Islington Social Workers Doing what Counts and Measuring

Islington Social Workers Doing what Counts and Measuring what Matters to make children safer A Joint Proposal from London Borough of Islington and University of Bedfordshire Section 1 – Lead contact details Cathy Blair Director Targeted and Specialist Children and Families Services London Borough of Islington 222 Upper Street, London N1 1XR Email: [email protected] Donald Forrester Professor of Social Work Research Director of Tilda Goldberg Centre; Academic Director, Frontline Academy University of Bedfordshire Email: [email protected]

Section 2 – Partnership Details Partnership working is critical to the design and implementation of our proposal and Appendix 1 contains letters which evidence that our partner agencies are fully committed to support this innovation bid. Dr Morris Zwi, Clinical Director, Whittington Health CAMHS – financial support and clinical supervision Dr Peter Fuggle Clincal Director, Anna Freud Centre – clinical supervision and service provision through Early Years Parenting Unit

DfE – Islington Innovation Proposal - Final

Dr Isobel Fleming, Programme Manager - Child Outcomes Research Consortium (CORC) - outcomes evaluation Sabrina Rees - Head of Children’s Commissioning Islington Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)

Section 3 – Our Vision for Change Our aim is that in Islington workers will become more effective in helping families and in protecting children. To do this we will transform the service so that workers can spend more time with families, and be provided with training, supervision and feedback to allow them to become excellent. A core element of this transformation is that across the service we will ‘Measure What Matters’- systematically collect evidence on the quality of practice and its impact on parents and children, and use this evidence to drive improvement for individual workers, teams and the service as a whole. Key elements of our vision are that: •

Social Workers will visit families more frequently and use increased skills to make better relationships with parents and children. This will help them to motivate parents to change and to care safely for their children. They will do this by using tried and tested ways of helping people and assessing and managing risks to children.

•

Social Workers will agree goals with families and these will become a plan for collaborative working, they will be able to use evidence based tools and support for reflective and thoughtful risk assessment, to inform the plan and to measure the progress of the family. Where there are concerns about the progress being made there will be clear evidence for deciding on next steps.

•

Social Workers will be able to fully utilise professionals from other disciplines when the concerns for a child are very high risk. For such families this may lead to a more intensive service being provided and the social worker will be able to involve other disciplines e.g. family therapist to complement the input of the social worker.

•

Social Work effectiveness will improve because in addition to extensive training and organisational reform to allow more time with families, practitioners will be observed regularly and will get individual feedback on the skills they demonstrate in practice. They will have regular supervision to help them reflect and explore different hypothesis for understanding the needs and risks in the family.

•

Social Work practice and service design and delivery will be focused on ‘measuring what matters’, rather than what is easy to count. Senior managers will be able to use different language and understanding to make enquiries about the safety of children, e.g. by asking about the quality and effectiveness of the social work practice and the impact of this on the outcomes for children, rather than focussing on the number of days that an assessment has taken.

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The very challenging factors in Islington’s demography together with its well functioning public services, e.g. no dependency on agency staffing and stable senior leadership team create ideal conditions for testing innovation and new ways of working that can be scalable to larger sites with similar characteristics. Refer to Appendix 2 ‘The Islington Context’ for supporting evidence.

Section 4 – The Rationale for Change What is the nature of the problem we will address? Children’s Social Care in Islington were rated as “good” with “outstanding features” by Ofsted in 2012; yet we believe that we can and should become significantly better. In common with most Children’s Social Care in England our workers do not consistently create meaningful change in working with families. We could and should work more intensively, more skilfully and more effectively with the families who need our services. Our evidence for this comes from the children and young people we work with, from listening to our workers, from evaluations of innovative services we have pioneered and from a recent in-depth research study of 610 families allocated a worker in Islington. The voices of our children, young people and workers We have well established groups for children in need, disabled children and children in care. Our children tell us: • • • •

“I don’t see my social worker as much as I would like to!” There is “too much reliance on other agencies to do their jobs” The least helpful thing a social worker did was “brought in other people”. Social workers need “less cases and more employment so that they could do their job properly”.

