About Pathways
The origins of Wiltshire Pathways & what it is about
The Pathways Project
The Wiltshire Children’s Services “Pathways” Project has looked at how services provided by education, health, social services and the voluntary sector could be re-shaped to make them more effective in helping children & young people overcome “obstacles to health & development” and achieve desired outcomes.
In 2001, in the largest exercise of its kind ever carried out in the county, more than 200 people - Education Welfare Officers, Educational Psychologists, Health Visitors, Paediatricians, Psychiatrists, School Nurses, Social Workers, Teachers, Youth & Community workers and others – met together in 23 Pathway Task Groups and two Working Conferences, in order to:
• define and describe these “obstacles to health & development” (click here to view the current list of obstacles)
• identify the services available to children & young people to help overcome them and describe how children & families find their way to these services
• propose how services could be re-shaped to make a better “pathway”
Hundreds of ideas were generated and thirteen key themes were explored at the Working Conferences to provide the basis for the Children & Young People’s Services Plan 2002-2004. Central to that plan was a vision of a more joined up service which emerged from the Pathways Project.
(You can view a presentation about the original Pathways Project here.)
The legacy of the Pathways Project
The Pathways project proved remarkably prescient as far as “Every Child Matters”/ Change for Children is concerned. Many of the concepts that “Every Child Matters” placed on the agenda for children & young people’s services had already been explored as a Pathways Project “key theme”. Implementation of Children’s Trust Arrangements is taking us in the direction we wanted to go and in which we had already started to move.
The legacy left by the “Pathways” Project includes:
• some important messages about joint working
• continuing commitment to multi-agency working on the part of the large number of agencies involved in the project
• a coherent group of inter-related projects that gave Wiltshire a head start and are now part of implementing Children’s Trust Arrangements
• descriptions of services that have been developed to provide the service information that can be accessed from this site.
• a contribution to shaping organisational change in the county (the integration of the Children & Families Division of Social Services with Education) by asking the right questions and providing some of the answers at the right time.
• the stimulus to form a Children & Young People’s Services Partnership for Wiltshire, out of which has since evolved the Wiltshire Children & Young People's Trust Board.
Pathways update
In a process starting in October 2005 and ending in March 2006, the Pathways Project reports (now covering 37 “obstacles to health & development”) were reviewed and updated, once again involving the contributions of people from across the whole spectrum of children’s services. Material from the revised reports can be viewed by clicking here.
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