Children and Young People's Needs Assessment
Hackney's Children and Young People's Needs Assessment provides a thorough, wide ranging and up to date analysis of children and young people's needs, mapped against existing services. It will be used to inform strategic commissioning priorities and our strategic approach to children and young people's services in Hackney.
We also plan the needs assessment to be our core evidence base for everything we do relating to children and young people.
Evidence
As part of the needs assessment we analysed evidence from a range of sources, including:
- Performance measures, inc national statistics
- Council service data and data from partners, e.g. Met police, PCT/NHS
- Messages from recent consultation with children and young people on a range of issues
- Other research studies e.g. childcare sufficiency review
- Review of literature: key policies, strategies and service plans
- Interviews with service managers
- Engagement with specific forums e.g. disabled children's performance sub-group, children and young people's forum
- Stakeholder seminar
Chapters
- Opportunities for 14-19 year olds (PDF, 91KB)
- Educational outcomes (PDF, 199KB)
- Youth offending and re-offending (PDF, 81KB)
- Safety (PDF, 121KB)
- Mental Health (PDF, 95KB)
- Disability (PDF, 490KB)
- Health (PDF, 120KB)
- Positive activities (PDF, 514KB)
- Poverty - material aspects of deprivation (PDF, 256KB
Principles
The needs assessment identified the importance of:
1. The need for early identification and intervention, especially in the early years to improve educational attainment and tackle childhood obesity and for young offenders, young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET), and young substance misusers.
2. The need for whole family approaches
3. The need to tackle deprivation as a driver of factors that affect life chances such as obesity and low educational attainment
4. The need for a targeted approach focused on particular ethnic groups, geographical areas, ages and vulnerability
Engagement with stakeholders also emphasised the importance of:
5. The need to work collaboratively and to remove barriers to partnership working.
6. Making more effective use of resources in a context of diminishing funding.
7. Use of evidence-based approaches
8. Engagement with children, young people and families.
Page updated: 27 Oct 2011
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