We want all children and young people in Walsall to be healthy, happy and safe, to be loved, valued and respected and to have high aspirations for a successful future.
Walsall Children Services is a partner of Walsall Children & Young Peoples Partnership, chaired by the Director of Children's Services, whose purpose is to improve outcomes for Children and Young People in Walsall. It does this through the production of the Children and Young People's Plan (CYPP) Plan 2011- 2014 (PDF 168KB) which is closely monitored by the Partnership Board to ensure progress is on track.
The Department for Education has published its Improvement Notice setting out targets and measures for improving Walsall safeguarding children's services following an Ofsted inspection in July 2012.
The CYPP priorities are to work together to ensure that all children and young people are:
The key partners in the Children’s Partnership who have agreed the CYPP are:
The Partnership Board meets regularly and works to improve outcomes for children and young people. Its Terms of Reference, Governance, Agendas and minutes can be found here;
For our Partnership Roadmap & Strategic Direction of Travel please click here
Our five Partnership Core Strategies have been designed to provide a clear, explicit and accessible suite of overarching documents describing how Walsall will achieve its key priorities for children. Together they form our Children and Young People’s Plan (CYPP). Each partnership core strategy is underpinned by a set of supporting strategies which in turn inform service plans in the Children’s Services Directorate and Partner agencies. Together they all form our planning ‘bookshelf'.
The supporting strategies in the ‘bookshelf’ enable the ‘cross-cutting’ approach that we have established as our preferred way of engagement across Walsall Children and Young Peoples Partnership.
Underpinning all the work in our Partnership, reflected in these strategies, is the promotion of the safety and welfare for children and young people - implementing sound safeguarding practices and procedures and always adhering to the Walsall Safeguarding Children’s Board Child Protection Procedures.
Each year an annual review of performance and analysis of need allows us to refresh the success measures for each Priority in the Children and Young People’s Plan. This is based on a scoring system that ensures we highlight any areas of challenge and then respond to it. Once the areas of challenge are identified then a report card is produced for each priority success measure to help guide actions to address. The Children and Young Peoples Partnership board then agrees targets for improvement for each measure. These are then closely monitored and performance is reported to each Children and Young Peoples Partnership Board. Three documents provide the basis for our needs assessment;
We have developed our new Child and Family Support framework to deliver our Children and Young Peoples Plans priorities.
Our new way of working, focussing on family support, will improve outcomes for children while also reducing costs by providing intensive family support in two key areas;
We also term this as ‘reducing step-up and increasing step-down’.
Our new way of working is based on what our children need and want:
View the latest draft document that describes the framework (PDF 304KB)
Andy Stewart
Head of Early Intervention, Workforce & Partnerships
Children's Zone 2D
2nd floor, Civic Centre
Darwall Street
Walsall
WS1 1TP
Telephone 01922 658365
Email stewarta@walsall.gov.uk