It would be impossible to deliver our ambitious outcomes agenda for Tower Hamlets’ children without effective partnerships. We cannot focus on improvements for the individual without working together. Strategic managers planning developments based on number crunching from remote offices do not deliver outcomes.

Work on partnership has developed over many years, enabling us to develop strategies that can be successfully implemented because they are built on knowledge from all the stakeholders. These partnerships exist at all service levels – from strategic partnerships that drive forward our ambitious agenda to partnerships around the individual child that reduce vulnerability.

Strategic Partnerships

Our partnership work is exemplified by our highly effective Local Strategic Partnership, which has school improvement at its heart. Our Children’s Services director (Kevan Collins) was appointed in September 2005 with the key task of producing the Children and Young People’s Plan (CYPP) and bringing together education and children’s social care services to enable us to make a further step change in the quality of services. The new directorate was expected to deliver services for children in the context of the strong Local Area Partnerships, or LAPs (eight regional areas, each covering approximately 2,500 children 0-18), as well as the Community Planning Action Groups, or CPAGs (service provider groups from across all agencies working in Tower Hamlets), both of which include representatives from all stakeholders in our borough.

From its inception, we have been aware that the CYPP can only be achieved through effective partnership structures that link directly to our key aims. This work is all brought together through the Children and Young People Strategic Partnership Group. Our structures include three major components.

• Eight LAPs provide the formal framework through which residents are involved. LAPs provide local people with the chance to influence the delivery of services locally and to scrutinize the performance of the council, health, police, and other mainstream services. Issues around service delivery within social services and education with regard to children at risk may be discussed in this forum, and the mechanisms are in place in the form of the CPAGs to ensure that concerns are fed back to the directorates and acted upon.
  
  
• Five CPAGs bring together key service providers under each of the five themes of the Community Plan to identify ways of improving local services. Each CPAG oversees the development and implementation of a joined-up plan for its specific Community Plan theme. The five CPAGs are:

  — Living Safely
  — Living Well
  — Creating and Sharing Prosperity
  — Learning, Achievement, and Leisure
  — Excellent Public Services

• A Partnership Management Group (PMG) involves residents from the four main areas of the borough and representatives from the CPAGs, together with local councilors and representatives from the major service providers, businesses, faith communities, and voluntary and community sectors. The Children and Young People’s Strategic Group is part of the PMG and has responsibility for developing the Community Plan and Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy and ensuring that all elements related to children are delivered efficiently and effectively and that targets are achieved.