Nursery World - Joining up

A new children's trust has already received a Government endorsement. Simon Vevers reports from Sheffield The fledgling Sheffield Children's Trust, which plans to integrate services to children, families and communities through children's centres and networks of extended schools, received an early endorsement from the Government when it was given a prominent mention in the Green Paper, Every Child Matters.

The fledgling Sheffield Children's Trust, which plans to integrate services to children, families and communities through children's centres and networks of extended schools, received an early endorsement from the Government when it was given a prominent mention in the Green Paper, Every Child Matters.

Unlike other local authorities among the 35 Pathfinder trusts, which have opted to test their strategic integration on select groups of vulnerable children, the South Yorkshire council has adopted a 'whole-systems'

approach in what the Trust's recently-appointed programme director Carolyn Leary describes as 'a single overarching plan' for the city.

She says the council's thinking was shaped by the fact that the city, once synonymous with the steel industry, has extremes of wealth and poverty, from leafy affluence in the south-west to a couple of wards in the north-east which languish among the 2 per cent most disadvantaged in the country.

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