Perhaps the key insight from children and young people is that they described how connecting and talking with staff left them with an experience of themselves ‘opening up’ to different opportunities. We also regularly consult with our workers, and held events to involve them in preparing this proposal. Our workers tell a similar story to the children we work with. They tell us that they want more time for intensive, high quality face-to-face contact with families. They tell us we need to reduce caseloads to allow more face-to-face work. They also say that to enable this they need a reduced administrative burden and improved technology, as well as easy access to consultation, advice and supervision from other professionals. They are passionate about helping children and families and want to be supported in this as they progress, rather than to feel pushed into management. Evidence from research in Islington This evidence was reinforced by findings from a major research study carried out in Islington in 2012-14 by the Tilda Goldberg Centre (see Appendix 3). This study looked at all 610 families allocated a worker over 7 months and provides a wealth of robust evidence about our service. We believe it is the most in-depth study of practice and 3


outcomes in Children’s Social care, ever undertaken, in the UK. It also explores the process of creating change in Children’s Social Care and insights from this element of the study are fundamental to our current proposal. Overall the study found that most parents liked their worker and that most families experienced positive changes following involvement of a social worker. However, it was relatively rare for the worker to have actively helped create these positive changes. Workers in general saw too little of the family to actually work to create change: on average they saw families once every four weeks. This limited level of contact was compounded by relatively low levels of skill demonstrated by workers. The communication style tended to be prescriptive and did not build meaningful collaboration for the majority of families. Perhaps even more concerningly, in around a fifth of the 131 interviews observed it was not possible for researchers to identify what the purpose of the conversation was. In a further substantial proportion of interviews workers were simply gathering information in a rather superficial way that appeared driven by procedural expectations. This paints a concerning picture in which social workers spend considerable amounts of time – their most valuable resource – achieving relatively little with families. Changing this and putting purposeful and effective work at the centre of everything we do is the heart of our current proposal. The study also provides some of the most robust evidence available linking social worker skills to outcomes for families. The Motivational Interviewing skills of workers predicted whether parents were engaged and the level of anxiety and stress in parents. This in turn was strongly linked to family and child welfare outcomes. We believe this is the first time that researchers have demonstrated links between worker skills and outcomes for families: this provides a crucial element of our proposal for reform. However, the study was not simply a description of practice, it was also an investigation of how to improve practice. Half of our workers were randomised to receive a 12 week programme of skills development in Motivational Interviewing. Over the next 7 months families were randomised to workers who had received the training and those who had not. We were surprised and disappointed to find that a relatively intense skills development programme had no measurable impact on either the practice of workers or outcomes for families. Put another way, we tried to train and supervise workers to show the skills that the study demonstrated make a difference, yet no change was observed. We return to these findings below, but in developing our understanding of what should be incorporated into our vision for Islington we also wanted to learn lessons from a local service that has had considerable success. Evidence from our Adolescent Multi Agency Support Service (AMASS) AMASS is a service that works with teenagers who are at risk of coming into care, usually because the young person presents with serious behavioural challenges. Where this is the case a team involving therapists, social workers and family support workers work with the allocated social worker to provide intensive support to help the family. Families are seen several times a week, progress is reviewed each week with all professionals and the parent and child present, and the input benefits from expert 4


