Keeping children and young people safe and giving them a great start in life

The Children and Young People’s Partnership is starting to prepare a new Children and Young People’s Plan for Herefordshire.  The partners involved include, but are not limited to, Herefordshire Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, West Mercia Police, 2gether NHS Foundation Trust, Wye Valley NHS Trust, Youth Offending Service, Voluntary organisations and Healthwatch.   

Our current plan has achieved a lot over the last three years, including significant improvements in children’s levels of development, provision of high quality services to keep children and young people safe and improvements in mental health crisis care.
 
We now need to review current evidence on issues relating to local children and young people and set out future priorities for the next three to five years.

The plan will ensure there is a clear strategic direction for partners relating to children and young people in Herefordshire, and it is intended that a final plan will be in place by the end of summer 2018.

The new plan will take into account relevant evidence relating to children and young people’s issues in Herefordshire, to ensure partnership actions address key local priorities.

To ensure the plan is informed by a broad range of perspectives, a number of engagement activities have already been undertaken, including direct engagement with children and young people, professionals and service providers.

Although at an early stage, emerging themes from our engagement activities to date include, but are not limited to:

· Further improving partner actions to tackle mental health, domestic abuse, oral health and obesity

· Effective early identification to avoid crisis and increase resilience 

· The role of appropriate and timely information and advice 

· Ensuring young people are well prepared for adulthood (including children and young people with disabilities) 

· Maximising what is available in the local community (both people and places)

· Promoting greater inclusion at a local level

The engagement sessions have also highlighted a number of areas that will support success, including:

· Ongoing involvement of children, young people and families in the development and delivery of key actions

· More effective information sharing between partner agencies

· The importance of a knowledgeable and skilled workforce

· Opportunities to deliver more efficiently through stronger partnership working

We want to capture the views of a wide range of people to ensure the plan reflects the true priorities for children and young people in Herefordshire.  We would greatly appreciate your contribution to this process, by answering a few key questions.
In order to feed into the next stage of the process, we would appreciate your response by Friday 9 March 2018.

If you’d like to contribute further or provide additional information, please e-mail Amanda Price.

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* 1. Herefordshire’s children and young people want to be safe, healthy and active, they want to achieve and contribute to the local community.

From your perspective, what are the most important issue(s) that need to be addressed in Herefordshire to help achieve these high level outcomes?

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* 2. Why do you think this and what evidence is there to support it?

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* 3. What actions do you believe will make a real difference in the area(s) you have highlighted?

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* 4. Please select your role:

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* 5. Organisation (if relevant):

Thank you for helping to shape our new plan by sharing your views.

We will consult further on the plan in the summer.

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