NASUWT supports effective multi-agency working as an essential means of ensuring that children and young people receive timely, appropriate and co-ordinated support to keep them safe, promote their wellbeing and enable them to achieve their full potential. 

Effective multi-agency working can provide a co-ordinated approach to meeting children and young people’s needs, ensuring that the distinctive expertise and responsibilities of different services and professionals are brought together in a meaningful way.

However, NASUWT has made clear that effective multi-agency working cannot be achieved through expectations on individual practitioners or professionals alone. It must be underpinned by effective systems, structures, leadership, accountability, and sufficient investment in the services and workforce required to support collaborative working.

NASUWT is concerned that the effectiveness of multi-agency working is currently highly variable across local authority areas.

In many areas, reductions in funding, staffing and specialist provision across children’s services have significantly constrained the capacity of agencies to work collaboratively and to provide timely and effective support to children, young people and families.

Expectations for professionals to work together must therefore be matched by the resources and infrastructure necessary to make such collaboration effective.

NASUWT believes that there should be a clear and consistent national framework for multi-agency working, while retaining sufficient flexibility for local arrangements to respond to the particular needs of their communities.

Such a framework should establish clear expectations regarding partnership working, roles, responsibilities, information sharing, communication and accountability across agencies.

The lack of framework has been an ongoing issue since May 2010, when the coalition government took office. Systems and structures that were in place, which supported and sustained impactful multi-agency working, were dismantled and not replaced.

Compounding this further, NASUWT asserts that multi-agency working requires sustained investment in the wider children’s services sector.

In conjunction, schools and the education sector need to be properly funded.

Schools cannot absorb more cuts and teachers and pupils cannot thrive in underfunded schools. This is a legacy of austerity measures and policies that are leaving schools and public services in an untenable situation.

Furthermore, where specialist services are under-resourced or unavailable, there is a significant risk that responsibility for meeting increasingly complex needs is displaced onto schools and individual education professionals. This is neither an effective nor a sustainable approach to safeguarding and supporting children and young people.

Multi-agency working must also recognise and respect the distinctive roles, expertise and professional responsibilities of the different services and practitioners involved.

Teachers and school leaders have a vital role to play in the team around the child, but their primary professional responsibility is teaching and learning.

They should not be expected to fulfil functions that are more appropriately undertaken by other members of the children’s services workforce who have the specialist expertise, training and remit to provide that support.

Effective partnership working should strengthen, rather than dilute, the professional roles and responsibilities of those involved.

Schools and education professionals must have access to timely advice, specialist support and effective referral pathways, enabling children and young people’s needs to be addressed by the most appropriate service or professional.

NASUWT therefore supports multi-agency working where it is based on:

• Bringing together the distinctive expertise of education, health, social care and other relevant services around the needs of the child or young person;

• adequate funding and resourcing of all relevant children’s services;

• clear roles, responsibilities and accountability for each agency and profession;

• respect for professional expertise and boundaries, ensuring that practitioners undertake work appropriate to their role, training and expertise;

• effective communication, information sharing and referral arrangements between agencies;

• timely access to specialist services and support for children, young people and families;

• appropriate workforce capacity, so that collaboration is not undermined by excessive workloads, vacancies or insufficient specialist provision; and

• meaningful involvement of schools and education professionals in local multi-agency arrangements, recognising their important role while ensuring that responsibility for wider children's services is not transferred to schools by default.

The government must ensure that its expectations for multi-agency working are supported by the systems, workforce and investment necessary to make them effective. 

Without this, there is a significant risk that multi-agency working becomes an expectation placed on already overstretched practitioners rather than a genuinely integrated approach to supporting children, young people and families.