Samarbeid mellom tjenester. «Multi-agency working for children's well being.»

1. Samarbeid mellom tjenester. «Multi-agency working for children's well being.» Prof. Harry Daniels, University of Bath

2. Harry Daniels is Professor of Education: Culture and Pedagogy at the University of Bath, where he is the Convenor in Head of the 'Learning as Culture and Social Practice' Research Programme and also the Director of the Centre for Socio-cultural and Activity Theory Research (CSAT), dedicated to the development and application of socio-cultural and activity theory. • He is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Learning Research at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and is also Research Professor at the Centre for Human Activity Theory at Kansai University, Osaka in Japan.

3. Multi-agency working for children’s well being Harry Daniels University of Bath

4. Overview • The study in its policy context • Learning challenges for practitioners • What practitioners were learning as they developed inter-professional work • New forms of expertise • Collaborating on complex problems • Organisational implications • Leadership implications

5. The Dynamic Nature of Social Exclusion • 1990s OECD discussions – view of child as ‘at risk’ of being unable to contribute to society • Social exclusion is disconnection from experiencing and contributing to what society offers • Social exclusion is a dynamic: vulnerability results from interacting aspects of a child’s life. A complex problem needs a complex response • Preventing social exclusion is early intervention to disrupt a child’s trajectory of vulnerability

6. Theories of Work

7. Networking Co-configuration Modularisation Mass Customisation Architectural knowledge Linking Process Enhancement Practical Knowledge Mass Production Articulated knowledge Development Craft Tacit Knowledge Renewal

8. Co-configuration includes interdependency between multiple producers in a strategic alliance or other pattern of partnership which collaboratively creates and maintains a complex package which integrates products and services and has a long life cycle.

9. Knotworking • is a rapidly changing, distributed and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance • takes place between otherwise loosely connected actors and their work systems to support clients. • various forms of tying and untying of otherwise separate threads of activity takes place. • Co-configuration in responsive and collaborating services requires flexible knotworking • no single actor has the sole, fixed responsibility and control

10. Knotworking • requires participants to have a disposition to recognise and engage with the expertise distributed across rapidly shifting professional groupings.

11. Theories of Learning in New Forms of Work

12. theories of learning • subject (traditionally an individual, more recently possibly also an organization) • acquires some identifiable knowledge or skills in such a way that a • corresponding, relatively lasting change in the behaviour of the subject may be observed. • knowledge or skill to be acquired is itself stable and reasonably well defined. • There is a competent ‘teacher’ who knows what is to be learned.

13. People and organizations are all the time learning something that is not stable, not even defined or understood ahead of time. • important transformations -- literally learned as they are being created. • There is no competent teacher.

14. Expansive learning • Such learning occurs in situations where professionals are learning something that has not been created or constructed before. • This implies that knowledge they are acquiring is constantly changing and they are not necessarily finding a solution to the problem but are redefining the problems themselves

15. Learning something that ‘isn’t there yet’ ‘You know, if you use the …analogy of a jigsaw, not of a painting …if you were painting a garden, we’d be doing very elaborate daffodils and painting an oak tree and stuff like that this but we don’t actually know the dimensions of the garden yet and what we’ve got to do is to define the scope in which people can make decisions.’ (Local Authority B)

16. Approaches to Learning • Learning as acquisition and application • Learning as participation in social practices • Learning as transformation – of self and of world (the approach taken in LIW)

17. Learning as Transformation • Learning involves internalising the ideas that are culturally valued and externalising them • We are shaped by our cultures but also shape them by our actions on them • As we are shaped by and shape our worlds both we and they are changed

18. Learning as Interpretation and Response • Acting on our worlds involves interpreting e.g. a child’s trajectory and responding to that interpretation • In interagency work to prevent social exclusion it also involves recognising that other professionals will interpret that trajectory differently and will respond to it differently • Practitioners learn from others interpretations: giving expanded interpretations of the trajectory

19. Learning and Motivation • How e.g. a child’s trajectory is interpreted reveals a lot about what is valued in a professional culture • An interpretation elicits professional responses which reveal what is permitted in an organisation • Professional action needs to be examined within an analysis of the organisation in which it occurs

20. New Contexts for Work and New Tools for the Job

21. Boundaries • Crossing • Communicating • Changing • Vertical and horizontal

22. New work – new tools • “what”, • “how”, • “why” • “where to”

23. The aim of the research To identify • What are professionals learning in order to do inter-professional work? • What forms of interpersonal and organisational practice are associated with that learning?

