The new government strategy to shape children's social services will focus on setting aspirational outcomes for councils to achieve, a senior civil servant said last week.

Sue Lewis, deputy director of the children and young people's unit (CYPU), told the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations conference in York that the new children and young people's strategy would be driven by a set of objectives for delivering better educational, health and social outcomes.

Lewis said there was a strong feeling in government that the strategy should set out the overriding principles for all local children's services, both voluntary and statutory.

The strategy will set five main outcomes for councils to achieve, covering health and emotional well-being, safety, fulfilment, mental well-being and social engagement. It will also set priorities, define objectives and spell out how the outcomes meet existing government objectives.

Lewis said there would be key areas in the strategy tackling teenage pregnancy, obesity and crime and providing children with a place to go for advice.

The UK has some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, crime and abuse against young people in Europe. The government was criticised recently by a UN report into the treatment of children (news, page 10, 10 October).

The CYPU is to issue interim guidance to local authorities in December on how to achieve the strategy's objectives. The strategy is expected to be published next spring alongside the green paper on children at risk of social exclusion.

Local authorities will then have to analyse how local preventive strategies meet the objectives and identify gaps in services.

The local preventive strategies should be in place by April 2003, although Lewis said the government did not expect councils to have "dotted every I and crossed every T" by then.

"If a council came to us and said 'give us an extra six months so that we can involve young people', I think we would say yes," she added.