Appendix 3: Issues to consider and signposts for improvement
LEADERSHIP
Issues to consider
1. To what extent are allied health professionals and education professionals motivated by the same vision of what they want children and young people to achieve?
2. Where are the greatest challenges to effective partnership working?
3. How can these challenges be met by effective leadership and shared vision?
4. What are the interpersonal skills which lead to effective partnership working?
5. What is effective communication in the context of partnership working?
6. Does your organisation have in place processes and opportunities for honest discussion and open feedback regarding leadership behaviours?
7. Does your organisation give due prominence to personal leadership and interpersonal skills within performance review and appraisal systems?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their leadership by:
1. Taking account of the importance of good relationships and interpersonal skills.
2. Understanding and respecting the roles of parents and of each professional and the demands of that role.
3. Ensuring there is a consistent and shared vision about what partners want children and young people to achieve.
4. Developing good communication across agencies at every level.
UNDERSTANDING ROLES
Issues to consider
1. What is your experience of the various roles of allied health professionals in addition to direct work with children and young people?
2. What are the advantages of an allied health professional building skills and knowledge among education staff rather than working directly with a child?
3. In what circumstances might indirect work be more effective than direct therapy?
4. What is the role of the class teacher in partnership working with allied health professionals?
5. How confident are you that roles are clear to parents, children and young people and how do you know?
6. Taking account of the different ways AHPs work, is there an appropriate balance in the current working arrangements for AHPs? (Universal, targeted, specialist roles detailed in appendix 1)
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their partnership working by:
1. Ensuring that allied health professionals, education staff and parents are all clear about each other's roles in supporting the child or young person.
2. Raising awareness of the value of indirect work such as training for education staff and parents.
3. Ensuring there is a shared rationale for indirect work so that this is not seen as a second best option for the child or young person.
4. Developing skills and knowledge within the education system through training, awareness raising, modelling and shadowing for education staff and parents.
5. Considering an enhanced knowledge of other professionals' roles as part of an individual's wider continuing professional development.
JOINT STRATEGIC PLANNING
Issues to consider
1. How does planning at a strategic level support activities at an operational level?
2. How do senior managers in education and the relevant AHP managers in health review the effectiveness of partnership working and service delivery?
3. Are financial arrangements efficient and do they represent best value so that partners can deliver the best service possible to children and young people?
4. How aware are staff of the ways in which their activity contributes towards achieving the higher level strategic objectives of their organisation?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their strategic planning by:
1. Ensuring there is a consistent and shared vision about what partners want children and young people to achieve.
2. Developing good communication at strategic level across organisations.
3. Ensuring that planning at local level articulates with the priorities set out in the single outcome agreement by the community planning partnership.
JOINTLY PLANNING THE DELIVERY OF SERVICES AT SCHOOL LEVEL
Issues to consider
1. What is the value of a written record of agreement between the school and the AHP?
2. What are the challenges and benefits in planning for the session ahead, both for allied health professionals and for school management?
3. What are the issues that need to be addressed during the meeting at the start of the session in your context?
4. How will a discussion and service level agreement help if significant concerns arise on either side?
5. Is there a clear link between the service level agreement at school level and the more strategic level of planning between health and education?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their joint service delivery by:
1. Agreeing the broad structure of service delivery between the allied health professional and the school at the start of a school session.
2. Addressing practical issues at the start of the school session including a place to work; arrangements for occasions when meetings are cancelled or an allied health professional is unable to attend; arrangements for occasions when a child or young person is absent from school.
3. Ensuring that allied health professionals have a named contact in the school.
4. Ensuring that the named contact in school knows the line manager of the AHP and how to make contact.
5. Recognising the challenges and limitations within which each service operates.
JOINT PLANNING TO MEET THE NEEDS OF INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
Issues to consider
1. How confident are we that we have created a culture which encourages all partners to be involved in planning, including parents and young people?
2. What are the barriers to effective planning and how can we act together to minimise these barriers?
3. Where effective joint planning takes place, are there clear lines of accountability?
4. How close are we to producing a single plan in line with the principles of Getting it right for every child?
5. How do we know that joint planning is better than planning separately?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their joint planning by:
1. Ensuring time is available for effective planning and valuing joint planning as a key part of support for the child.
2. Getting involved as early as possible in planning.
3. Ensuring parents are centrally involved in planning discussions and meetings.
4. Having a streamlined process leading to a single shared plan.
5. Being clear about the benefits to children arising from joint planning.
JOINT WORKING TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
Issues to consider
1. How can we plan to deliver more joint interventions rather than working in isolation?
2. How are parents involved in delivering interventions?
3. How can we use Curriculum for Excellence to ensure the work of the AHPs links closely to the outcomes and experiences?
4. How can AHPs make an effective contribution to literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing across the school?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their joint working by:
1. Being clear about which interventions are more effectively delivered together and which are more effectively delivered by a single service.
2. Ensuring that AHPs are familiar with the relevant parts of Curriculum for Excellence so that they can plan effective joint work with school staff.
3. Examining their own practice and identifying how much of the support for children and young people is actually delivered as a partnerships.
PARENTS AS PARTNERS
Issues to consider
1. How do you know how effective your relationships are with parents?
2. How could your communication skills with parents be improved?
3. What steps can be taken to ensure effective parental involvement in assessment, planning and interventions for children?
