Introduction

According to the government, multi-agency partnership working is about different services, agencies and teams of professionals and other staff working together to provide the services that fully meet the needs of children, young people and their parents or carers. The government’s initiatives, such as Sure Start, Extended Schools and Every Child Matters (ECM) have been significant key drivers in promoting collaborative, joined-up multi-agency working to support a range of education settings in improving children and young people’s well-being and life chances. The Children Act 2004 further strengthened the requirement for agencies and services to work together more closely in multi-disciplinary teams in order to safeguard and improve the ECM outcomes. Schools and other education settings cannot be expected to meet all the requirements of the ECM agenda alone. Leaders and managers in education settings appreciate the added-value contributions that multi-agency practitioners make to their ongoing work in promoting pupil well-being. The government has been keen to promote integrated multiagency working, because it enables:

• the five ECM well-being outcomes to be enhanced and improved;

• the pooling of multi-agency practitioners’ expertise, knowledge, skills and resources to occur, which leads to more efficient and effective working;

• children and young people to reach their optimum potential through the removal of barriers to learning and participation;

• early intervention and preventative work to take place in order to address any problems immediately;

• services to be tailored and personalised according to the aspirations and needs of the child or young person;

• a holistic approach to be adopted in meeting all the needs of the child or young person;

• teachers to focus on their core role of teaching in order to facilitate children’s and young people’s learning.