C4EO are currently running a series of regional conferences to showcase evidence of what works to improve children’s lives. The conferences focus on prevention and early years work. At the one I attended in Bath the keynote speaker was Olivia Mcleod from the Department for Education who was quite clear about there being substantial evidence for preventative work being very good value for money. It saves costs from use of the criminal justice system and other expensive services if early difficulties are not nipped in the bud. She said that where there was evidence that preventative work was effective and reasonably priced so it should be protected from budget cuts. I have a sense that people in some local authorities are giving up the fight to preserve preventative work and you may find the C4EO work and other evidence very useful at this time. This all pushes the case for evidence based commissioning of services for populations (e.g a locality, CWD and SEN together, the 5% families with multiple disadvantage) as the way to make efficiency savings. By using evidence, commissioners can and should commission for populations to meet their needs. This will often lead to radical change in service configuration. In contrast, commissioning services can perpetrate long standing inefficiencies and may lead to decisions being made on the basis of a lack of evidence on what works. This approach is also at the heart of the Radical Efficiency paper (launched by Nesta yesterday) and of Total Place. In this respect, you may find the Total Place Croydon report on Early years very useful. If you need further evidence of what works and what does not work for children then do use the C4EO website because it now contains many more reports bringing together evidence in an easy to read format which deserve widespread use.
C4EO are currently running a series of regional conferences to showcase evidence of what works to improve children’s lives. The conferences focus on prevention and early years work. At the one I attended in Bath the keynote speaker was Olivia Mcleod from the Department for Education who was quite clear about there being substantial evidence for preventative work being very good value for money. It saves costs from use of the criminal justice system and other expensive services if early difficulties are not nipped in the bud. She said that where there was evidence that preventative work was effective and reasonably priced so it should be protected from budget cuts. I have a sense that people in some local authorities are giving up the fight to preserve preventative work and you may find the C4EO work and other evidence very useful at this time.
This all pushes the case for evidence based commissioning of services for populations (e.g a locality, CWD and SEN together, the 5% families with multiple disadvantage) as the way to make efficiency savings. By using evidence, commissioners can and should commission for populations to meet their needs. This will often lead to radical change in service configuration. In contrast, commissioning services can perpetrate long standing inefficiencies and may lead to decisions being made on the basis of a lack of evidence on what works. This approach is also at the heart of the Radical Efficiency paper (launched by Nesta yesterday) and of Total Place. In this respect, you may find the Total Place Croydon report on Early years very useful.
If you need further evidence of what works and what does not work for children then do use the C4EO website because it now contains many more reports bringing together evidence in an easy to read format which deserve widespread use.
