Total Family Early Years Pilot for Tameside

What is Total Family?

Total Family is the local name for one of Tameside’s Total Place programmes. Total Place is a nationally inspired initiative that aims to demonstrate the greater value and improved outcomes that can be achieved by public services working together locally. It is one of four programmes in Tameside but this is the only one with a focus on families with children in the early years. Other local authorities in Greater Manchester have similar early years projects, all of which sit within the Manchester City Region Better Life Chances pilots and are taking place in selected neighbourhoods.

The Local Steering Group

The Denton South steering group for this pilot is now well established with local partners from Denton South Partnership, Mid-wife services, Services for Children and Young People, Children’s Centres, Extended Services, Locality Services (PCT), NW E-government group, Welfare Rights and Job Centre Plus. The group meets monthly to plan for steady progress of the programme’s aims.

The Place Board

The local steering group is itself responsible to an inter-agency group of senior managers chaired by the Chief Executive of Tameside Council. This group, known as the Place Board, has membership from New Charter Housing, Probation Service, fire service, police service, Council, PCT, Pennine Care, job centre plus, T3SC, local colleges, economic development team. The Place Board offers a ‘discursive and problem solving forum’ for issues emerging from all the total place pilots in Tameside. It endeavours to understand and then support plans to improve some difficult and long-standing problems. The Board will support local groups to unblock some of the challenges it may face.

Understanding the family journey

The initial task of the local steering group has been focussed on developing a peer methodology to provide us with an understanding of the ‘parent storey’ i.e. of their journey and their experiences of public services from conception to reception. Local volunteers from the local Children’s Centres Forum are being trained to sensitively interview and record parents’ views about their experiences. A basic structure to provide a script (something like a questionnaire) is being developed to act as a prompt for the interviewers. Ultimately this will help provide useful qualitative data allowing the group to arrive at a description of a typical parent ‘journey’. This description will relate parental views about public services; their understanding of the notion of ‘readiness for school’ and their perceptions of how agencies view this too; their experiences of family budgeting and of financial support services; and the relative sense how our services work or are seen together. We are also exploring the potential to use the video diary format.

The interviews are likely to take place in the early autumn.

Understanding costs

The second task the steering group is facing is to understand better the total public expenditure on under 5’s in the Denton South area. Once these total sums are understood then it may present the steering group and the Place Board with new challenges about using the funds differently.

Better Information Sharing

The third task facing the steering group is to improve information sharing between professionals. This, because of legitimate data security concerns, is an obstacle to service improvement.

Other Work

The steering group will be reviewing how all of this develops over the course of the next months and will be reporting regularly to the Place Board. Two of the things we wish to do are (a) to develop a set of performance indicators that will tell us something about the progress we are making and (b) produce a paper that opens up the local understandings of ‘ready for school’ which we think will be different from professional to professional, between parent and professionals and amongst parents. We wish to do this in order to discover how we create a common approach to collectively improving children’s readiness for school.

Please Note: Continuation of this is being undertaken within the Coalition Government's Local Integrated Services/Community Budget arrangements