Learning in and for interagency Working

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"Learning in and for interagency Working"
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Personalisation

• The proposal is that clients become
  coproducers of services and take a central part
  in the design and formulation of the particular
  service that is made available. stark contrast to
  the services that deliver a standardised offer
  to all clients whatever their needs
• Leadbeater, 2004

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Social Exclusion

• Social exclusion may be typified as loss of
  access to the most important life chances that a
  modern society offers, where those chances
  connect individuals to the mainstream of life in
  that society.
• New life chances new patterns of exclusion?
• Social inclusion involves clients as co-producers
  of services?

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Vulnerability and Resilience

• Causes of vulnerability are often complex
• Resilience is built through flexible responses
  from practitioners

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Changes in Interagency Work

• Responsive interagency work in these contexts
  requires a new way of conceptualising
  collaboration which recognises the
  construction of constantly changing combinations
  of people and resources across services, and
  their distribution over space and time.

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• Many services are shaped by their histories and
  organised for the convenience of the provider not
  the client (Cabinet Office, 2001).
• Audit Commission report (2002 p.52) suggests that
  there is a general consensus that agencies need
  to work more closely together to meet the needs
  of young people, but different spending
  priorities, boundaries and cultures make this
  difficult to achieve in practice
• Interagency working of such services tend to
  'underlap' rather than overlap and agencies can
  ignore the complexity their clients present

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The Childrens Fund Programme

• Launched in 2000
• Partnership working
• Preventative services
• Participation of children and young people
• Aged 5-13
• In 149 local authorities
• For local strengths and local needs

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The Green Paper, September 2003 Every Child
Matters

• Integrated teams of health and education
  professionals, social workers and Connexions
  advisers based in and around schools and
  Children's Centres
• Sweeping away legal, technical and cultural
  barriers to information sharing so that, for the
  first time, there can be effective communication
  between everyone with a responsibility for
  children
• Establish a clear framework of accountability at
  a national and local level with the appointment
  of a Director of Childrens Services in every
  local authority responsible for bringing all
  children's services together as Children's Trusts.

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Policy and Inclusion

• Current policy on social inclusion is running
  ahead of conceptualisations of inter-professional
  collaboration and the learning it requires in a
  number of fields
• Even Personalisation through Participation

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Working Together

• Young people need but typically dont get
  flexible and responsive service delivery
• Professionals need to LEARN how to work
  collaboratively
• Collaboration between practitioners needs to
  include collaboration with service users
• Collaboration with users currently seems to place
  them as users of resources rather than
  co-producers

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Mass Production Articulated knowledge
Development
Craft Tacit Knowledge
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Modularisation
Mass Customisation Architectural knowledge
Linking
Process Enhancement Practical Knowledge
Mass Production Articulated knowledge
Development
Craft Tacit Knowledge
Renewal
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Networking
Co-configuration
Modularisation
Mass Customisation Architectural knowledge
Linking
Process Enhancement Practical Knowledge
Mass Production Articulated knowledge
Development
Craft Tacit Knowledge
Renewal
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• Co-configuration
• Co-configuration includes interdependency between
  multiple producers in a strategic alliance or
  other pattern of partnership which
  collaboratively creates and maintains a complex
  package which integrates products and services
  and has a long life cycle.

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The NECF Partnership Case Studies (One element in
the Evaluation)

• Sixteen longitudinal case studies of Partnerships
• Seven months in each site
• Visits of one week every four weeks
• Structured (DWR)feedback sessions every month
• Working through layers from strategy, to
  providers, to users, to providers to strategy
• Case studies defined by activity theory

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The Challenges of Collaborative Practice

• A focus on the child in context
• Following the childs trajectory
• Talking across professional boundaries
• Using the expertise distributed across an area
• Users involved in designing pathways
• Systems-wide change

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Networks in Partnerships

• Networks are the beneath the surfacelifeblood
  of partnerships (Lowndes and Skelcher, 1998)
• New pathways are hacked through the jungle that
  can be more easily trodden a second time (Kings
  Fund, 2002)
• Cognitive trails are the first treadings of new
  pathways of interprofessional trust (NECF
  Cussins, 1992)

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Networks for Collaboration seen by NECF

• Old networks which sustain historical practices
• New networks, developments of older networks,
  newly mobilised configurations
• Cognitive trails between practitioners which may
  or may not become networks

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(Some of) The Research Questions

• How is a capacity for multi-agency collaboration
  developed across service providers? (Horizontal
  Learning)
• How are Partnership Boards learning from the
  experiences of service providers? (Vertical
  Learning)
• How are local authorities learning from the
  Funds experiences? (Vertical Learning)

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Horizontal Learning the work of an
area-co-ordinator

• This co-ordinator set up meetings in the
  locality. Initially they were for administrative
  matters. They developed into sites where service
  providers could learn more about what each other
  did and how other people could help support
  childrens trajectories of inclusion. These
  meetings very clearly became important boundary
  zones between services where practitioners could
  build trust.

