INTRODUCTION
This guidance has been written to help school staff and allied health professionals ( AHPs) to work more effectively as partners supporting children and young people. The guidance itself is the result of extensive partnership working. It has been drawn from the experiences of parents and practitioners across Scotland who work in partnership to improve outcomes for children and young people with additional support needs. The guidance is needed because many of the parents and practitioners are saying that there is room for improvement in partnership working. This message was also clear in the HMIE report on the implementation of the Education (Additional support for learning (Scotland) Act 2004 ( HMIE, 2007). The report identifies ways in which the Scottish Government, authorities and schools can take action to improve the quality of partnership working between agencies. It also says that that there is a need to plan support services more clearly and improve opportunities for joint training of education staff and partner agencies. The allied health professions children's services action group, established by the Scottish Government, continued to identify barriers to effective partnership working. As a result the partnership working project was established jointly between the Scottish Government chief nursing officer directorate and schools directorate.
Partnership working however is not an end in itself. The purpose of this guidance is in line with the overall purpose of the Scottish Government. That is:
"To focus government and public services on creating a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing economic sustainable growth".
The focus is on outcomes rather than processes. This guidance therefore aims to improve outcomes for children and young people by improving partnership working. We can improve partnership working by evaluating where we are and identifying how we need to improve. The structure of the guidance supports this process of identifying strengths and areas for improvement. The first two sections look at leadership and processes. In each section we have identified what is considered to be good practice, issues to consider and signposts for improvement. Good leadership and effective processes enable partners to contribute to better outcomes for children and young people. The final section therefore focuses on impact and outcomes for children and young people. The guidance is offered to NHS staff and local authority staff as a way of benchmarking their own practice and evaluating together how effective their partnership working is at bringing about improvements for children and young people.
The work of the project team has been directed by a steering group which involves practitioners from education, health and other related policy areas within the Scottish Government. This written guidance is a summary of extensive engagement with parents, children and young people, practitioners in health and education, voluntary organisations and policy colleagues in Scottish Government. During this engagement we encountered many examples of good practice which are worth sharing across the country.
These examples and many other related resources are available on the web site related to this publication. In addition, the web site contains examples of current practice, evidence from research on partnership working and resources for continuing professional development. www.linktowebsite.gov.uk