Joining up the solutions: the rhetoric and practice of inter‐agency cooperation

Abstract

A three-year project placed home-school support workers in secondary schools. The intention was that they should work closely at operational level with other agencies to provide a cohesive local authority response to the needs of disaffected and excluded youngsters. Crucial distinctions emerged between project constraints, possibilities and bene®ts for agency personnel in the school-focused agencies and those external to the school. In relation to the external agencies, support workers ful®lled predominantly an information gathering and sharing role whereby they joined up the solutions of disparate agencies, whereas very effective forms of cooperation developed with the school-focused agencies. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. I n order to provide an effective`seamless' response to the needs of young people, it has long been recognised that agencies must work in close cooperation. More recently through legislation (for example, the 1989 Children Act and the 1996 Education Act) and guidance (for example, Department for Education and Employment), 1999; Department of Health, Home Of®ce and Department for Education and Employment, 1999; and Department of Health, 2000) the government has endorsed the importance of such cooperation by setting out speci®c requirements as to how agencies should work together in order to plan and implement`joined-up solutions' to social problems. However, inter-agency cooperation is recognised as problematic with clashes between professional cultures, competition between departments for local government funding, reductions in overall budgets and low morale being commonly cited as the main contributory factors (see, for example, Dyson and others, 1998;Hallett and Birchall, 1992;Vernon and Sinclair, 1998). Conducting an evaluation of a three-year Home Of®ce funded project Meeting Need and Challenging Crime in Partnership with Schools provided the opportunity to study the rhetoric and practice of inter-agency cooperation and to investigate the factors constraining and facilitating the implementation of joined-up solutions. The project placed social work trained home-school support Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Rosemary Webb* and Graham Vulliamy Department of Educational Studies, University of York *Correspondence to: Dr R. Webb, Department of Educational Studies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD. E-mail: rew7@york.ac.uk workers in secondary schools to support pupils at risk of exclusion and keep them in mainstream education. Thus it targeted assistance to those youngsters whose challenging behaviour and disaffection from school research has shown are indicators of the possibility of future offending (see for example, Audit Commission, 1996;Cullingford, 1999;Graham and Bowling, 1995).The project had two main aims which were to reduce the number of exclusions from school of youngsters with challenging behaviours and, in acknowledgement of the range of expertise required effectively to address their needs (Lupton and Sheppard, 1999) to ensure a cohesive loca...

More than the sum of its parts? inter‐professional working in the education of looked after children

“…Since the 1988 Education Reform Act enabled schools to take responsibility for much of their budget, the power of local education authorities (LEAs) to achieve consistency across schools in certain policy areas has diminished. Schools are often viewed as autonomous units with very different policies on discipline, exclusions, and levels of tolerance towards pupils with emotional and behavioural problems (Webb and Vulliamy, 2001). This has inherent difficulties for inter-professional work in such areas as LEAs may be unable to influence school decision-making.…”

“…Additional explanations highlight certain structural features of the care and education systems which can prevent the education of looked after children being prioritised. Key departments involved in looking after children are not always successful in adopting a corporate parenting approach and consequently fail to communicate effectively to share relevant information and coordinate services (Audit Commission, 1994; Borland and others, 1998;Roaf and Lloyd, 1995 2000), which emphasises the need to establish and enforce joint procedures and protocols to promote effective inter-agency collaboration.There is a body of research highlighting factors that support inter-agency work (Atkinson and others, 2002; Sloper and others, 1999;Stobbs, 1995;Webb and Vulliamy, 2001;Wigfall and Moss, 2001;Wilson and Charlton, 1997) and many of these are reflected in the joint guidance. This paper outlines what these supportive factors might be and illustrates their relevance, drawing on research in three English local authorities, to achieving collaboration around the education of looked after children.…”

Integrating objects of intervention and organizational relevance: the case of safeguarding children missing from education systems

“…What, however, our data suggests is that the service user's perspective on a solution provides a promising but challenging starting point for any integrated intervention, wherever the child becomes visible and whatever the professional perception of the problem. Being 'able to play my drums', having 'somewhere safe to play', 'getting a place of my own', 'having a boyfriend', were just some of the solutions that were offered to us as starting points but that wouldn't fit within the current boundaries of service provision, nor with specialist areas of expertise that professionals may want to preserve (Webb and Vulliamy, 2001). Our data, however, suggests that if services and those who work with children fail to start from the service user's objects of intervention, children and their carers will seek their own solutions, which can often confound the original difficulties they faced.…”

Un modèle d’équipe de soutien à l’enseignant pour offrir des services intégrés en contexte inclusif ontarien : le cas d’élèves présentant un trouble du spectre de l’autisme

“…Dans ce sens, nos données viennent appuyer les résultats de l'étude d'Andringa et Keller's (1991) qui démontrent clairement que le modèle des équipes de soutien, lorsqu'utilisé efficacement comme modèle collaboratif, peut assurer le maintien des élèves en difficulté en classe ordinaire (Labonté et Trépanier, 2011). En outre, il semble que le travail interagence contribue à diminuer l'exclusion des élèves qui ont des difficultés de comportement (Webb et Vuillamy, 2001). Il y a lieu de croire que cet état de fait s'applique également aux élèves qui présentent un trouble du spectre de l'autisme.…”