Workforce strategy

What is the workforce strategy?

The Workforce Strategy team has four key areas of responsibility across the children’s workforce:

• Developing collaborative and distributed leadership
• Planning and enabling change management and workforce development
• Recruiting, inducting, developing and retaining high quality staff
• Managing self-funding continuing professional development and training

What is the children’s workforce?       

The concept of a children’s workforce encompasses all adults working with children and young people in the County. This includes many occupations, the majority being in Health, Education, Safeguarding (Social Services) and the voluntary sector.

Supporting collaborative working

The Children’s Plan of 2007 stated the ‘need to ensure that the children’s workforce unites around a common purpose, language and identity’ because ‘integrated working is pivotal to a personalised service that responds to individuals’ needs in a seamless and timely manner’. The challenge was, and remains, to achieve effective multi-disciplinary and multi-agency working whilst ‘keeping the strong and distinctive professional ethos of different practitioners in the workforce.’  So the focus is on the needs of children and young people, rather than the objectives of individual services.

The second challenge is for Local Authorities to work in partnership with other bodies. This requirement extends the concept of partnership working beyond consultation and joint decision-making to a deeper mutual relationship in which there is collaboration, joint action, and shared expertise and responsibility. Leaders and managers at all levels are expected to work laterally with people in a variety of work or voluntary contexts whose authority and area of expertise is different. They will experience a wide variation in ethical codes, accepted practice, skill sets, qualifications, terms and conditions of employment.