Integrated Children's Services
Across the world, governments and communities are recognising the need to renew and re-energise learning and development systems to better support families and prepare children for modern life.
In Victoria, the Blueprint for Education and Early Childhood Development sets out the Government’s five-year agenda for learning and development from birth to adulthood. It is the next generation of reform to improve outcomes for children and young people.
The Blueprint and Victoria’s Plan to Improve Outcomes in Early Childhood recognise the importance of quality early childhood education and care services.
Children’s Centres are central to this strategy to improve quality and accessibility of early childhood services by emphasising the importance of integrated early learning and care.
Horwarth and Morrison describe integrated services as those that are ‘characterised by a unified management system, pooled funds, common governance, whole systems approach to training, information and finance, single assessment and shared targets…Partners have a shared responsibility for achieving the service goals through joint commissioning, shared prioritisation, service planning and auditing. Joint commissioning can be one of the major levers for integration, service change and improving the delivery of children’s services…Ultimately, joint commissioning may lead to the merger of one or more agencies, who give up their identities for a shared new identity. (Evaluation of Victorian children’s centres, Literature review, DEECD)
Every Child Matters (http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk) describes the key feature of an integrated service is that it acts as a service hub for the community by bringing together a range of services, usually under one roof, where practitioners work in a multi-agency way to deliver integrated support to children and families.
The integration of services makes life easier and less stressful for parents and children and commits to making education and care more accessible through more convenient forms of delivery. Children and parents benefit from the convenience and stability offered by innovative and integrated service delivery. Children receive a high quality kindergarten education in the same place as their long day care. Children and their families have ready access to Early Childhood Intervention Services, maternal and child health services and family support services. Often there are also a range of complementary serivices available, such as supported playgroups, parenting groups or programs, occasional care, and outside school hours care. Community space may also be available for local activities.
The co-location of early childhood facilities with schools, wherever possible, leads to communities becoming more child-friendly.
Increased collaboration is important in recognition of the complex, multidimensional nature of people’s needs and the notion that ‘joined up problems’ require ‘joined up solutions’.
Intervening earlier to reduce the impact of emerging child heath or developmental difficulties that will impact in later life is a key area of reform, reflecting the substantial body of evidence that the early years of life are the most critical for child development. In particular, Victoria’s Plan to Improve Outcomes in Early Childhood highlighted the importance of this period for disadvantaged children and guides improvements so that services will be culturally sensitive and responsive to the needs of diverse children and families such as Aboriginal children and families, children with a disability, humanitarian refugees and families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
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