Issue - meetings

The Board will receive information on Starting Well (An update on the refreshed governance and accountability arrangements, including the role and scope of the new Board and groups reporting to it; HWBB role in governance; Children and Young People Partnership changes and update).

Contact: Jo-Anne Sanders, Service Director, Learning and Early Support

Stewart Horn, Head of Children’s Integrated Commissioning, informed the Board that he worked in an integrated role, representing the Integrated Care Boards, and Kirklees Council’s Children services. He explained that the update would focus on the new integrated governance arrangements for the health and wellbeing of children in Kirklees, called the Starting Well Program.

In summary, the Board was informed that in terms of historical context, there was the Children and Young People's Partnership Plan which ran from 2020 to 2023, and the Health and Wellbeing Board had oversight of that. The priorities in the plan included:

-      To reduce the effects of poverty on children - this has now become a Council wide focus, there is a tackling poverty partnership, there are various cost of living support programmes and poverty awareness when working with families. This ensures the continual monitoring and analysing of the negative effects of poverty on children's experiences and outcomes

-      To support inclusion and better outcomes for LGBT+ young people – this came out loud and clear on many of the children and young people surveys undertaken and as a result of this increase focus, a service has been commissioned to support LGBT plus children and their families as well as the agencies working around them

-      To grow our youth offer, places to go, people to see, things to do – this is now the core work of the youth development programme, and various projects have been delivered including ‘Our Space’ which was regarding capital grants for local voluntary sector providers to improve their facilities, provisions and venues. There is the holiday activity and food program which provides activities for children in school holidays

The integrated approach to governance in Kirklees is known as the ‘Well Programmes,’ and the focus of the programme is to align all of the top tier strategies with the emphasis being the Health and Wellbeing Strategy. This helps the system to work together towards shared outcomes. Under the programme, there is a life course approach, which includes, Starting Well, Living Well and Aging Well.

The idea is that work is undertaken in a collaborative way with providers and Commissioners, giving everybody an equal voice at the table and everyone's view is heard. There is distributed leadership around the system where partners have been given autonomy to deliver in the best way they can, ensuring that the programs are partnership led. It is important that the plans are not seen as  NHS or local authority plan, it is system wide, and it is hoped that partners feel sufficiently engaged.

It was felt important that there was some senior system leadership with the plans, therefore senior leaders from across the partnership lead each of the plans. Tom Brailsford as director of Children's services, has agreed to chair and lead the Starting Well Programme.

The principles worked to when developing the Well Programmes, were developed through some initial workshops, and the outcome from those workshops included the following:

-      Alignment of priorities  ...  view the full minutes text for item 20