ABSTRACT
The chosen mechanism for achieving the aims of ECM – multi-agency working – was neither new nor innovative. The Plowden Report (CACE, 1967) made recommendations for professional partnership between schools and social workers to improve their effectiveness for the child. It was a central tenet of child-centred education. The same model for the delivery of frontline services of education, health and social services forty years later, in the era of child-centred social policy, comes as no surprise. ECM promoted the notion of multi-agency working, but provided no models of practice. It was for local authorities and agencies to work it out for themselves. How successful multi-agency approaches have worked in practice, what might be the barriers to inter-professional working and training, and whether this is indeed the best model for the most serious and complex cases, are discussed in this chapter. The strategy coincided with enormous changes at local authority and government department level under the guise of new public management (NPM) (see Chapter 2). We look at the ways in which local authorities planned for and provided multi-agency responses to child welfare issues in a context of change and innovation.
