Commissioning

Family Support Strategy
Participation Strategy for Children and Young People in County Durham & The Parent Participation Strategy

The Government has set out its vision for children’s services in ‘Every Child Matters: Change for Children’. You can download a copy of the ECM Commissioning Framework at the bottom of this page.

The term ‘children’s services’ includes all services received by children, young people and their families including education, early years, sure start, components of health care such as health visitors, school nurses, CAMHS, services within social care and health including fostering and adoption, parenting programmes, child protection, services provided at a local level including housing, nursery provision, leisure services, connexions and youth engagement services including job centre plus, services provided by the voluntary community and independent sector and those services that engage the local police and probation.

By 2008, local authorities are required to have in place arrangements that produce coordinated and integrated working at all levels, from planning through to delivery with a focus on improving outcomes for children, young people and their families. In order to achieve this, some areas across the country are developing arrangements to put in place Children’s Trusts. Across County Durham, the County Council is consulting with its partner agencies on how best to deliver services for children and young people.

Within that context, the County Durham Every Child Matters Implementation Group has agreed to the development of a commissioning framework to ensure that children, young people and their families experience more coordinated/integrated and responsive services, and specialist support embedded in and accessible through universal services. The commissioning framework will bring together people into effective multi-professional teams underpinned by joint training supported by integrated processes.

The County Durham Every Child Matters Implementation Group has acknowledged that effective joint planning and commissioning is at the heart of improving outcomes for children, young people and their families. It has also acknowledged that no single agency can deliver the requirements of the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda.

A commissioning work stream group has been established to develop a framework that will help to specify and secure services for children, young people and their families.

The framework will offer the opportunity to map the collective resources of the statutory, voluntary and independent sector and to critically evaluate their performance against a range of criteria, feedback from children, young people and their families and an analysis of indicators and inspection findings.

It will also offer the scope for comparing what we currently deliver independently and collectively against best practice and will provide us all with the opportunity to consolidate what is working well and to re-focus and to develop new services, or alternative service configurations against the ideal. The commissioning framework will encompass all statutory, voluntary and independent sector services that children, young people and their families may need.

You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader from the Adobe website.

ECM COMMISSIONING FRAMEWORK FINAL VERSION DEC.pdf (15 pages, 180kb)

Date Published: January 2006