Children and Young People's Plan

The Children's Plan: Building brighter futures sets out a compelling challenge - to make England the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up. This means world-class health outcomes, services of the highest quality, minimising inequalities, and tackling poverty. The Children and Young People's Plan (CYPP) is a powerful force in helping realise these ambitions - it drives better local integration of children's services; helps strengthen local partnership arrangements; and describes what improvements will be achieved in the local area, and when these improvements will be delivered.

We now need to build on the experience of developing CYPPs and bring a step-change in our approach to improving children's outcomes. By 2010 all areas are expected to have consistent and high quality arrangements in place for prevention, early identification and early intervention in order to make it easier for parents to support their children's development, to raise aspirations and to narrow gaps and improve outcomes for all.

Revised non-statutory CYPP guidance for local authorities (LAs) is being prepared for publication in December 2008. The new guidance is designed to replace previous guidance on the Children and Young People's Plan issued in 2005 and 2007. It will bring together the 2005 and 2007 CYPP regulations in one place, reflect the performance management arrangements including Local Area Agreements, and set out the proposed legislative changes for 2011.

Annual review 2008 - update for local authorities

The 2005 regulations require authorities to undertake an annual review of their CYPP. In response to enquiries on how LAs might review and roll forward their CYPPs from 2009 onwards the following clarification of regulations and timings has been prepared.

Clarification of regulations and timings

The Children and Young People's Plan (England) Regulations 2005 sets out the necessary steps local authorities must take for reviewing their CYPP:

1. The authority shall review their plan in each year in which the authority is not required to publish a plan.
2. During the conduct of such a review the authority shall consult such persons as they consider appropriate.
3. The authority shall publish the result of the review in such manner as they consider appropriate.

The recent consultation on proposed legislative changes to children's trusts indicated strong support for improving the consistency and impact of CYPPs. Subject to Parliament this will mean putting the Children's Trust Board on a statutory footing, extending the ownership of CYPPs to all statutory partners and placing the duty to produce the CYPP on the Children's Trust Board. It is expected that all areas will need to develop new CYPPs for 2011.

To permit flexibility in joint planning, CYPP regulations do not define the duration of the plan. LAs also have the flexibility to review and roll-forward an existing plan rather than creating an entirely new plan. While it would not be good practice to do this regularly, where new legislation will mean that any new plan has a very limited lifespan before it needs to be completely re-done, it can be justified under existing regulations. LAs review and publish their CYPP at different points of the year and they will want to consider how best to use this flexibility to align the timing of their CYPP with the proposed requirement to publish a new CYPP by April 2011.

Annual review and consultation requirements

LAs that wish to review and roll-forward their existing plan will need to ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the proposal to extend the plan period rather than completely re-do the plan. The best way to do this would be to ensure that all the bodies listed in regulation 7 (i.e. those who must be consulted on the preparation of a new plan) are consulted on the proposal to extend the plan, rather than following the regulation 8 review process of only consulting those who they consider appropriate. This approach will help to avoid any later argument that the regulation 7 bodies, who were expecting a new plan, were not aware of the proposal to extend the period of the existing plan.

Research

Strategic Planning in Local Authorities (Ofsted, 2006)

Analysis of Children and Young People's Plans (National Foundation for Educational Research, 2006)