guidance from highly qualified clinicians, who meet weekly to consider the effectiveness of the work, the progress and safety of the child. AMASS was established in 2006 with Invest to Save funding from the council. Since it started it has successfully prevented 84% of all children referred to it from being admitted to care, with 74% remaining with their families until they are 18. Financially for every £1 spent, AMASS produces a saving of £2.57 to the care system per year. This increases to £4.88 over 2 years. AMASS was subject of a positive independent evaluation by the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes (Brodie et al, 2008). We believe that there are a relatively small number of families – families with a high risk of children entering care – where skillful work by a single worker will not be enough. These families differ from the current AMASS cohort in that they are younger children and the focus is abuse or neglect. We believe that these families would benefit from a model similar to our AMASS service. Indeed, the families have so many similarities that for many we believe it would be like providing AMASS when the child is 13 months old rather than 13 years old. We think the improvements we see in family life for teenagers would be profoundly life changing if translated into care for younger children. This demonstrates a key element of our thinking, namely that investing in effective service delivery has the potential to reduce costs in the long-term. We believe we cannot afford to waste valuable social work resources in meeting families and achieving little. Conversely, we believe effective services can reduce the number of children entering care, the proportion of re-referrals for the same underlying reason and the turnover of the staff team. These assumptions are built into our costing model. Conclusions We have reflected on these sources of evidence, supplemented by our reading of the international literature. In doing so we have been struck by the fact that the challenges we face in Islington seem to be endemic across Children’s Social Care in England. Indeed, the realisation that this is the case is part of the rationale for the Innovation Programme. But why are these problems so widespread? One reason is that too often local authorities are not focused upon the best outcomes for children and families. The reasons for this are complex, but a central problem is that data routinely measured by local authorities and reported to DfE and used by OFSTED is often more about process than outcome, and important things that should be measured are not. As a result, those leading services at every level – from first line supervisor to Chief Executive - are not able to ‘Measure What Matters’. Leaders therefore obtain a picture of the service that is based on what can be counted, not what should count. Things that are easy to count, like the number of days an assessment takes, outweigh more important outcomes, such as how well children are progressing or the extent to which parents are changing their behaviour. Perversely, a focus on what can easily be counted creates an illusion of safety, but makes it very difficult to answer the question “how do you know that the service is effective and children are safe?”

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One consequence of this is that because procedural measures are so dominant in the grading of local authorities by DfE and Ofsted, they filter down and influence all areas of practice, becoming key drivers for direct work with children and families. The implication that procedural measures are more important than outcomes prevents social workers from routinely doing high quality direct work and this has negative consequences for children and families. Although measuring what matters – outcomes for children and families – is more difficult, we believe it is possible with an innovative approach inspired by the study described above. Our proposal tries to embed measuring what matters as an integral part of whole system reform. In reflecting on the lessons from our research and experience we have concluded that: •

•

•

Changing practice requires commitment across the whole organisation. Training is not enough: the whole organisation needs to commit to a vision of practice, and policies, procedures, training, supervision and every element of agency culture needs to be reformed to achieve this vision. The vision of practice needs to be holistic: addressing communication skills in isolation is not enough. A coherent vision needs to encompass risk assessment, risk management, effective social work help and the effective coordination of help from various sources. Finally, the data we collected for research purposes would have been incredibly helpful for individual workers and the service as a whole if we could find ways of feeding it back into constant service development. We propose to do that in the proposed reform programme.

We think things can be done very differently. Through a coherent, evidence based vision of good practice and a process of measuring what matters we believe the work of children’s social care services can be re-focused making it more purposeful and effective. In the next section we outline how we propose to do that.

Section 5 – Our Proposed Solution Our proposal for transformational change in Islington has three core elements. At the heart of our proposal is a clear, specific and we believe inspiring vision of good practice that is based on evidence about what makes a difference for families and children. Our transformation programme aims to allow us to achieve this vision and our vision defines what we think it important to measure to discover whether we are succeeding in achieving it. We call this measuring what matters. We now provide more information on each of these elements. 1. Our Vision: A Islington Practice Model We will ensure that workers are spending more time working with families to create meaningful change. To ensure this time is purposeful we expect all workers to use proven ways of helping people. The Core Offer combines three components:

