Resources, commissioning and workforce

• Resources
• Other key partnership budgets
• Commissioning
• Children's workforce
• Facts and figures

Resources

Effective, co-ordinated use of resources is vital for improving outcomes. Hampshire’s Children’s Trust is evaluating progress towards aligned budgets as part of Trust development. This includes an analysis of all partners’ budgets for services for children and young people. Within the next year, the Children’s Trust will be able to evidence the use of all partner budgets (including the voluntary and community sector) in delivery of the CYPP priorities. At present, only Hampshire County Council’s budget for 2009/10 is confirmed. For indicative purposes, Hampshire PCT’s children’s services budget for 2008/09 was approximately £16.5 million.

The Children’s Services Department’s gross cash limited budget of £970.2 million for 2009/10 outlines the committed resources necessary to fulfil the activities outlined in the Plan. The greatest proportion of this budget is allocated to schools, with the remainder allocated between local education services and children’s social care, as demonstrated by diagram 9.

Diagram 9: Hampshire County Council Children’s Services Department cash limited budget 2009/10

The allocation of school budgets is detailed in diagrams 10 and 11, below.

Diagram 10: Individual schools cash limited budgets 2009/10

Diagram 11: Schools cash limited budgets (excluding individual school budgets), 2009/10

The allocation of budgets for local education services is detailed in diagram 12.

Diagram 12: Local education authority services cash limited budget 2009/10

The allocation of budgets to children’s social care is shown in diagram 13 below.

Diagram 13: Children’s social care cash limited budget 2009/10

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Other key partnership budgets

Hampshire has made strong progress towards the strategic alignment of budgets and commissioning processes, as evidenced by the CAMHS Commissioning Group and the Wessex Youth Offending Team.

The CAMHS Commissioning Group is a partnership between Hampshire County Council, Hampshire PCT and other organisations providing support for children and young people with emotional, social and mental health needs. There are a number of groups who work in partnership to implement the strategy and assess priority areas for spend and services based on local and county needs analysis: CAMHS Commissioning Group; CAMHS Strategy Group; Local Implementation Groups; and the CAMHS Practitioners’ Network.The pooled budget for 2009/10 is approximately £10 million. Since pooled budgets were established, there have been a number of developments, including:

• investment in an IT solution for recording and analysis;
• new good practice protocols;
• launch of the CAMHS pilot rapid and intensive support system;
• increased joint training and development opportunities;
• a capital programme to support developments to premises.

The Wessex Youth Offending Team is a multi-disciplinary organisation working with Children’s Services and the Criminal Justice System aiming to prevent offending behaviour by children and young people. The total budget for 2009/10, including partner contributions, is approximately £10 million.

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Commissioning

Central to improving outcomes for children and young people is effective joint planning and commissioning of services between all partners. Hampshire Children’s Trust is committed to:

• further developing arrangements for the joint commissioning of services;
• identifying additional opportunities to develop stronger partnership arrangements;
• co-ordinating and aligning budgets and resources to achieve local and county-wide priorities;
• the continued development of robust planning, budgeting and performance monitoring systems;
• using resources efficiently and effectively, e.g. joint commissioning of services and investment in prevention and early intervention measures;
• targeting resources to areas of greatest need;
• the provision and maintenance of an effective infrastructure of efficient IT systems and excellent business processes.

Strategic commissioning involves all Children’s Trust partners. Providers of children’s services in Hampshire are working to align their different commissioning programmes as part of Trust developments. Hampshire County Council has made significant progress towards more integrated services with the creation of the Commissioning Co-ordination Team in 2008. This team is taking a key lead in the following areas:

• commissioning preventive services across children’s services;
• letting, reviewing and regulating contracts;
• co-ordinating a major programme of grant-aid for voluntary sector stakeholders in partnership with the children’s voluntary sector - building preventive capacity at district level in support of local targets.

Processes will be strengthened and streamlined during 2009, to deliver a real difference for children, young people and families. Activities include: Bringing together previously separate funding and grant aiding streams to create a single integrated grant system, widely known and accessible, with a single application route and open processes linked to priority targets for improvement. Strengthening links with voluntary sector and local district partners, including involvement in planning and funding decisions about county-wide preventive services; and playing an active role in developing local capacity and supporting innovation. Planning for more local consideration of funding decisions. Building on excellent multi-agency relationships and seeking to pool preventive funding wherever appropriate for greater impact. Ensuring that the process for commissioning services is well known and applied methodically and providing a consultancy service to advise and steer emerging preventive services e.g. through locality teams and children’s centres to make best use of resources. Ensuring that the views and aspirations of local children, young people and families are listened to, and make a difference to outcomes and insisting that those who benefit from funding can demonstrate how they ensure that participation and consultation takes place.

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Children’s workforce

The challenging agenda set by Hampshire’s CYPP can only be met by integrated working. All partners are committed to supporting and developing the children’s workforce across the public, private, voluntary and community sectors in order to meet the needs of children and young people and work more effectively together.

As part of Children’s Trust developments, an integrated county level workforce strategy will be developed, taking into account the national Children’s Plan 2020 Workforce Strategy. This will provide additional clarity around responsibilities for delivering the CYPP priorities and establish a long term vision for integrated working in Hampshire. The strategy will outline:

• how partners will take account of recruitment and workforce development issues when designing, commissioning and delivering services for children and young people;
• how partners will work together to improve skills and knowledge across the whole children’s workforce;
• approaches to recruitment and continuous workforce development (including the development of leaders and the sharing of good practice and training opportunities).

Joint working is already underway, particularly between Hampshire County Council and key Children’s Trust partners; examples include:

• the establishment of a joint recruitment portal, covering vacancies at County Council and District Council level;
• the availability of County Council Children’s Services Department induction to the voluntary and community sector;
• co-ordination of safeguarding training for voluntary and community providers by the children and young people's voluntary alliance (now known as 'The Alliance').

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Facts and figures

Hampshire County Council employs the equivalent of 16,798 full time staff in the county’s schools (September 2008). The number has risen by 10% since September 2005 and now makes up 60% of the County Council’s full time equivalent staff.

3,248 staff are employed by the Children’s Services Department (September 2008), equivalent to 2,569 full time staff members. The allocation of these staff by branch/team is shown in diagram 14 below.

Diagram 14: Children’s Services Department staff

The equivalent of 432 full time staff are employed in children’s services at Hampshire PCT (Care Services Board Paper, September 2008, CSB08/086), however this does not take into account the thousands of staff who work in primary care e.g. GPs.

Approximately 467 voluntary and community organisations deliver services to Hampshire’s children and young people every year (The Alliance Business Plan 2009-12), making up a large section of the children’s workforce. It is estimated that 34% of children and young people take part in activities co-ordinated by the voluntary and community sector outside of school.

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