Top issues from the Review

The top issues from the Review were drawn from the interviews, conversations adn inputs from all quarters but principally from the October events. There was a high degree of agreement between all sources about the key issues for better supporting the health and wellbeing of children and young people aged 0-19 years in Tower Hamlets. These issues are:

• Emotional wellbeing
• Holistic approach
• Joined up working
• Peer development
• 16-19s services
• Engagement
• Information

The issues are recorded from the October events : review top issues

Along with these top issues were identified key ‘tensions’ in the system that also must be addressed in forging future direction: tensions Each of these has two areas that must be done well but negative forms that should be avoided (in italics):

• Universal services and targeted services or patchy work, scattergun projects and narrow excluding targets
• New innovative work and tried and tested approaches (evidence-based) or woolly projects that ‘we don’t know if they work’ and overly risk averse approaches ‘we can’t do that’
• How to focus on the child/young person and  focus on the family or the context/strengths of child and family are ignored and the child’s voice is lost
• Peer led activity and professional led services or peers don’t know what they don’t know and professionals dominate and exclude
• Holistic prevention and problem-focused support or work is seen as ‘pink and fluffy’ or simply ‘firefighting’
• Working across agencies and being clear about our own responsibilities or we retreat into buckpassing and silo working
• A whole school approach and working with individual children/young people or ignoring individual children’s needs and letting school culture undermine the work
• Having a named person working with a school and involving a range of people with the school or becoming overly territorial/inflexible and confusing schools and alienating them from health work
• Being responsive & available and using a referral system or people are spread too thinly and the system is too bureaucratic

All these issues and tensions were explored and debated in the November events where specific ‘statements of direction’ and ‘milestones’ for making progress were developed for each top issue – see future direction page