Centrally-driven approach to commissioning local services

Case study

Merton Local Authority located 10 of its 11 children’s centres alongside schools to facilitate delivery of Every Child Matters (ECM). The authority uses children’s centre funding to address local priorities.

Key learning

Economies of scale and Merton’s experience in commissioning services have enabled the authority to establish universal, equitable and coherent delivery across the borough.
Central management and negotiation reduces the person hours spent talking to key agencies about what is needed in each centre.
Equality of access is supported by two multi-agency teams, one of which is the Borough’s Supporting Families Team, which provides a range of services across all of Merton’s children’s centres.

Background

Merton Local Authority decided to take a uniform approach to the challenge of providing access to a range of services across a densely populated borough. It has placed its children’s centres on strategically located school sites, selected to ensure an even spread of provision.

The authority, which lies in south west London, gives children’s services a high profile and is committed to tackling child poverty, narrowing the attainment gap and meeting adult employability targets. While the borough doesn’t score highly on standard indices of deprivation, approximately 20 per cent of Merton’s children live in poverty.

Key challenges

Relevant expertise

Headteachers and governors on the selected co-location sites were, on the whole, not experienced commissioners of services outside education.

Limitations of partner agencies

Limited capacity is a key challenge to further progress, particularly in relation to the commissioning and overall capacity of local health services.

Long term uncertainty

There continues to be uncertainty over the long term availability of funding streams and the different roles that might need to be played by different agencies, including third sector partners.

Solutions

Learning new skills

Retaining much of the responsibility for commissioning and evaluation centrally means that the authority can offer a model of how to do these tasks from which schools can learn, developing their own skills and understanding of how commissioning works.

Managing for consistency and local need

The local authority line manages children’s centre managers and two multi-agency teams that work across all the centres. Headteachers play a key role in contributing to local agendas and challenging local authority priorities and strategies. Each centre has its own management board and the local centre manager leads on extended services for the host school. The authority’s adviser for extended services is the performance manager for all of the centre managers.

Next steps

Merton expects its co-located, inter-generational offer across the borough to make a background contribution to the achievement of all ECM outcomes. The borough is now considering what might be the most appropriate success criteria for this work. Possibilities include critical referral rates, engagement with extended services, the success of headteachers as community leaders, parent and pupil satisfaction surveys and, from spring 2010, Ofsted judgements on the quality of children’s centres. In the longer term, Merton thinks the experience of a centrally managed co-location will help schools develop their capacity to understand how service commissioning works so that they can do it themselves.

Further information

For further information contact Merton Council by email at childrens.centres@merton.gov.uk.