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Horizontal Learning in the Boundary Zone

• One provider talked about how was able to help a
  refugee child access a football club set up for
  refugee and asylum seeking children. We would
  never have been able to do this unless the
  Childrens Fund had held those network meetings.

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Horizontal Learning across Service Providers
the co-location of services and joint training
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A Service Users Perspective on Multi-agency
Working

• ..if all the groups are sort of talking to each
  other and knowing what each other does then if
  someone goes to one of the groups and they say
  but this is what is going on in my life and
  then they identify the support needs and then
  theyll say well we can do this part of it, but
  that project will deal with that part better,
  this is our specialism, thats theirs Thats
  really going to help users.

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What Service Providers Said (1)

• It is about understanding at deeper levels or
  knowing each other at a deep level, because I
  think if we actually know each other better
  individually then you know we can makeits about
  connections isnt it, you are not sure about the
  child we are thinking about, but as we talk it
  through if there is no connection or not, and
  maybe not for that child, but maybe for another
  child.

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What Service Providers Said (2)

• And it may not be a massive weight on us in terms
  of having to do the work, but just adjusting what
  we are offering slightly to meet someones needs
  and someone elses request. But those are all the
  things that grow.and what happens when people
  get in a room and talk together, you just cant
  predict can you, because in the end you couldnt
  have schemed what comes out of it.

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Lack of Horizontal Learning being parachuted in
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Vertical Learning from the operational to the
strategic by creating a pillar structure
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Vertical Learning from the operational to the
strategic in task focused groups
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Vertical Learning from the strategic to the
local authority by connecting to champions

• The Childrens Fund was being stitched into key
  structures as a result of cross-representation
  between the Partnership Board and the Local
  Authority Unit responsible for taking forward
  changes in childrens services.
• Key strategic players were Board members. These
  included senior representatives of statutory
  agencies, one of whom was chair of the Board.
  There was an expectation that they would be able
  to effect changes in their own organisations.
• The really long-term impact will be when those
  members of the Board go back to their
  organisations over the next eighteen months and
  start pulling the levers of change.

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Vertical Learning from the Strategic Board to
the Local Authority by Building Networks

• We need to persuade different sets of actors,
  for example, different (local ) politicians. We
  have got to do work on networks (with them). We
  need dialogues that cut across in the right
  places (Local Politician)

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Learning Within and Between Systems how and
where does it seem to happen?

• Partnerships which confront difference at the
  strategic level seem more likely to enable the
  development of horizontal learning between
  service providers
• Where boundary zones between service providers or
  between providers and the strategic level are
  established we can see evidence of learning in
  changing practices
• Where there are no boundary zones we have seen
  rejection or resistance
• There is considerable reliance on champions for
  vertical learning from the strategic level to the
  local authority
• These boundary zones need to be formally
  established and have a purpose, even though the
  purpose may not be networking

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Learning Within and Between Systems how do we
understand what is going on?

• Effective boundary zones are object-oriented
  spaces where different interpretations of the
  object they are working on can be explored in
  relatively power neutral situations
• Boundary zones can set off new cognitive trails
  which allow practitioners to build trust, work
  across professional boundaries and learn to draw
  in the distributed expertise of the neighbourhood
• These trails are often object oriented i.e. they
  involve supporting a childs pathway of
  participation
• They are sometimes the work of responsive
  practitioners who are not always enabled by the
  working practices of their employing agencies
• It is easier to do this work when the employing
  agencies have reconfigured their systems e.g. by
  establishing a pillar structure for vertical
  learning

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How can responsive multi-agency work be supported?

• Practitioners need to learn how to recognise and
  access the distributed expertise of others
• The social practices of their employing agencies
  need to enable them to trust other professionals
• Efforts are needed to build the resilience of
  practitioners as they operate in new trails and
  networks
• We need to recognise that multi-agency working
  requires more explicit specialist expertise and
  not less
• Safe boundary zones for interaction around common
  purposes seem to be good starting points