How is the Children’s Fund supporting projects on the ground? Kate Coxon visits Leicester where the fund has been running for three years, and witnesses a high degree of partnership working.

Start A Fresh is one of 50 projects in the Leicester area supported by the Leicester Children’s Fund. Leicester was among the first programmes to get off the ground following the national programme’s launch in 2000.

This is how it works, in the words of one child who has used the service. "When I was in year seven I was missing out on a lot of my education and I was being bullied and never wanted to come to school. I joined Start A Fresh and got to meet new people and make friends. I was in Start A Fresh full time for two weeks and then gradually we were back into school. A learning mentor helped me for two weeks after the programme and I am now in the support group giving circle time and group work activities to new Start A Fresh students. I am also a leader in the friends against bullying club [FAB]."

Like Start A Fresh, the focus of the Children’s Fund is on prevention - it aims to address the gap in preventive services for 5-13 year olds and their families by providing more and better co-ordinated support before they reach crisis point.

In Leicester Children’s Fund, the same voluntary body - NCH - is both the lead agency and the body accountable for how the money is spent. Judy Hardman, programme manager for Leicester Children’s Fund, explains: "It is unusual for a voluntary organisation to hold both roles, but this has advantages. The Children’s Fund is supposed to develop the role of the voluntary sector, and with NCH as lead agency it puts the voluntary sector right in the strategic planning arena."

It can also speed things up: negotiations between the lead agency and accountable body can often take up a lot of time and with one organisation occupying both positions, this is kept to a minimum. The Leicester Children’s Planning Partnership which drew up the initial delivery plan had a good relationship with local voluntary sector organisations. It was also committed to developing community capacity and providing a mixed economy of services, says Hardman.

Meanwhile, social services departments were aware that families from ethnic minorities were not taking up statutory support services and it was felt that running the whole Children’s Fund as a voluntary project might make it more accessible to excluded groups.

The Children’s Fund steering group oversees how the fund operates and reports to the Leicester Children’s Strategic Partnership, which plans all children’s services in Leicester. The fund has tried to engage local children and parents in running the programme, involving children in selecting staff and in creating a special website and a children’s room at the Children’s Fund offices, and inviting parents to join the steering group itself.

Providing opportunities for networking and sharing information and good practice can be harder for Children’s Funds than for Sure Start programmes, where workers operate within a smaller geographical area out of a centre. "We’ve developed good practice forums for different practice areas. For example, there may be several projects working with children who are excluded from school, or projects using learning mentors and we want them to be aware of each other," says Ian Hall, information and communications officer. Monitoring officer Sarah Read has just completed a review of all 50 projects supported by the Leicester Children’s Fund. "Rather than just asking them to tick boxes and supply numbers we wanted feedback from the projects on how they were meeting the Children’s Fund’s objectives and the problems they were facing. Projects often don’t know how to collect their own feedback, and so we support them through this process."

Shifts in national policy about what the fund should be doing locally have made life difficult for those on the ground. "One of the biggest challenges of being a new programme which has been introduced quickly is that often it feels as though the rules are being made up and amended as you go along. Procedures for accounting for funding can change from day to day and it is hard to go back to projects and tell them that the rules have changed, and that we need different evidence now," says Hardman.

She adds that one change that will present particular difficulties is the decision, announced in the 2002 spending review, to direct 25 per cent of the Children’s Fund towards services that prevent youth crime. "We had to choose services from a very restricted menu provided by the Youth Justice Board - this means that many existing services which may well be preventive but which aren’t on the list may have to be cut. It’s a large chunk of our budget and it will be a challenge to meet these requirements within the timescale."

On the positive side, a change which has brought a sigh of relief in Leicester is the proposal from the Children and Young People’s Unit to transfer the development of identification, referral and tracking systems for vulnerable children from local Children’s Fund programmes to councils. Children’s Funds are a major backer of preventive services but they are not in direct contact with all vulnerable children.

Local services destined to lose their Children’s Fund money because of the government’s decision to divert a quarter of the fund into youth justice are already searching for alternative sources of funding, and others will be hoping local government and health bodies will pick up their bill after 2006 - the date when the government’s commitment to the Children’s Fund ceases. The Leicester programme hopes that by proving the preventive approach is better for families and cheaper than crisis intervention, it will gain long-term funding.

Start A Fresh

This project aims to give students a positive experience of school to build on and to tackle the difficulties of starting in a new setting. The three-week rolling programme takes place every four weeks and students attend once - parents are then expected to support the scheme. The programme is aimed at key stage 3 and five groups identified for support are: children new to the area/school; students transferred from another school, those with non-attendance issues; those in transition from primary to secondary school and year 7 children who are still having problems settling in. Students progress gradually from sessions in a mobile classroom into mainstream school, and once there can be tracked by a learning mentor.

Children’s Fund facts

• Launched in 2000, the £450m Children’s Fund is being developed and implemented by the Children and Young People’s Unit (CYPU).
• Leicester Children’s Fund has been allocated a three-year funding total of £4.8m until March 2004.
• There is no funding guaranteed beyond 2006.

Offending and learning

Twenty-five per cent of the Children’s Fund is dedicated to programmes jointly agreed with Leicester Youth Offending Team. For example, the Leicester programme supports Life Education Centres. This drug prevention education charity uses a hi-tech, mobile multimedia classroom environment and trained educators to stimulate children to learn about themselves and how their bodies function. Children are able to talk about how legal and illegal substances can harm them, and so enable them to make positive health choices about their future. The unit aims to reach up to 12,500 children and young people each year in school and community settings.