Early Years & Childhood teams in the nine Government Offices work with Children’s Fund partnerships.
The Children’s Fund was set up to support the development of local partnership working in improving preventive services to enhance children’s life chances, particularly those at risk of social exclusion. The regional team works with the 10 Children’s Fund partnerships located within the county and unitary councils in the region.
The Government’s vision is to integrate key services for children within a single organisational focus so that they adopt a co-ordinated way of working. The preferred model for this way of working is called a Children’s Trust and the expectation is that all areas will be working towards integration into local Children’s Trust arrangements by 2008.
The 10 Children’s Fund partnerships in the East of England are working towards migrating to the Children’s Trust models. They submitted three year strategic plans between November and December 2004, outlining their proposals for migration during 2005-08. The Early Years & Childhood team will continue to support and monitor the partnerships until migration has taken place.
