Context: Considering what the right change to make and how to make it can be challenging. One local authority in the North of England decided that for one of their workstreams, running a pilot was the best way of being able to better define the detail of the change they wanted to make and test whether their idea would actually work.
What they did: In their diagnostic they found that silos between LA, health and social care colleagues at Early Years were impacting outcomes for children. They wanted to test if introducing a new team to overcome this could successfully help to improve the early identification of need, support for families and the implementation of targeted interventions for the child.
However, this required coordinating funding across three distinct organisations and engaging in the wider community. Therefore, before they were able to secure funding long term, they wanted to trial the change via a pilot to understand the impact and if the creation of such a team was feasible.
They engaged a team who were relatively experienced, focused on a specific locality in their area and ran the pilot for 3 months. They had a milestone in their plan to evaluate whether or not the pilot had been a success. This evaluation involved the project team, reviews from parents and carers who had used the service, contributions from education providers, as well as looking at the data to see the impact of the support on the children.
What was the outcome: Their pilot was showing promising results in terms of impact on children, but it highlighted key challenges in coordinating data, information and hiring practises across three different organisations. These challenges needed to be resolved before the business case could be approved for the full team to be launched across the local area.
