“Children’s needs and experiences are not superficial or one-dimensional,” says Maggie Farrar, Operational Director ECM & Standards at NCSL.

“They are multifarious and interconnected –
and education professionals alone cannot hope
to meet them in isolation.

“But while most school leaders would agree that multi-agency, cross-sector working is at the heart of Every Child Matters (ECM) and the Extended Schools agenda, action on the ground is still very patchy.

“The College is committed to working with school leaders – and with leadership agencies across other sectors – to overcome hurdles to the kind of deep
and enthusiastic collaboration that will improve achievement and wellbeing for children.”

Maggie thus sets the tone for a one-day NCSL seminar on Leading and Managing Multi-Agency Contexts, attended in the summer by more than 100 school leaders.

At the end of the day, delegates conclude that while there are pockets of excellent engagement and strong leadership in partnership working around the country, the national picture is very much polarised.

“There is still a long way to go to get it all working on the ground,“ says Anne Frost, deputy director of workforce development at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).

“Generally speaking, it’s not happening across the whole of local authority areas or across the whole breadth of services. Where it is working well, it’s often due to the passion and drive of individual headteachers who are pushing the agenda forward locally, from the bottom up.”

It’s not surprising that progress is slow. The move to multi-agency working is change management on a huge scale, demanding considerable shifts in attitudes and substantial leaps of faith.

Schools that have been working in isolation are now being asked to collaborate and take joint responsibility for children’s achievement and wellbeing throughout their towns and cities.

Preventative care organisations that have been used to working autonomously are now being asked to come together and share their knowledge in an arena of trust. Yet each speaks a different professional language and is bound by different policies, protocols and confidentiality guidelines.

And, in the absence of prescribed models and structures for going forward, many local authorities are struggling to give cohesive direction and support.

“Local authorities are trying to engage in this, but in some cases they are not getting it right,” said Anne. “What we have to remember though, is that we are only three-and-a-half years into a 10 year plan. We’re on the right track but we have to be realistic and accept that change on this scale does not happen overnight.”

The good news is there are tools available. The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) provides a standardised approach to conducting an assessment of a child‘s additional needs and deciding how they should be met across children’s services.

The DCSF has also produced guidance on appointing and managing a lead professional to co-ordinate provision and act as a single point of contact for children and their families when a range of services are involved.

NCSL has developed the National Professional Qualification in Integrated Centre Leadership (NPQICL): the first national programme and qualification in working in multi-agency and multi-disciplinary environments across education, health and social services.

And, after running inspiring and challenging pilots with 20 teams from April 2004 to September 2006, the College is about to roll out its Multi-Agency Team Development (MATD) programme nationally from January 2008.

The programme brings together professionals from different sectors to take part in consultation sessions and facilitator-led workshops so that they can learn, over a six month period, how to turn the theory on integrated working into practice.

Lynne Walker, whose company Castlewood Consulting designed and delivered the programme, said: “There’s no recipe for this and it’s actually quite difficult, but school leaders should start by practising what they already know about effective networking and build from there.

“They need to bring together a team by focusing
on moral purpose and their vision for children
and then work to establish ground rules, procedures and communication lines and get everyone to sign up to them.

“In doing so they should listen to the consensus of opinion and let others take charge in order to dispel fears among other agencies that this is an ‘education takeover‘.

“That doesn’t mean shying away from fierce conversations. Silence isn’t always golden and school leaders should have the courage of their convictions and think about how they can say what they mean without offending people.

“Meetings provide the opportunity to get to know each other and build trust and understanding – one of the most powerful things is to give groups of professionals an opportunity to tell everyone about their day job – but they should also be effective and time defined, with clear actions to take so that they can be seen to be productive. “

NCSL senior research officer Andy Coleman, author of the report Collaborative Leadership in Extended Schools: Leading a multi-agency environment describes leading collaboration as “more an art than a science”.

“It calls for a wide range of leadership skills, from the ‘transformational’ in winning hearts and minds to ‘collaborative thuggery‘ in holding people to account,“ he said.

“It’s very important that school leaders model collaborative behaviour. Evidence from Ofsted shows that extended services flourish when there is a strong combination of distributed leadership and successful management.”

Brian Taylor, headteacher of Wybourn Community Primary School is further down the integrated working path than most. His school is part of a massive reorganisation in Sheffield to create seven service districts, each with its own manager and partnership board – schools, police, health, social services, the voluntary sector – responsible for identifying and addressing local priorities for improving outcomes for children. He is also a part-time secondee to Sheffield Children’s Services to work on developing inter-agency approaches to delivering ECM.

“It’s about changing behaviours and cultures,” said Brian. “It’s about taking many providers and many points of access and joining them up into one cohesive service. Schools need to be the glue between all the agencies because we are the one sector that sees the child most consistently every day and which can engage with the whole child on a daily basis.

“In Sheffield we stepped off the edge with a fundamental belief in the morality of ECM and an understanding that transformation was required. We worried about the money and resources later. Quite simply, if you keep doing things in the same way, you will get the same outcomes. We therefore decided to do things differently.”

Next steps
NCSL is making available all of its leadership development resources and case studies to support leadership of the ECM and Extended Schools
and services agenda on its website at www.ncsl.org.uk/ecmleadershipdirect
from September