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i) Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a form of counselling focused on supporting behaviour change. Initially developed in relation to alcohol problems, it has been found to be effective in helping people with a wide range of behaviour problems. MI has been extensively and successfully used in situations where workers need to combine care and control, such as probation and prison. Furthermore, MI is centrally concerned with understanding resistance to help and engaging often apparently hard to engage people. It is therefore useful both as a way of maximising the likelihood that families will engage with our workers and as a way of helping create change in itself. Most importantly, MI skills predicted engagement and outcomes in our Islington study. However, social workers do more than talk to people, coordinating the involvement of a variety of agencies and ensuring practical help is as important as effective listening and engagement. To recognise this we are combining MI with Task Centred Work (TCW). ii) Task Centred Work (TCW) is a core approach in social work in which workers and clients collaboratively develop, carry out and review achievable plans. This allows a transparent agreement about the expectations of all parties and opportunities to review progress. While workers often identify themselves as doing TCW, in fact they rarely carry out this approach with the attention to collaborative plan development and review that is necessary. With their complementary foci on engaging families in meaningful change and developing and reviewing plans to achieve change MI and TCW are a natural “fit”. However, in Children’s Social Care almost all help is offered in the context of risk assessment and risk management. Incorporating MI and TCW into our approach to risk is therefore crucial. iii) Motivational Risk Assessment and Management involves developing a shared understanding of risk assessment and management that is consistent with our vision for effective help for families. We believe that risk assessment is inherently uncertain and complex. It requires thoughtful and intelligent workers who are supported to reflect and challenge their assumptions. We want our workers to think, think and think again when assessing risk, and no ways of supporting risk assessment could or should replace this. It is also important that workers do not just “assess”. We want them to work with families and others to actively manage risk: reducing risk factors, supporting resilience and protective factors while developing the capabilities of parents and children. Assessment and intervention will therefore be inter-twined, with risk management as a key focus for this. We propose to develop a model for risk assessment and risk management that is based on solid theoretical and evidential foundations and that incorporates the fundamental values of MI and TCW. This will require: • •

A balanced focus on strengths and solutions as well as risks and problems; Supervision that will be focused on generating multiple hypotheses about what is happening within each family; 7


• • •

An assessment plan designed to explore the hypotheses by collecting different types of evidence to confirm or refute the theories about the family; A negotiated plan to harness strengths and address risks with families; Some structured tools to support reflective and transparent practice. For instance, we envisage Goal Attainment Scaling being incorporated into all practice with families. This is a research tool which involves concretely identifying specific foci for work, describing in detail the current nature of the problem and agreeing aims for the work over 6 or 12 weeks.

Every family will receive help using this Core Offer. However, we recognise that some families require a more Enhanced Offer. Where child protection concerns are more serious a single worker for a family is not enough. Too often social workers refer out to other agencies to provide this type of intensive work. However, the Islington vision sees social workers as the key agents of change for families. It therefore aims to keep social workers at the heart of work with families even where more intensive work or additional expertise is required. These principles are at the heart of our Enhanced Offer aimed at families where children are at high risk of coming into care, which is based on lessons from our AMASS service. Where children are at risk of entering care we believe that families often require: • • • •

More intensive input that allows assertive engagement in challenging situations; Professionals who can bring different skills sets and different ways of understanding the issues for families; An approach that can swiftly provide the services required; An enduring relationship with their social worker, so that additional input complements and provides consistency.

Our Enhanced Offer is aimed at the minority of families where the risk is high and needs are so complex that there is a risk of the children coming into care: we estimate 60 families a year. For these families we propose to use a pool of multidisciplinary professionals that the social worker will be able to bring in and coordinate for the duration of the intervention. More detail about the model, including a case illustration can be read at Appendix 4. 2. Our Transformation Programme Detail of our project plan is provided in section10. Here we outline the key elements of our transformation programme. These are: Embedding The Vision– Staff are keen to continue to be fully involved in this next stage of our journey and have already contributed to the vision and development of the practice model. Phase one described below will involve further collaboration with front line staff to develop, refine and embed the vision and model. Working to ensure staff involvement and ownership in our Vision for ensuring social workers are effective change agents will be central to everything we do. 8


