Voluntary Sector Summit on Early Help October 22nd

In October, Beth Plant, Manager of Policy and Influence at Macc along with Elaine Morrison Head of Commissioning 10-19 years and the Lead on Early Help for Manchester City Council held a Summit for voluntary and community sector groups that worked with children, young people and families came together to discuss their role in Early Help.

There were several reasons for this:

• The recent Ofsted Inspection, which found that Manchester’s Children’s Services and Safeguarding Children’s Board were inadequate and highlighted the need to strengthen the work around Early Help in the city
• The current social and economic context - the recession, public spending cuts, voluntary sector cuts and long-standing issues of social and economic deprivation in local communities.
• The reduction in real wages and welfare benefits and the increasing use of sanctions impacting the communities that we work with.
• Public sector and voluntary sector workers are all overstretched trying to tackle increasing demand and need to come together with children, young people and families,  to think differently.

Fundamentally, there is overwhelming evidence that the effects of austerity measures, including the welfare reforms, have increased the challenges that all agencies face in providing services to provide positive activities, fun and play, increase wellbeing and resilience, create strong communities and keep vulnerable children and families safe.
 
In the first part, Elaine presented to the group, highlighting the key findings from OFSTED and the Council's ideas for how Early Help Could be developed. The presentation is available here.

What is Early Help?

There was  a frank discussion about what Early Help actually  is:

The existing Council Strategy on Early Help  and accompanying Threshold of Need Document is available here
 
The current definition used by the Council is :

Public Service workers acting early, appropriately and assertively supported by a clear pathway to services
and interventions available as early and as soon as possible to tackle issues which can emerge at any age

This definition  wasn’t felt to be inclusive of the voluntary sector role – because fundamentally  Early Help is what the voluntary sector does as its core:

•  The sector  works with people who may be under the radar of statutory services or don't trust statutory services.
•  The sector does a huge amount of work increasing resilience of individuals and communities
•  The sector is funded from a diverse range of sources including Trust Funds, Grants, Donations as well as public sector commissioning as well as carrying out a lot of activity which is unfunded.
• There is lack of clarity as to whether Early Help refers to preventative work which increases resilience in local communities or work at higher levels of need which stops people requiring a social worker.

Going forward we will be looking at developing a definition that is more inclusive of the voluntary sector.

Family Services Directory

Carol Tarpey from Children's Services introduced the  Family Services Directory, which is developing to be a one stop shop for people to find out what services and support they can access from the public and voluntary sector.

There have been several attempts to create a user friendly,  up to date directory before, that have had limited buy in and have quickly become out of date. However, the need for a directory remains for public and voluntary sector organisations to navigate the range of provision that exists. This site has lots of user friendly features to make navigation easier,  groups are able to update their own information on the directory and there are currently interesting discussions about how to add user feedback about the services received by organisations on the Directory.

Carol's Presentation is available here.

Voluntary and Community Sector Discussion about Early Help

The VCS split into three groups and had wide ranging discussions about the role the sector already plays delivering early help, what needs to happen for it to do more and how we can collaborate more effectively with cross sector partners.

The notes are available here:

Next Steps:

A follow up summit will take place on 3rd December will be arranged for the voluntary sector to take forward the ideas developed in the first meeting, click here to book a place at the summit.

Voluntary Sector Attendees signed up to participate in work groups on:

• Developing the tools to deliver Early Help
• Improving Early Help in the Local Area

Progress on these meetings will be fed back at the next event.

As this work progresses we will be organising cross-sector events to take forward Early Help.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please get in touch with:

Beth Plant
Policy and Influence Manager at Macc
[email protected]
0161 834 9823