West Lothian Life Stages Planning programme
Contact: Lorraine Gillies, West Lothian Council
The Life Stages Outcome Planning Programme is a substantial, high level strategic programme of change led by West Lothian Council working across the Community Planning Partnership (CPP). The overall aim of the programme is to enable the CPP to plan and deliver more effective interventions to tackle social inequalities and build successful communities across West Lothian using a Life Stage approach, targeting deprived geographical areas.
The approach recognises that those who are most at risk, and who generate the greatest expense in terms of demands on services, often lead complex lives, and hence focuses on redesigning services around the needs of the target group using a partnership approach. The programme has three objectives:
- To reduce inequalities by targeting services at those most at risk
- To shift resources upstream, reinforcing a prevention approach
- To ensure maximum impact from expenditure
The Life Stages covered by the programme are: early years; school age; young people in transition; working age and older people.
Within each life stage group, target populations have been identified as priority groups. For early years, the priority population is children aged 0-4 living in families misusing drugs or alcohol. The long-term outcome for this population is "Children are ready to start nursery and school and parents and carers are responsive to their children's developmental needs".
It is recognised that there is a clear link between the objectives of Life Stages and GIRFEC, which is the golden thread that knits together Government policy objectives for children and young people; and at a local level - the core components of GIRFEC are seen as one of the main delivery mechanisms for the Life Stages approach.
The programme will be fully integrated into West Lothian's Single Outcome Agreement for 2011-12. All services across the CPP are working directly towards delivery of the Life Stages outcomes - including Health, police, community and third sector bodies as well as a range of Council departments.
There is recognition within the programme of the importance of transition points between each of the stages, in order that service provision is seamless for children and young people. Communication across groups focussing on each of the life stages is, therefore, a key feature.
This programme meets the objectives of many of the elements of transformational change within the Early Years Framework. In particular, Life Stages contributes to delivery of the element "A coherent approach", which stresses the importance of integrated service planning and delivery based around the needs of the child, the alignment of aligning resources to local priorities for action and the development of a continuum of support from pregnancy through to primary school.
Scottish Borders Council: Early Years - Locality Based Planning
Contact: Jayne Bathgate
This project was set up in response to the publication of the Early Years Framework and a desire to think radically about working together across organisations in the early years sector, eradicating duplication and overlap to better meet local needs. It also links to the development of the Scottish Borders Early Years Strategy and the implementation of this by the Strategic Early Years group (a theme group of the Scottish Borders Children and Young People's Planning Partnership)..
The objectives of this project are to
- determine if better early years services can be provided more efficiently
- develop a body of knowledge and learning about effective cross-agency working
- develop opportunities across agencies for joint working, planning and integration of services
The project has focussed on an emerging early years model in one locality, with a view to transferring the elements of best practice to other localities.
The first step has been to carry out a mapping exercise across all partners, including the third sector. This mapping exercise gathered information on the numbers of children and families in the locality; the services being provided within the locality; the numbers of staff providing these services; the qualification levels of these staff; and the total spend on these services within the locality across all agencies.
Families and practitioners were interviewed about their experiences of services within the locality. There has been recognition that input at an early age to prevent more complex needs later on is a positive approach and one that we should build on. The feedback has highlighted areas of best practice and issues that require to be addressed. This information will be used to develop the emerging Early Years locality model and also to inform our Early Years Strategy.
Recommendations from the research have been presented to the Strategic Early Years group and these are being further developed by the project team. We will update this case study as work progresses.
For further information please contact:
Margot Black, Childcare Partnership Manager, MBlack2@scotborders.gov.uk ,
Tel 01835 824000
Jayne Bathgate, Policy and Planning Officer (Partnerships), jbathgate@scotborders.gov.uk , Tel 01835 824000