How will we provide the resources to work in a more integrated way and achieve our partnership improvement priorities?
Our plan is supported by detailed action plans for 2009-2010 for delivering the ten improvement priorities that we have set ourselves. These include broad details of the resources allocated to each action.
However, we are not yet in a position to provide a complete map of all the resources across our Children's Trust that are allocated to support and improve outcomes for children and young people. This is an area of development for the Nottinghamshire Children's Trust which we hope to address in future editions of our plan.
How Nottinghamshire County Council’s resources will contribute to the achievement of our priorities
The County Council’s budget anticipates that it will spend a net £124.6m on children’s services in 2009/10 (26.3% of the Council’s total budget). After taking account of specific grants and other income, the Council’s total gross expenditure on children’s services is £211.5m, excluding funding delegated to schools. This represents 26.6% of the Council’s total budget. Funding for schools, all of which is supported by grant, totals £426.5m (34.9% of the Council’s budget).
The County Council’s budget includes £1.3 million new investment over the period 2008/09 – 2009/10 to deliver key elements of the Plan across the following broad areas:
- early intervention and prevention
- targeted and integrated youth support
- responding to ‘Care Matters’.
The County Council is also investing £1.6 million over the three year period 2008/09 to 2010/11 to support the Every Child a Reader project, with the aim of improving reading skills of approximately 500 school children in Year 1, who have the lowest levels of achievement in literacy.
Additionally, the County Council has been accepted in Wave Six of the Building Schools for the Future programme. The County Council has made £2.5 million available towards the infrastructure costs involved in supporting the early stages of preparation for the programme. Additional funds will be identified later to support the transformation and project management aspects of the programme.
How the budgets of partners will contribute to the achievement of our priorities
NHS Nottinghamshire County spends an estimated £70 million (approximately 8% of its resources) on children and young people’s services. NHS Bassetlaw invests a similar percentage of its resources.
The voluntary and community sector will also make an important contribution to the delivery of the improvement priorities set out in our Plan, although their contribution will usually be in terms of staff and volunteer time and expertise.
Progress towards alignment of budgets and integration of resources
The children and young people’s block of the Local Area Agreement provides the opportunity to coordinate, prioritise and align resources with objectives and targets across the partner agencies. Some examples of budgets being pooled or aligned to support the achievement of improved outcomes for children and young people are:
- Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service £1.1 million
- Young People’s Substance Misuse Service £0.5 million
- Teenage Pregnancy Support £0.3 million.
Over time, the development of integrated working in localities will provide further opportunities to combine budgets and make best use of shared assets and resources.
Future implications for how resources will be made available to support this work
Although the overall resources available to support children and young people in Nottinghamshire are considerable, the County Council and its partners are likely to be operating in a context of severe financial constraints over the life of this Plan and beyond, with some budgets reducing and with efficiency targets built into most budgets. Therefore, it will be increasingly important to ensure that value for money is achieved across all services. The development of joint commissioning approaches will be a key means of achieving this – further details can be found in the Nottinghamshire Joint Commissioning Framework issued earlier in 2009 by the County Council, NHS Nottinghamshire County and NHS Bassetlaw.