Delivering a new service design – In Phase 1 we will clearly specify the operational model with updated policies and procedures for what has been referred to in this bid as the Core Offer and the Enhanced Offer. The nature of the design will be reviewed regularly using feedback from “Measuring what matters”. Delivering ‘Measuring What Matters’– Producing a new monitoring and evaluation framework and a performance dashboard along with the selection of measures and other tools, which details how we will measure practice excellence, service user outcomes and how we will embed risk assessment and management into everything we do. This area of work will include considering any flexibilities we may want the DfE to consider as well as close liaison with the DfE and Ofsted in terms of the potential for this part of our innovation proposal to influence the future national regulatory framework. In addition, feedback will be incorporated into the supervision and skills development of individual social workers. We proposed to focus attention on addressing the skills and practice of first line supervisors to enhance their ability to observe and feedback on practice skills. A primary element of their job needs to be to create excellent social workers, and we will provide the training and coaching they need to do so. Ensuring staff have the right knowledge and skills – This strand of work will develop extensive training programmes for staff to work in the new model. Initially to be delivered jointly by Islington and the Tilda Goldberg Centre by the end of the project this will be delivered in-house by our best workers. This is related to defining the professional career pathway for social workers, including for example the recently announced Approved Child Protection Worker status. Ensuring we have the right staff – recruitment of additional staff across social care, business support and health services to enable us to deliver the new models as well as the practice evaluators who will be monitoring the quality and effectiveness of the delivery of the new model. Our selection processes will be modified to ensure that we select those capable of applying the range of skills necessary, and we will test this capacity at interview. We will positively support staff who are unable to achieve new standards of competence. Reviewing Roles and Tasks - This strand of work will review the tasks required when working with families and identify those that need to remain core to the function of the social worker and those that can be considered ‘support’ or ‘back office’ tasks. We will seek to dispense with some and have others delivered by others wherever possible. We will review all forms and practice frameworks against the requirements of the practice model, and the IT interface, we will make software changes, with a view to reducing bureaucracy and steamlining recording expectations within our children’s social care electronic information system. Monitoring Operational Delivery – making sure we capture the impact of change and any risks as it happens for staff and for service users as soon as the new model comes into effect is critical to ensuring services remain safe during the project. Ensuring that 9


‘measuring what matters’ is able to generate management information that informs operational staff about the quality of the service and the impact on outcomes that we are seeking to achieve through this project. We will discuss with the DfE maintaining a shadow data set of performance indicators for DfE reporting purposes but will not be using this to drive performance reporting within the department. 3. Measuring What Matters (MwM) The central concept behind MwM is that obtaining and feeding back robust and meaningful evidence about the quality of practice and the outcomes for children and families can and should be a core element of creating excellence in Children’s Social care. We believe that the failure to embed feedback into practice and service delivery contributes to many of the problems in Children’s Social Care. Lack of feedback means that it is difficult for people at every level of the organisation to be clear on the quality of their service. To this end MwM proposes embedding practice evaluators into social work teams. These workers will collect data based on the highly successful approach to data collection from our study in Islington. Information from that study was used for research purposes. The current proposal is that it is fed back to individual workers, their line managers and throughout the service in a swift and useful format. To this end during the study the following information will be collected: • •

• •

Quality of practice: All families allocated for more than two visits will be asked for consent to have a meeting with their social worker recorded Family views and problems: The practice evaluator meets the family separately and collects evidence on the experiences and problems of parents, children and the family using a mixture of bespoke measures and established research instruments. Outcomes: Six months later the practice evaluator collects evidence on outcomes and experiences of the service from families. This is supplemented by evidence from computerised records and social workers.

Using this data workers and their supervisors will get robust, independent ratings of skills in working with families. They will also be able to listen to recordings of their practice. In addition, evidence on skills, experiences and outcomes will be collated into a “dashboard” of data at the level of teams and the whole service. This will be used as a key tool for driving system change, with monthly and quarterly reviews of the data produced. In Appendix 5 we provide an example dashboard and a brief example of what it might tell us and how it might be useful to illustrate this. However, we want to ensure that MwM can be developed into a sustainable model. To this end we will deliver it in three phases. Measuring what Matters has three phases: Phase One (17/12/2014 to 31/3/2015): Building the Model