4. What do you do to support and encourage more reluctant parents to be involved in their child's education?
5. How do you gather information on parents' perceptions of their involvement with partners in health and education?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of parental involvement by:
1. Involving parents as early and as much as possible in all relevant processes involving their children.
2. Ensuring that all information is in a form that is easily accessible to parents.
3. Treating parents as valued partners with unique insights into their child's additional support needs.
4. Checking you are taking account of the parent perspective when making decisions.
5. Ensuring newly qualified staff are given good role models in working with parents as partners.
JOINT TRAINING AND CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Issues to consider
1. Do we have an effective system in place for identifying joint CPD needs and if not what steps can be taken to put this in place?
2. To what extent do individual organisations plan for joint continuing professional development?
3. To what extent do individual organisations plan to deliver training jointly with a partner?
4. What do we consider to be good joint CPD?
5. Are we taking a sufficiently broad look at the variety of forms CPD can take?
6. How do we evaluate the impact of joint CPD on staff and on children, young people and their families?
Signposts for improvement. Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of their training and continuing professional development by:
1. Ensuring that both health and education routinely plan for joint training opportunities for staff.
2. Encouraging the use of a broader range of CPD opportunities for some staff to include work shadowing, special interest groups, joint working groups and journal clubs.
3. Using the skills and knowledge of allied health professionals to improve the capacity of education staff to meet the learning needs of a broader range of children and young people.
4. Encouraging allied health professionals to make use of existing CPD resources within education including the Journey to Excellence web site and other resources hosted by Learning Teaching Scotland including the Curriculum for Excellence resources and CPD Find.
5. Using the Guidance on Partnership Working between AHPs and Education and associated web resources as CPD material.
SELF-EVALUATION FOR IMPROVEMENT: HOW GOOD ARE WE AT WORKING TOGETHER?
Issues to consider
1. Do AHPs and education staff have a shared understanding of what self-evaluation is and the purpose of self-evaluation?
2. Is there an effective process in place for carrying out joint self-evaluation of partnership working?
3. Are there opportunities for colleagues from health and education to carry out peer observation as part of the self-evaluation process?
4. How might the results of self-evaluation be reported to stakeholders and used for planning improvements?
5. What are the indicators of quality that will be used in carrying out self-evaluation?
Signposts for improvement: Education and allied health professions can improve the quality and effectiveness of self-evaluation for improvement by:
1. Agreeing to evaluate with each other as a joint activity the quality of their services to children on an annual basis.
2. Practitioners reflecting on the effectiveness of partnership working on an ongoing basis.
3. Involving all stakeholders, including parents, children and young people, in their self-evaluation process.
IMPROVING OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
Issues to consider
1. How do partners identify which outcomes will be used to identify progress and therefore the outcome of partnership working?
2. Are all partners agreed on the value of gathering evidence on the collaborative advantage of working together?
3. Are AHPs sufficiently informed about Curriculum for Excellence to be able to contribute meaningfully to planning to achieve the outcomes?
4. How can AHP services record information on improved outcomes for children and young people and use the information in planning and resourcing services?
5. How can services use the evidence for collaborative advantage to inform school and service improvement plans?
Signposts for improvement: Education and allied health professions can improve outcomes for children and young people by:
1. Jointly agreeing what the outcomes of partnership working are.
2. Jointly identifying the small steps the child will make as he or she works towards achieving a particular outcome.
3. Agreeing what evidence will be used to demonstrate progress towards a particular outcome, whether this is qualitative or quantitative.
4. Identifying ways of recording progress and agreeing these with parents and with children or young people as appropriate.
5. Consider how this information can be used to inform the improvement of services.
ADHERENCE TO STATUTORY PRINCIPLES AND FULFILMENT OF STATUTORY DUTIES
Issues to consider
1. How are staff made aware of legislation, guidance and codes of practice which apply to their situation?
2. What are the main pieces of legislation which apply in your area?
3. Are you sufficiently familiar with legislation and codes of practice which affect your partners in supporting children and young people?
4. What systems are in place to ensure that staff comply with relevant legislation and act in accordance with relevant guidance and codes of practice?
5. How do you use information from evaluation, feedback and complaints processes within your own service?
Signposts for improvement: Education and allied health professions can improve outcomes for children and young people by:
1. Adhering to statutory principles as outlined in relevant legislation, guidance and codes of practice.
2. Monitoring feedback, complaints and reference to dispute resolution processes and learning from these.
3. Ensuring that AHPs and education staff are aware of the relevant legislation, guidance and codes of practice within which each operates.
4. Shaping the legislative and policy agenda by contributing to consultations on legislation and policy as appropriate.
Consultation Questions
In responding to the consultation on the draft guidance it would be helpful if you could consider the following questions in addition to other comments which you may wish to make.
1. Is the structure and content of the guidance clear and can you identify any way that the structure and content could be improved?
2. The guidance is structured to support joint reflection and service improvement. How effective do you think the guidance will be as a way to reflect on and improve partnership working?
3. When you consider the range of practice identified in the guidance, to what extent does this reflect your experience and expectations ?
4. The guidance offers guidance on the universal, targeted and specialist roles of AHPs. Is this model of practice consistent with current ways of working by AHPs?
5. Any other comments about any aspect of the guidance or consultation process
Please also complete the consultation response form below.
Thank you
RESPONDENT INFORMATION FORM
