About Integrated Children’s Services

Integrated Children’s Services is about joined up services centered around the needs of children, young people and their families. It includes how services are planned, commissioned and delivered. This moves away from the traditional structuring of services around professional disciplines.

Background to Integrated Children's Services

The Integrated Children's Services proposals were passed into law in the Children Act 2004. For more information visit www.everychildmatters.gov.uk.

In order to improve the life chances and outcomes of the poorest and most disadvantaged families and break the cycle of poverty and inequality, the Government has identified five key outcomes for children and young people. These are: Staying safe, Being healthy, Enjoying and achieving, Achieving economic well-being and Making a positive contribution.

What does 'Integrated Children's Services' actually mean?

Integrated Children's Services apply to all services provided for children and young people from birth to the age of 19. With some vulnerable groups this can be extended to 25. In addition, it affects the services received by their parents or carers.

Integrating services means providing services for vulnerable children and their families provided alongside, and in most cases, co-located with the services that all children and young people are liable to access. For example, child care, schools and youth centres. This will make it easier to identify problems earlier and offer a graduated response

Examples of integrated services

Some examples of integrated services led by Nottingham City Council include:

• transforming the Sure Start programme for early years (0-4s) into a wider programme of Children’s Centres  (for 0-5s). These offer quality childcare, health and family welfare services;
• encouraging schools to extend out of hours activities and some secondary schools to become community hubs with employment, training, recreation, health services for the whole community;
• driving a £150 million programme of investment, called 'Building Schools for the Future', that will transform  secondary schools and provide opportunities to join-up services for children and provide them much closer to local communities; and
• exploring opportunities for multi-disciplinary team work whereby there is one named professional who leads and co-ordinates, allowing better information sharing and service provision.

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