The ‘Connecting Families’ Partnership Approach to Overcoming Challenges That Prevent and / or Delay Positive Outcomes for Children, Families and Vulnerable Adults - ‘LESSONS LEARNT’

This report is the result of research undertaken from October 2018 to April 2019. It was commissioned by the Worcestershire Connecting Families (CF) strategic group, with the aim of extrapolating an ‘lessons learnt’ from the CF partnership approach to overcoming challenges that prevent and / or delay positive outcomes for children, families and vulnerable adults. Due to funding limitations, it was agreed that the research would focus on Wyre Forest and Bromsgrove. The report reflects this, but also considers CF countywide.
Methods utilised for the gathering of information included reviewing existing project literature for context, conducting interviews with CF staff and partners and an online questionnaire for partner agency staff in two Worcestershire Districts.

The findings show effective joined up working and a shared vision of CF at strategic level. Front line practitioners however, said they were not always entirely clear about the aim, expected outcomes, vision or strategy. They did though, like the ‘High Level Plan’ process utilised, as it gave them time to meet with partner agencies to reflect on both the service users they served, and current service provision. This resulted in new ways of effective partnership working. The anticipated financial savings across Worcestershire as a result of the implementation of CF, were not as big as had been anticipated. Research participant believed this was because the ‘systems thinking methodology’ underpinning CF, would take a long time so any significant financial savings would not be evident in the short period that CF operated. The funding bid, literature and research participants were clear though, that financial savings were not the sole aim of CF. Nevertheless, the research concluded that outcome measurement methods were inconsistent across agencies and across Districts, which made it challenging to aggregate data, and much evidence was reliant on and limited to case studies.

The research also concluded that CF tried to do too much, with not enough money, in a too short timescale. That said, it is clear that the CF initiative resulted in some good outcomes and had an impressive impact on service users. The ‘lessons learnt’ extrapolated from the research data are shown in this report. It should be noted that the sample of interview participants and questionnaire respondents was small therefore, while the findings from their data is interesting, it is not necessarily representative of all partner agency staff involved.