Children's & Young People's Services

Developing Children's & Young People's Services

Introduction

This section is aimed at parents, carers, relevant professionals, school governors - anyone who has an interest in the development of children's services in Bexley. They are intended to inform people about progress with the changes being made to those services, who is involved and what might be ahead.

Education and Social Services in Bexley have been brought together into one "Children's and Young People's Services Directorate" that can move towards more joined up services designed around the needs of the citizen. A key priority is to improve services for diverse groups of children and the provision of a single access point to services for children, parents and schools.

This process will take several years to complete fully but our vision, as set out below, is that by 2008 significant changes will have taken place to improve outcomes for children and young people.

The Council believes it is essential that those likely to be affected by its children's services have the opportunity to influence any change. Therefore, the section includes a general contact form to help people ask questions or offer ideas and suggestions.

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Vision for the Future

In Bexley, our vision for 2008 is to have the following tangible developments in place:

Vision for the future

Diagram showing heirarchy of support teams for specific target groups such as young offenders and disabled children; through integrated teams, collaborative groups, and children's centres for "children on the edge"; to single bodies such as schools, voluntary groups and medical professionals who provide universal services.

We will develop new 'integrated' services for targeted groups, some of these services are already in place - LAC, Leaving Care, but some need to become integrated i.e. Children with Disabilities and we need to establish a Children Out of School Service.

We will develop integrated teams which will serve groups of schools and a community which will establish new ways of working, the focus will be on the preventative agenda with the common assessment framework and single referral route being developed here. The integrated team approach will be developed for services for young people.
We will work with all our schools to develop a range of collaborative, cluster or network arrangements which will then form the basis for the improvement agenda. These groupings may be a vehicle for delivery of commissioned services.
We will develop an Extended School strategy in which each school can be defined as an extended school and will develop additional provision in line with the needs of the local community. Schools will increasingly diversity their workforce and may be commissioned through the Children's Trust to deliver new services.
All of the above will be underpinned by a Strategic Review of school estate linked to the Regeneration agenda in Bexley.
All of the above will be underpinned by the development locally of the Children's Workforce Strategy.