Tomorrow’s Professionals. (26 November 2007 at the Manchester Conference Centre) This conference was for educators and training providers in Higher Education, together with their partners (practitioners, employers and service users) who are developing and delivering programmes to meet the needs of Integrated Children’s Services.

The conference aimed to:

• inform and raise awareness of key issues for Higher Education providers and partner organisations around the Integrated Children’s Service agenda
• encourage and facilitate discussion around effective practice, barriers and solutions to managing cross-organisational and interprofessional change
• showcase educational initiatives and provide opportunity for discussion and development
• develop the ICS-HE network by providing opportunity for participants to meet, share ideas and experiences and gain further information about the Project activities
• provide a forum for discussion between representatives from Higher Education and those from a range of stakeholder groups involved in Integrated Children’s Services including employer, regulatory, service and professional organisations.

Events 2006

Stage 4 of the project (which comprises the main intervention study) commenced in October 2005 and will continue to the end of 2006. The research team is currently operating in three local authority research sites, in which it is conducting ‘developmental work research’ workshop cycles. The three research sites are very varied settings that illustrate contrasting strategic and operational approaches to addressing the post-Every Child Matters agenda in ‘children’s services’. The first is a large local authority that is widely regarded as leading edge in its implementation of multiagency working. The authority has adopted a strategic, top-down approach that has involved major restructurings of organisations and groupings around children’s services. Our focus is upon one of its recently formed multi-professional teams (MPTs). The formation of the MPTs has created a new division of labour in children’s services. Our initial analysis suggests that this has, in turn, given rise to new regulative discourses and new forms of legitimate practice, which are not encumbered by the rules of traditional professional silos. The workshops have suggested that staff in the MPT are working intently on a ‘new’ moral discourse about why they work as they do and the directions of future practice.

In the second local authority our work focuses on an extended school. The school is a multiagency site, insofar as it contracts staff from external agencies and relies extensively on school-based para-professionals, such as mentors, education welfare officers and behaviour support teachers. Our initial ethnographic and workshop research suggests that the school’s primary ‘multiagency’ objective is resolving behavioural problems (particularly around attendance) that hinder attainment. At present, multiagency services tend to be engaged in quick response to behaviour/ attendance needs.

In the third local authority we have worked with a grouping of staff involved in Children in Public Care services (CIPC). These professionals are located in the upper reaches of operational level; some have a degree of strategic control in areas such as staff training. The CIPC staff are not a multi-professional operational team and do not routinely work together outside the workshops. There is evidence that professionals may draw upon each other’s expertise but they still operate within the boundaries of their own organisations, which are not easily crossed. There is strong expression of support for multiagency working at strategic level but our initial research suggests that this does not always translate itself into an identifiable structure at operational level. However, there has been a bringing together of education and social care under ‘children’s services’ and a number of co-located teams exist.

During Stage 4 the research team has collected documentary, interview and observational data in collaboration with strategic and operational professionals in all three sites to feed into the series of six workshops that are taking place in each local authority. The project has also recruited experienced Children’s Services professionals from each local authority to join the research team as practitioner-researchers. Their incorporation into the research team is designed to promote ‘upstream’ dissemination of the innovations generated by the research intervention. The aim is to create a professional learning dynamic in the boundaries between operational, executive and strategic working.

BERA 2006

BERA 2006 Symposium abstract

Events 2005

In January 2005 Stage 3 of the LIW Project commenced, continuing through to September 2005. In Stage 3 the research team moved to a detailed examination of multiagency work practices via small-scale intensive studies in two local authorities. In the first of these we worked with the local Youth Offending Team (YOT), which has been operating as a co-located, multi-agency service for the past five years. It includes professionals from the police and probation services, plus social services, parenting, education, health and drugs and alcohol officers. In the second local authority we worked with the newly created Multi-Agency Project, a ‘virtual’ team comprising professionals from a range of services and agencies (social work, health, educational psychology, CAMHS, family support). These two very different teams provided diverse perspectives on multi-agency working.

In each local authority our research was organised around a sequence of four workshops, which drew upon the ‘developmental work research’ model devised by Yrjö Engeström and colleagues at the University of Helsinki. The workshops involved both strategic managers and operational staff. Prior to the workshops the research team collected interview and observational data that was scrutinised in the workshop settings by researchers and children’s services professionals from each local authority. The aim was to develop a reflective systemic analysis that built upon professionals’ ‘everyday’ understandings of multiagency working, juxtaposing these with ‘scientific’ analysis of the ways in which current working practices (or ‘activity systems’) either enabled or constrained the development of innovative multiagency working.

These workshop analyses focused upon:

Present: identifying contradictions (structural tensions) in current working practices

Past: encouraging professionals to consider the historical emergence of these working practices

Future: working with professionals to suggest new forms of practice that might effectively support innovations in multiagency working.

In short, the aim of the workshops was address professional learning by:

encouraging the recognition of areas in which there is a need for change in working practices

suggesting possibilities for change through re-conceptualising the ‘objects’ that professionals are working on and the ‘tools’ that professionals use in their multiagency work.

Our work with children’s services professionals in Stage 3 suggested that the learning which is most critical post-Every Child Matters involves professionals grasping the deep-seated rules of emergent multiagency practice. Across the course of each workshop series participants showed a concern to constructing readings of current practices and repeatedly emphasised processes of coming to know the potential networks or ‘trails’ of colleagues and resources that pre-figures effective multiagency working. These ‘knowing who’ trails are an example of the kinds of shifts in knowledge and practice that ‘developmental work research’ style workshops can support.

Another salient feature was the relationship between professional subjects, the objects of their practice and the rules that governed their activities. In the workshop settings it became apparent that responsive, ‘joined up’ service provision often called for a degree of ‘rule-bending’ on the part of staff. ‘Rule-bending’ occurred in cases where staff had identified the need for non-routine, partially improvised decision-making in order to meet highly personalised client needs and/ or rapidly changing situations. In such cases professionals sought to ensure that local authority processes and routines did not unduly constrain their responses to clients’ needs. We would suggest that constructive forms of rule-bending rely upon the creation of organisational climates that support flexible, responsive action by professionals and learn lessons for future practice from the ways in which staff have negotiated structural tensions between rules, objects and professional identity.

The outcomes of the workshops are reported in our February 2005 Newsletter, which can be found on our ‘Project Documents’ page.

Events 2004

The LIW team is currently planning its first set of workshops involving invited representatives from a range of English local authorities. The purpose of the workshops is to help us map the current shape of interagency working and to inform the research that we shall conduct in the subsequent stages of the project. The workshops are scheduled to take place in June; further information will be posted in the near future.