Children and Young People's Summary of the Tameside Children and Young People Plan

What is the Tameside Children and Young People Plan?

The plan is an important paper which sets out all the things that services in Tameside are going to do over the next twelve months to make things better for children and young people.

The Tameside Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Trust is a group of people who work together to plan services for children and young people, they meet every six weeks and talk about the different ways in which improvements can be made in five important areas. These are called the “five outcomes”.

• be healthy
• stay safe and feel safe
• be happy and do well in their life
• help out in their community
• have everything they need for a happy healthy life

Children, young people, parents and workers who provide services have been asked about what they would like to see in the plan and their views have been included. The plan will last for one year, but it will provide a start to put together a longer three year plan from 2007-2010.

The plan lists things that are going to be improved to help children, young people and their families, these include:

• More help for parents
• Making sure services are providing their own kind of special help and not doing the same as another service
• A plan to improve play

How is it going to be done?

The Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Trust has members from the health service, the Police, schools, the Youth Offending Team, the Youth Service, children’s social care and the voluntary sector. This group of people will work together to make sure services are planned properly, services “talk to each other” and they are organised in a much better way to provide services for children and young people who need them the most. They will also develop services for children and young people to prevent them having problems in their lives.

A separate three year plan has been written for workers who provide services for children and young people to make sure they have the chance to go on training courses that are recommended by the Government, to improve their ways of working or to help them achieve further qualifications.

A group is also being set up to decide who should be given money to develop services for children and young people and to decide if more or new services need to be developed. This group will be called the “Children and Young People’s Commissioning Group”. Children and young people will also be asked about how they think the money should be spent and what kind of services they want.

Five separate groups will be set up to look at the development of the five outcomes; the groups will look for gaps in services and report on what is happening.

Children's and Young People's services are going to be organised across four district areas of Tameside, these are:

• Ashton
• Dukinfield, Stalybridge and Mossley
• Hyde and Longdendale
• Denton, Audenshaw and Droylsden

Some special services will be organised across all of Tameside and the workers will travel to the four district areas.

A person called an Area Coordinator will be responsible for encouraging everybody to work together. They will make sure important information about children, young people and families is shared and one worker is identified who will be the main contact for the family. They will also have responsibility for one of the five outcome groups.

A directory of all the services for Children, Young People and their families has been put together and this can be found at www.tameside-sid.org.uk. The directory will be updated regularly and this will help families find out what is available in Tameside.

What do Children and Young people need?

During 2005 a big survey was done to find out what children and young people needed to help them in the five outcomes.

Using the results from the survey eleven areas have been identified by the Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Trust as being very important and Tameside wants to concentrate on these and give them special attention.

• more services in less well off areas
• reduce smoking, drugs and drinking alcohol by young people
• improve services for emotional health
• increase support for children and young people who have witnessed violence in the home
• improve results in key stage 4 with a focus on boys
• improve the number of young people staying on into further education and training with a focus on boys
• reduce school exclusions with a focus on boys
• reduce the number of teenage girls under 18 who get pregnant
• improve the achievements of particular groups of children and young people
• improve support for parents
• improve support for children with disabilities

What do we want to achieve?

Our aim is to make improvements across all the eleven important areas of work with children, young people and their families. We want to involve children and young people and their families in the development of new services and to improve existing ones. We want children and young people to be involved in the recruitment of staff who work with them, plan activities and tell us how they think services are meeting their needs.

During the summer there will be events in the four districts where children and young people are invited to come along and tell us what they think of the Children and Young Peoples Plan and what would they want to include in the next one.