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During the initial stages of the programme, the academic team will work closely with workers and managers to specify and refine the details of our Core offer and Enhanced Offer and therefore what needs to be measured. We will also engage with Ofsted and with DfE in relation to flexibilities. Training in MI and TCW will be provided for all staff and senior managers Phase Two (1/4/2015 to 31/6/2016): Delivering the Model MwM will be at the heart of delivering the model, driving practice and service level changes. To this end, social workers will get feedback within a week relating to the quality of the work they undertook for every family they are allocated. Information on this and the experiences of parents and children will be collated for teams and the service overall on a monthly basis to provide a “dashboard” for constant feedback. This will be achieved using embedded practice evaluators who will collect data as outlined above. Phase Three (Closing 01/07/16 – 31/3/2017): Embedding Measuring What Matters The level of resourcing for MwM is not sustainable in the long-term, but we want to embed the approach into our practice permanently. All line managers and above will receive training and coaching around observing direct practice and robustly rating it. We plan to create practice evaluator roles within the service who may be Senior Social Workers. This is likely to replace some current Quality Assurance methods. We will work collaboratively to develop a model of practice feedback that is sustainable for Islington as well as one that can be used in other authorities nationally. Note that the closing phase of the project is longer than the DfE project period, this is because for Islington this is a 2 year project.. For more information see Appendix 6

Section 6 – Scalability We believe that our project has the capacity to influence change across the sector in a wide variety of ways. We do not believe there ever could or should be a “one size fits all” approach to delivery of Children’s Social Care. Therefore “scalability” involves identifying the elements of our programme that could help transform services nationally or across a variety of authorities. We believe the following elements have such potential: Measuring what Matters •

Our measures of practice and outcomes would allow transformation programmes across the country to measure: a. The skills of their workers b. The experiences of parents and children c. To what degree change is achieved

•

Our identification of key practice skills could be used to assess social worker skill: a. For local authorities in selection and promotion of workers b. As part of social work education, ASYE and beyond 11


c. Nationally in the testing for the Registered Practitioner role •

Key elements of our measures could be incorporated into national inspection frameworks. For instance, perhaps local authorities might be expected to record a certain proportion of interviews and have them scored independently. Inspectors could quality control this and be assured of the quality of practice. Or authorities could systematically collect evidence on parental experiences of services using measures adapted from this project. We believe inclusion in national inspection regimes offers the opportunity fundamentally to change the nature of Children’s Social care, by ensuring leaders focus on the quality of practice and outcomes for children and families.

Core Offer • There are remarkably few coherent models for practice for Children’s Social Care, and limited robust evidence on the strengths and limitations of each. Our Core Offer provides a coherent, evidence based approach to delivery of services that will have lessons for other authorities and services. •

Enhanced Offer The robust data collection will establish whether intensive intervention succeeds in reducing the need for care. In this we are fortunate to have baseline data from the previous study before the Enhanced Offer. We believe this may be the element of the proposal with most immediate and obvious cost savings and therefore one that many local authorities would be interested in.

Section 7 – Project Budget Value for Money We believe that our approach to improving social work practice will enable more children to live safely with their families, and hence deliver value for money by reducing the number of children in care. Our analysis indicates that we can reduce our care population by 15% (48 children) bringing our rate of children in care, in line with statistical neighbours, without compromising child safety. Achieving this outcome will provide a saving to the local authority of £1.1m, which will be re invested in the service model, to create sustainability. We anticipate that it will take two years to achieve this from the point of implementation in April 2015. We understand that a more effective social work service may increase demand for early help services, because more families will be referred to early help services following a successful social work intervention. The council are committed to maintaining our existing level of early help services for the duration of the project to support this level of demand. Additional savings will accrue from reducing repeat referrrals and stabilising the workforce, continuing to prevent the need for dependency on agency staffing, and reducing staff turnover, because we have a more developed approach to staff development, validation of skills and competency that means more experienced staff will stay in Islington, and importantly in frontline practice. 12


The chart above shows the total cost of the new model including investment from the local authority together with funding sought from the Department for Education. Funding sought from the DfE totals £2,961,087 up to 31 March 2016, with the local authority ‘re-focusing’ non-statutory services and identified project funding, at a total contribution of £1.855,187 over the same period. These ‘re-focused’ services will be ring-fenced and protected from local authority efficiency savings over the funding timeframe indicated. The local authority is then forecast to achieve cashable efficiency savings which, together with the re-focused services, will help sustain the model during the two years post DfE funding. The cost of the service over this period reduces to £3.7m per annum, from £4.7m in 15/16. There is a ‘funding gap’ in 2016/17 of £351,068, reflecting the phased approach of the reduction in Children Looked After numbers, which will be met from local authority ‘Invest to Save’ allocations. The full year effect of identified cashable savings will be fully materialised during 2017/18 with the service expected to be able to re-invest (cashable savings less cost of service) the sum of £226,447 back into the provision.

