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An assessment and support service for young people won the inter-agency work category at this year's Community Care awards. Alison Miller reports.

In 1997 Dumfries and Galloway faced a dual problem - comparatively high exclusion levels and a high number of out-of-area placements at residential schools, which were costing the authority around £2m each year.

Poor co-ordination in assessing troubled young people was resulting in conflicting advice from social workers, psychologists, teachers and other professionals involved in the system.

To combat the problem the council set up Crannog in partnership with Aberlour Child Care Trust. Crannog provides an assessment and support service for young people at risk of exclusion from school. The emphasis is on partnership working and considering the needs of young people first.

Aberlour's Steve McCreadie is Crannog service manager. He says that the key to the success of the service is the partnership between the council and the child care trust, a partnership that "imposes an imperative to move towards an integrated service". He adds: "It's really a three-cornered hat between education, social services and ourselves," he says.

Crannog is divided into three teams. Each team covers a different part of the region and is made up of a project manager, a teacher, a full-time social education worker, a part-time social education worker and administrative support. It works closely with social services, education, families and the Children's Panel.

Crannog provides an initial assessment of a young person's difficulties and presents a comprehensive plan to the area review group, which is Dumfries and Galloway's decision-making body for young people at risk. Support is provided in school, in class or at break time, and also outside school, at particular pressure points - for example, family disputes and fostering breakdowns.

McCreadie says Crannog's first priority was to create teams that could engage with young people. "We had the advantage of being seen as something different - we weren't from social services or education - and that gave us space to engage with them. You can only engage with these young people incrementally. You have to work patiently and with great persistence. The level of personal commitment and determination the teams show is a credit to them," he says.

Many of the young people who Crannog works with had a low opinion of the help they were previously offered, McCreadie says. Crannog builds bridges to let them return to mainstream education. "It's about being reliable, consistent and on time, and showing the utmost respect."

Gerry Brown, children's services manager at Dumfries and Galloway social services, is clear about why the service has been so effective. "Crannog has developed interventions that impact on young people's capacity to interact with their home and school environments simultaneously. It has an ability to interface between home, community and school, and to stick with young people and their families where that success has been slow to achieve."

More than 140 young people have benefited from this sticking power. Crannog has also been very successful in cutting the number of young people placed in residential schools by more than half.

Winning Community Care's award for inter-agency work has been the icing on the cake. "We were absolutely delighted, and being at the ceremony was fantastic. To have achieved this national recognition is an enormous boost," McCreadie says. His sentiments are echoed by Stuart Beck, the education department's head of children's services. He says: "It is particularly pleasing that the award is for partnership working, which has been at the heart of Crannog. I look forward to developing our partnership with Aberlour as we move towards developing a more integrated service for children."

To further the cause of partnership working, Crannog plans to spend the £4,000 prize money on producing a video showing a day in the life of each agency to promote inter-agency understanding, collaboration and co-operation.

- The inter-agency work category was sponsored by OLM.