Blueprint for Connect Somerset 2024 to 2030

Introduction

We are trying to do something quite different, and need your help. This blueprint shows how we want to evolve public sector early help for Somerset families and residents. Improving the early help system in the right way will significantly reduce costs to acute services across care, health, education and justice sectors. As well as having a big impact on the lives of Somerset residents.

Because the system of services is so complex, this is not a target operating model, but a blueprint describing our direction of travel.

• Early help is the total support that improves a family or resident’s resilience and outcomes or reduces the chance of a problem getting worse.

So early help is an approach that can include informal support and a range of services that help families and residents to thrive. We are all responsible for delivering early help.

Design principles

Connect Somerset is about everyone working together to increase early help in the community. Connect somerset is not a service but a way of working together.

Because Connect Somerset is about everyone working together, we all need to chip in when we are redesigning services or take the opportunity to change our daily interaction with families and residents. The following principles describe what professionals can do to shape our work and services:

1. We focus on strengthening relationships between professionals and with children and families. People, processes and systems are caring.
2. We listen to families – to understand what matters for them, to build on what is already working well and to design services, based on what we learn from individuals and their communities.
3. We spend less time on diagnosis, assessments and referrals – and more time helping when people need it, stepping outside of our comfort zone.
4. We use relationship based and trauma aware practice, personalised support (personalised care) and whole family working. Everyone can be a key worker for a family.
5. Support and services will increasingly be based in neighbourhoods and community hubs – we work together across geographic and professional boundaries and with communities, recognising the challenges of rurality.
6. We recognise that communities have different strengths and needs and work flexibly to support both individuals and communities.
7. We share data and intelligence so we can offer more help to those most in need, and children don’t slip through the net.
8. As a system by supporting earlier, the need for acute services will reduce over time, offering more investment early in communities and reducing inequalities across Somerset.

North Sedgemoor – Working closely with the Wessex Learning Trust to develop the Team Around the School model and to utilise the community hubs and spokes in the neighbourhood to support local key priorities, enabling statutory and community services to come together to work as one.

West Mendip – Working with Crispin and The Blue School to identify gaps in parenting offer and establish new provision. Creating links between early years, youth and adult provision across statutory, council, school, health and Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise to promote a whole-family approach.

Bridgwater – Working with the Bridgwater Bay Primary Care Network and Social Care to connect Health Coaches, community provisions and local community spaces to enhance and compliment the provision on offer to residents.

Mendip – Linking Parent Family Support Advisers and the Family Intervention Service to the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise, enabling the delivery of a cohesive support package to parents and families.

Early help system

As we have said before, this is a complex system of services and community support. Starting with the family or resident and their community, we have lots of things around us that keep us all resilient in our lives, such as friends and family and community groups. We have the universal services that we all know and love and acute and targeted services. These all dip into early help at times and are an important part of the system. There are between 20,000 and 30,000 working in the Somerset early help system.

Frome – Leading the Children and Young People Mental Health Forum meetings to support networking and partnership working.

West Somerset – Continuing the partnership with Living Better Primary Care Network, CCS Village Agents and key education and health services to provide a
health and well-being hub.

What and when

As a blueprint, we can just show the direction of travel, activities will move around as we learn more about the system and different services come on board.

If we are successful, then in time the public sector in Somerset will change to a more local, neighbourhood-based model of delivery. We will increase early help, invest more in community resources, and design our services to start with the individual and their community.

Yeovil – Supporting the County Lines Creative Project in partnership with Yeovil College and Bucklers Mead Academy.

South Petherton and Somerton – Enabling health and social care partners to use the Martock Information Centre and other hubs, schools and community venues to meet people within their community, reducing travel anxiety and bringing more services closer to families.

Chard, Langport, Ilminster and Crewkerne – Strategically enabling Community Leaders to focus on Early Years and the Cradle to Career initiative.

