Chichester Community Alliance

How the Chichester Community Alliance is using system leadership to integrate children’s services.

Summary

This case study relates how Chichester Community Alliance has been exploring collaborative models of leadership and governance to support multi-agency working for its early years and primary age children.

Key outcomes

Based on this case study, leaders of multi-agency collaborations could usefully consider the following questions:
- What intelligence is needed to ensure that the right people are involved in the right configurations for the right purposes? What role might the local authority play in helping to ‘map’ the terrain?
- How can groups of professionals best learn about each other’s beliefs, cultures and priorities in order to work together effectively? How quickly?
- What benefits and what disadvantages are associated with a lead organisation within a collaborative? How can you encourage other schools or organisations to lead development?
- When is the right time to begin succession planning in a collaborative?
- What criteria should be used to decide the appropriate level of formality for a collaborative? Should fragile early relationships or long-term sustainability be the deciding factor? Is it possible to balance the two?

Background

Chichester Community Alliance serves around 800 families in central Chichester. The fairly affluent community is predominantly white British, with a small number of migrant families from Eastern Europe. The alliance extends beyond education to include health, social services, the police and voluntary organisations.

The alliance was conceived as a way of providing strategic direction for the integration of children’s services in the area and grew from a multi-agency Sure Start project. It has explored models of leadership and governance that can provide efficient and effective multi-agency services to families.

The schools in the alliance are Chichester Nursery School and Children’s Centre, Portfield Primary School and Tangmere Primary School.

Challenges and issues

Bringing disciplines together

Each of the agencies in a multi-agency setting has discrete and distinctive professional beliefs, and a culture and set of protocols that govern how they think and act collaboratively. For example, the ability to make decisions is located at different levels in the different organisations.

Representatives do not therefore always have delegated authority from their organisations to speak and act on their behalf. Alliance leaders have had to try to maintain ownership among participants while securing sponsorship at the appropriate level.

Creating balance between agencies

The alliance originated in and is led by the nursery school and children’s centre. The co-leaders therefore have to work to counter the perception that it is education-centred and peripheral to the concerns of the other agencies.

Regular presentations by colleagues from other agencies go only some way to creating a balanced agenda.

Integrating new leadership roles

It has been a challenge to plan for new roles that are not part of recognised hierarchies and accountabilities. The absence of any formal, legal entity also makes it impossible for the alliance to appoint outside its own organisations.

One suggestion is to identify a ‘home’ organisation for each role. This would provide line management and require compliance with associated professional regulations. Explicit protocols would be needed to make sense of any conflicting accountabilities, and processes such as performance management would have to be aligned.

Ensuring the right structures and processes

With multi-agency working, it becomes essential to ensure that new structures and processes are flexible, robust and inclusive. They need to accommodate the variety of contributions from colleagues across the range of agencies involved in the alliance.

Over-reliance on a few individuals

Leadership of the alliance relies heavily on the skills and contributions of a very few people and has no separate identity or existence outside them.

This places a burden on the co-leaders to sustain and develop the alliance. It leaves it vulnerable if there are changes of priority from the participating organisations or if the co-leaders move on.

The Chichester Community Alliance approach

Establishing the alliance

The alliance operates as a subcommittee of the governing body of the nursery school and children’s centre, and expects to be adopted on the same basis by the two primary schools.

It has its own terms of reference and strategic plan. Its two co-leaders, Candy Daffern, headteacher of the nursery school, and Val Hughes, chair of governors, provide strategic and operational leadership.

Monthly meetings

The alliance meets monthly as a forum for consultation and collaborative planning. It has well-designed activities and presentations to involve all parties, and representatives from each of the children’s services attend regularly.

Looking at new roles to support multi-agency working

The alliance has been developing prototype job descriptions for three new roles to provide leadership capacity for a multi-agency setting.

Firstly, a hybrid role would sit between teacher and outreach worker, requiring some knowledge of mental health issues and the needs of early years children and their families. Secondly, a business manager would focus on funding and fundraising. Thirdly, an information and communication worker would gather the data the alliance needs for planning and decision-making.

Next steps

Extend invitations to alliance meetings to headteachers outside the alliance to ensure that plans and decisions meet the needs of all families in the area.
Building collaborative capacity

The alliance has made progress in building its collaborative capacity to agree strategic priorities. It has also developed its ability to hold key partners to account for agreed priorities and actions.

Through this collective capacity, it hopes to ensure effective integration of services, transparent processes for financial accountability, quality assurance criteria and protocols and, ultimately, enhanced provision of services.