Intergrated Working: Guidance for Practitioners and Managers Consultation

The Northamptonshire Children and Young People’s Partnership want to ensure that, through effective partnership working, all children and young people in Northamptonshire are healthy, safe and are able to enjoy and achieve, so that they will make a positive contribution throughout their lives and achieve economic well-being.

This is a bold vision, and, if we are to be successful, every adult working with children and young people in the county must recognise their contribution to this work, and be prepared to adjust their working practice, where necessary, continually to improve outcomes for our children and young people.

This Guidance is intended to support practitioners and managers as they work together in a more integrated way.  It includes tools, agreements and guidance that will enable staff in each agency to work together more effectively.  It includes:

The National Context 

This section sets out the relevant national policy frameworks 

• Every Child Matters  
• Safeguarding is Everyone’s Business 
• Think Family

Integrated Working Processes

Children, young people and families are supported most effectively when services are planned and delivered in a co-ordinated way to offer integrated support across the continuum of needs and services. This section includes diagrams of these levels of need and is intended to provide a common language to describe and way of representing the range of need of children and young people in Northamptonshire.

Northamptonshire Continuum Charts

The purpose of this section is to:

• Introduce the Northamptonshire Continuum of Need model 
• Outline common risk triggers for beginning a common assessment 
• Provide descriptors of need against which those using Common Assessment can make a judgement of the level of need identified as part of the assessment

CAF interface with other assessments

This section describes the interface between the Common Assessment Framework and other key assessment/referral tools and key interventions.

Definition of a Team around the Family (TAF)

The Team around the Family brings together young people, parents and practitioners, regardless of agency boundaries, into a small, individualised team to ensure the needs of all children and young people in a family are met.  This section sets out a cross organisational agreement on the way in which a Team around the Family should operate.

Lead Professional

All children and young people with additional or complex needs requiring support from more than one practitioner should experience a seamless and effective service in which one practitioner takes a lead role to ensure services are co-ordinated, coherent and achieving intended outcomes.  This section summarises how the Lead Professional role will operate in Northamptonshire.

Information Sharing 

Step Up and Step Down Policies

“Step Up” policies are flow charts that detail how a child or young person supported through Common Assessment will continue to receive support as part of a more specialist assessment process e.g. social care, mental health or youth offending. It also explains the role of members of the CAF Team around the Family as the specialist agency takes on the lead role with a child or young person

“Step Down” policies describe how a CAF Team around the Family can be engaged by a specialist service, when they are bringing their support to an end.

These policies are in development and will be added when this Guidance is updated.

Area Based Working and Local Operational Teams (LOTS) 

Area based working offers the opportunity to use a new integrated structure to devise significant improvements in outcomes for children, young people, their families and communities.  This section describes how Area Based Working and Local Operational Teams will operate in Northamptonshire.

Glossary Acronyms – What Do they mean? 

The Guidance will be reviewed between September and December 2009.  Thereafter it si envisaged that it will be updated bi-annually.  It will be available to download in full (or in sections) from the web pages of the Local Safeguarding Children Board and Children and Young People’s Partnership.

We will inform you of any future updates.