Children's Services - Integrated working

Integrated working enables everyone supporting children and young people to work together effectively to put the child at the centre, meet their needs and improve their lives.

By combining their professional expertise, knowledge and skills, and involving the child or young person and family throughout, practitioners can identify needs earlier, deliver a co-ordinated package of support that is centred on the child or young person, and help to secure better outcomes for them.

Integrated working is achieved through collaboration and coordination at all levels, across all services, in both single and multi-agency settings. It requires clear and ongoing leadership and management. At an operational level, it is facilitated by the adoption of common service delivery models, tools and processes.

Integrated processes

Integrated processes will ‘drive’ multi-agency working. They will also support the delivery of integrated frontline services.

Key integrated processes include:

Information sharing

• Better information sharing between professionals: appropriate information sharing underpins all integrated processes.

Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

The Common Assessment Framework for children and young people:

• A national, common process for early assessment
• To identify more efficiently the additional needs of children and young people at risk of poor outcome
• Will reduce duplication of assessment
• A shared language across agencies
• Improve involvement between agencies.

The role of the lead professional

Read more about the role of the lead professional.

This is a role taken on by one of the professionals working with a child in order to:

• Act as a single point of contact that children, young people and their families can trust, and who is able to support them in making choices and in navigating their way through the system;
• Ensure that children and families get appropriate interventions when needed, which are well planned, regularly reviewed and effectively delivered;
• Reduce overlap and inconsistency when more than one practitioner is working with a child.