What's holding back children's services

We know that the early years of a child’s life, from conception, are a critical period, determining physical, cognitive, social and emotional, and behavioural development in ways that have lifelong effects. What parents and communities do during this time is hugely important for their children, and how local services are organised to help them really matters.   

In the Autumn of 2020 EIF recruited 20 local areas, half in Wales and half in England, to carry out a local assessment of arrangements for support in maternity and early years. 

The focus was on the local system as a whole, so understanding how different services and organisations work together as partners to offer joined-up support for families. The process was intended to help each local area to establish a baseline which takes account of the initial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to help them to plan for the future. 

We will publish a report later this year drawing out the key themes from this work including examples of how local areas are working together for families. 
In the meantime, local areas described some common and familiar barriers to progress: 

• The way funding is available to local areas is a limiting factor on local strategic planning. The majority of local areas described a loss of funding, short-term and time limited funding, rigid eligibility criteria which limits what funding can be used for, and a dazzling confusion of different funding streams. Overall, this is holding back the ability of local leaders to plan for coherent and longer-term transformation and integration. 
• The pandemic response has stretched limited capacity even more thinly. There is no lack of enthusiasm for creating more joined up local arrangements for maternity and early years services. There is, however, a lack of time: for specialists such as speech and language therapists, health visitors and midwives to attend planning groups or training; for partners more generally to collect data on how population needs are changing, and review what research tells us about evidence-based approaches; and for co-ordinating local planning work and developing local strategy. 
• More integrated working continues to be held back by information sharing barriers. The majority of local areas lack joined up systems for collecting, storing and sharing personal data, and some partners still have paper records. Data protection laws are being interpreted differently by local stakeholders, and tools such as information sharing protocols are often insufficient. Knowledge is lost as children transition between services and areas. 

The overriding message from this work, however, is an upbeat one about local innovation and persistence – how local stakeholders are working together to overcome the barriers and how government in England and Wales can help. We will say more on this later in the Autumn.