Impacts and benefits

Connect Somerset will support more families and residents to achieve better outcomes, sooner. By doing so lives are well-led, avoiding the need for more costly resources to manage the impact of crisis.

There have been many evaluations of early help, for example the national Supporting Families evaluation demonstrated a clear and attributable impact of early help, with a return of £2.28 for every £1 spent. And the austerity experiment of 2010 to 2020 provided compelling evidence that cuts to early help services leads to more expensive delivery (and much worse outcomes). An evaluation partner will show the impact of early help in Somerset through data and logic models, qualitative case studies and quantified impact and benefits.

Wincanton, Castle Cary and Bruton – Working on alternative provision for Children and Young People not attending school due to Social Emotional Mental Health needs.

Connect Somerset Programme

Afterword

You may have noticed that much of the Connect Somerset programme is focused on communities. There is a good reason for that.

There are three efficiencies we get from designing the early help system better:

1. Universal services — sometimes when services are under pressure, they focus inward on core business, for example, teaching, policing, dealing with the caseload. Unfortunately that leads to a more expensive delivery model, poorer outcomes and experience for families and residents — increasing referrals and handoffs, relying more on process, supporting only one need for example. Connect Somerset is therefore about improving how services work together, support and coach each other. That enables us all to positively support needs we may not have been comfortable supporting in the past, and is more efficient than a referral model. In Kent, just the team around the school model led to a 22% reduction in utilisation of acute care services. So if we scale this up across GPs, Schools, Nurseries, Pharmacies, etc we can improve lives and reduce demand at the same time.
2.  Digital — we can increase the help that’s delivered online, but we must be careful this is not digital by default. Not everyone will find an online offer helpful or be able to afford the data, but many residents prefer anonymous and always available digital services, such as simple directories, support services like Kooth or training such as the Solihull parenting support. We can also develop the digital relationship between professionals and residents, using text-based follow-ups, small pieces of advice and guidance and Client Relationship Management software to blend face-to-face and digital. Because digital delivery is scalable at low cost, this is a good way to build resilience.
3. Community — research such as Bowling Alone shows how high social capital/community resources leads to improvements in health, education, social-cohesion and safety. Even heart-attacks and cancer rates can reduce. Support in the community is more accessible for residents who do not trust or engage with public services — possibly the best way to reduce inequalities. And community buildings are often viewed as more welcoming and less threatening/judgmental. There are around 2700 charities in Somerset, not counting unconstituted community groups. There are nearly 10,000 volunteers, not counting faith-based volunteers. And often the support that residents receive from their community is life-changing — such as building life-long friendships that can be drawn on when things are tough, or peers modelling behaviour in a way that really affects your norms, and community groups that offer help at a very low price. Connect Somerset is about creating the conditions so the public sector and community can work well together in a symbiotic relationship. This draws on the best from all sectors and means support for families and residents is more than the sum of the parts.

So, given these efficiencies, why does Connect Somerset focus on communities so much?

In the public sector, we have been heavily influenced by management models that describe more transactionally efficient delivery. The way we structure our services and
governance reflects reductionist thinking. What we can measure heavily influences service design. And legal frameworks, short-term politics, government departments
and inspection have all refocused practice in narrow terms.

These all miss the point of good system design.

Our public service design almost always starts from when needs present themselves at our front door. Those coming into A&E, referrals in safeguarding, someone phoning the Police. And that’s reflected in our funding — 95%+ of spend in health is on illness not prevention, early help in the Council has reduced due to austerity, there is less money for communities.

Actually, the need started with the individual’s resilience, the environment they are in, their connections to friends and family who could help, the social capital that supports them. Designing good public sector services therefore has to start with the individual and community, not from the point that need knocks on our front door. And to be efficient in Somerset, we will have to turn-around the prevailing ideas of good service design, and embrace systems thinking and a community first approach. It’s a cultural change that takes time, so that’s why we focus on communities (alongside lots of good system design).