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Costs are all revenue, no capital funding being requested. To summarise, the costs of the Innovation Proposal are as follows: Evaluation and Research Costs: £ 773,433 Practice Model: £1,899,812 Change Team: £ 287,842 The total bid to DfE is

£2,961,087

The detailed costings can be read at Appendix 7.

Section 8 – Project Risks The Project Risk Register can be read at Appendix 8. There are 2 risk areas identified that need to be highlighted at this stage. 1) The council recognises there will be £351k funding gap in 2016/7. The council are committed to enabling full delivery of the outcomes, and are willing to support the shortfall, using an invest to save approach to bridge the gap provided the Project Board have shown suitable progress on the project deliverables. 2) The numbers of social workers that need to be recruited in by 1st of April 2015. Ideally we would want all our social work posts filled by 1st of April with permanent staff to make sure that the benefits of reducing caseloads and freeing up social work time is achievable and to enable us to invest our training and development of staff into people who are committed to staying in the organisation. However that may not be achievable and we will therefore launch an agency recruitment campaign by the end of February for any posts which have not resulted in appointments. We anticipate that some of those agency workers might be encouraged by what we are doing to innovate front line social work and therefore choose to stay and apply for permanent jobs later on. We accept that for social work teams and families this may result in the first 3 months of the new service in particular, resulting in some front line staffing changes. We believe that this is better than keeping posts vacant waiting for permanent staff because that would result in the service model not being able to be implemented properly. The dedicated senior project officer will be assigned to lead on the recruitment campaigns for the first 5 months of the project in partnership with HR.

Section 9 - Project Delivery and Project Plan Ensuring an Authorising Environment Islington’s Chief Executive, DCS and Executive Members are fully supportive of this proposal and will actively engage with the development and delivery of the innovation.

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Islington CCG, Whittington Health and the Anna Freud Centre have co produced this innovative proposal and are fully supportive and will join the Programme Board. Within Islington, the Project Sponsor will be the Director of Targeted and Specialist Children and Families Services who will report directly to the DCS, the Chief Executive, Lead Elected Member and Leader of the Council, through the existing safeguarding accountability structures. Professor Donald Forrester will be responsible for the MwM strand. Ensuring Effective Project Delivery Our approach to the delivery of our transformation programme will be rooted in Prince2 project management methodology. The project plan, which can be read at Appendix 9, shows the different work packages which the Project Manager will be responsible for monitoring for the duration of the project along with the project governance and communication strategy strands that come with all projects. Each work package will be assigned a team leader. These team leaders are our operational staff, and representatives from University of Bedfordshire who will all be seconded into the project for a percentage of their working week, to help deliver the overall programme of work. For all of them, this transformation programme links to their area of responsibility and therefore their engagement throughout the project period is seen as a key success factor in making the change happen. They have all been involved already in the Proposal preparation stages and we are very confident that they will continue to play an instrumental role in making this project a success. Each of them will have a group of practitioners from relevant partnership agencies and/or different professionals to assist them in delivering the products required by their work package and they will meet regularly to review progress and report progress and issues back to the Project Manager. External Evaluation External evaluation will supplement and verify the evaluative evidence internal to the delivery of the proposal and will focus on: • Verifying the data • Supplementing the evidence with information from focus groups of children adults and staff • Providing any addional requirements of the overall programme LIST OF APPENDICES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Partnership letters confirming commitment to the project The Islington Context Supplementary Measuring What Matters Information Supplementary Model Information Score Card 15


6. 7. 8. 9.

Theory of Change The budget cost model The risk register The project plan

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Islington Social Workers Doing what Counts and Measuring

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