About the joint planning and commissioning process
Every local area both plans and commissions children's services, but current examples of joint planning and commissioning are mostly limited to specific services such as drug action teams, behaviour and education support teams, child and adolescent mental health services or youth offending teams.
No single agency can deliver any one of the five outcomes for children or the 25 aims in the Outcomes Framework by working in isolation. In principle joint commissioning should be developed wherever the meeting of identified needs requires contributions from two or more children's trust partners.
The guidance on the duty to cooperate (Inter-agency Cooperation to Improve the Wellbeing of Children: Children's Trusts) sets out an overview of joint planning and commissioning in nine steps.
Download a diagram of the joint planning and commissioning process or read the nine steps below.
1) Look at the current pattern of outcomes for children and young people in their area, and recent trends, against national and relevant local comparators.
2) Look within the overall picture at outcomes for particular groups of young people.
3) Use all this data, and draw on the views of children, young people and their families, local communities and frontline staff, to develop an overall, integrated needs assessment.
4) Agree on the nature and scale of the local challenge, identify the resources available and set priorities for action.
5) Plan the pattern of service most likely to secure priority outcomes, considering carefully the ways in which resources can be increasingly focussed on prevention and early intervention.
6) Decide together how best to purchase or provide (commission) those services, including drawing in alternative providers to widen options and increase efficiency.
7) Develop and extend joint commissioning from pooled budgets and pooled resources.
8) Plan for the workforce development and other changes in local processes and ways of working necessary to support delivery.
9) Monitor and review to ensure services are working to deliver the ambitions set out for them.
For more information, view joint planning and commissioning
Guidance on inter-agency cooperation and an outline of the development of joint commissioning units are available below.
Inter-agency
Cooperation to Improve the Wellbeing of Children: Children's
Trusts
An
Outline of the Development of Joint Commissioning Units
This page was last updated on 27 November 2007
