How did our workforce contribute to our Children and Young People’s Plan?
Our workforce are the people who will turn our Children's Trust vision into reality through the work that they do with children, young people and families, so our Plan must be relevant and useful to them in their everyday work. In developing our Plan, we wanted to learn from their experience and knowledge, including their knowledge about local areas. To do this, we organised consultation events, which were attended by around one thousand people, from a wide range of partner organisations. Participants included teachers, nurses, midwives, youth workers, social workers, police officers, voluntary and community workers, managers and strategic leads in children and young people’s services and health services and many more.
In 2008, we held a county-wide workforce conference, where people talked about how we could work together to make a difference for children, young people and families. Participants said that we needed to concentrate on:
- more resources for early and pro-active intervention
- co-locating resources close to children
- extending the role of schools
- giving power to children and families through the “do-ers"
- enabling children and young people to feel good about where they live
- recognising and valuing the voluntary and community sector
- raising partnership to the next level
- developing integrated commissioning
- improving our communication and information
- creating new ways of working and developing our workforce
- growing visionary leadership
- developing equity of resources and standards.
In March 2009, we held seven workforce conferences, one in each of our districts or boroughs. Participants included our workforce and county and district councillors. At each event, participants found out more about:
- the vision and development of the Nottinghamshire Chidren's Trust
- the improvement priorities in our new Children and Young People's Plan
- How locally-based services help to deliver these priorities.
Participants contributed ideas about how we could achieve our improvement priorities for Nottinghamshire, including ideas for action in their local area. We then used these ideas to help decide on the actions needed to achieve each of our improvement priorities.
