A joined up approach with the named person

How the public sector plans and delivers its responsibilities is now embodied in the new Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill passed by the Scottish Parliament on the 19 February 2014. The Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector explains the Joined up Approach.

This requires those delivering children's services to work together using a common framework to improve the wellbeing of children, identify any concerns and plan together to meet needs. A key aspect of GIRFEC requires this to be delivered through a named person role located with identified staff from statutory organisations at various times during a child’s and young adult’s life.

All of Scotland’s children will have named persons to support their development. It is recognised that most will not require any formal assistance beyond what their parents and wider family will provide. Most of the professional named person support will therefore be concentrated in helping those facing more serious problems in their lives and early intervention will seek to address these quickly and prevent those becoming worse.

Increasingly, the third sector supports vulnerable families alongside statutory organisations in provision of services and specialist support to parents and young people in many of the city’s most vulnerable communities

http://www.gcvs.org.uk/engagement/everyones_children/getting_it_right_for_every_child 

One health visitor who has been practising for 12 years believes that the Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) approach means that her role is more widely recognised by other professionals. As a named person she can work more closely together with them, and she is more aware of what is happening with families. Local police now tell her if there has been a domestic violence incident and hospitals inform her about visits to accident and emergency.

There is another way of looking at this: If the health visitor is learning more about families because of the imposition of GIRFEC does this not indicate that some families never saw her as a trusted person to begin with; only now it is a relationship which is forced on them? Can that really be for the best?
 
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0043/00435539.pdf

The net closing around families is truly suffocating and includes voluntary workers who have contact with the child as well as an army of different professionals. Ever ready to intervene at the earliest possible moment, they must consider what information to keep in confidence and what information to share; and be alert to the needs and risks of each child in the context of their relationships and wider world . But without information about their relationships and wider world how is a person to judge? This has got to involve the sharing of a whole lot of information - just incase.  Is this the true purpose of GIRFEC and the eCare framework which supports information sharing?  It would be naive to think not.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2012/06/5565/5