24. Five Stages of LIW Project

25. Learning Challenges for Practitioners in Stage Two • Included: • Recognising how other practitioners interpret children’s trajectories and seeing increased complexity • Recognising how other professionals respond to their interpretations • Knowing how to work with other professionals while respecting their expertise • Knowing how to work outside ‘the safety of their institutional shelters’

26. Learning Challenges for Organisations in Stage Two • Included: • Enabling people to collaborate across institutional boundaries • Enabling them to work responsively with other practitioners and with children and families

27. Database for the presentation • Three longitudinal (21 month) case studies at Stage 4: using intervention sessions designed to stimulate thinking and talking about inter-professional work, plus interviews throughout the period • A Multi Professional Team with services around an extended school Analyses tested • in regional workshops across England • with participants six months after final sessions • in the NI extension project funded by TLRP

29. Rule bending and risk taking • Example: • Education Welfare Officer and Educational Psychologist having discussion about placement of child who was being bullied in school; a practice which was outside agreed referral processes • Contradiction: • Between old rules and new division of labour (MPT) • Resolution: • Justification of bending the old rules (expanding the moral-ideological object) and leading to questioning the existing system

30. So- innovatory work place learning gets lost • Rule breaking operation. • Rule enforcing strategy • Operational staff recognise need to inform strategy but unwilling to do it – ‘not me’ ‘not how I see myself’ – witnessed at all levels of structure • Operation reports with ‘compliant’ accounts but acts in new, but hidden ways • Strategy remains unaware of evolving operational practice and thus unable to comment on / supervise new developments which remain unseen and highly situated

31. The Challenge: Distributed Expertise in Mobile Systems • Practitioners were working between organisational boundaries doing new forms of work which were not sustained by existing practices • They needed to see themselves as parts of local systems of distributed expertise • Children’s trajectories change and practitioners had to follow them, work responsively with the child and each other

32. Knowledge in Use in New Inter-professional Practices (1) • Seeing the whole child in the wider context • ‘Knowing how to know’ other professionals • Working relationally and responsively with other professionals – relational agency • Helping other professionals to understand – being pedagogic with others • Being professionally multi-lingual – pressing the right buttons

33. Knowledge in Use in New Inter-professional Practices (2) • Making professional values, motives and expertise explicit • Be able to ‘bend’ rules (work on changing the system) if they get in the way of being responsive to a child’s needs (Glissen and Hemmelgarn 1998) • Be able to make and rework the tools (resources) they use to support children's trajectories • An enhanced form of professionalism - not the all-purpose worker

34. Relational Agency in Inter-professional Work • Interpreting a child’s trajectory alongside other practitioners to reveal its complexity • Understanding how other practitioners will interpret the trajectory • Negotiating priorities for action • Recognising what others bring to the action • Making what you bring visible to others • Negotiating responses to interpretations

35. New Forms of Expertise for Inter-professional Work • Experts must now extend their knowledge… to building links and trying to integrate what they know with what others want to or should know and do (Nowotny, 2003:155) • Knowing how to reveal their motives and expertise and understand those of others • An additional set of expertise which augments core professional expertise

36. Know-who is not enough • Need core expertise to be able to interpret a child’s trajectory (cf emergent role of welfare managers in schools) • Need to spend time on making values and motives visible as a prerequisite for flexible responsive work with vulnerable children

37. Professional hybridities and organisational structures individual specialists • strong boundaries and control (contract cultures) coordinated collection of specialists in the field (strategic development) • professional practice of strong boundaries between services and their professional values coordinated by strategy. a hybrid collection of workers who drew on the primary strengths of their colleagues (local balkanisation?). • weak boundaries and control -- weakened through rule breaking and bending

39. Professional learning communities Performance training sects Transform knowledge Transfer knowledge Shared inquiry Imposed requirements Evidence informed Results driven Situated certainty False certainty Local solutions Standardized scripts Joint responsibility Deference to authority Continuous learning Intensive training Communities of practice Sects of performance

40. Implications for Organisations 1 • Organise in a way that allows strategy to listen and learn with operation: beyond the rhetorical ‘consultation’ • Structures and processes that derive their rationale from purposes: after Glissen and Hemmelgarn (1998) and our ‘rule-bending’ findings • Analyse rule systems for future rather than letting legacies of the past dominate the future

41. Implications for Organisations 2 • Structure the division of labour (vertical and horizontal) to align with new demands • Organise for regular purposeful reflection oriented to ‘surfacing’ underlying tensions in practices and the development of new tools for new tasks • Organise to articulate objects (what needs to be worked on) rather than outcomes alone

42. Promoting a ‘learning system’ –the Munro review of child protection • The current system is too preoccupied with procedure and insufficiently focused on children’s needs • View of children’s services as a learning and adaptive system • Leadership committed to promoting learning but remaining accountable

43. The Aim To reveal what effective Directors of Children’s Services do to create learning cultures and learning practices which are aimed at promoting good outcomes for children across all levels of need. i.e. the actions they take to build capacity and why they take them.

44. Today Three stages: (i)     developing a model of learning in children’s services; (ii)     testing the model with a small group of senior leaders in children’s services;and (iii)    using the model as a framework for collecting evidence about the work the senior leaders do to create a culture of learning

45. Outline Key ideas in the model Framework for examining the work of DCS Working resourcefully to take forward strategy

46. The Aim To reveal what effective Directors of Children’s Services do to create learning cultures and learning practices which are aimed at promoting good outcomes for children across all levels of need. i.e. the actions they take to build capacity and why they take them.

47. Three stages: (i)     developing a model of learning in children’s services; (ii)     testing the model with a small group of senior leaders in children’s services;and (iii)    using the model as a framework for collecting evidence about the work the senior leaders do to create a culture of learning

48. Outline Key ideas in the model Framework for examining the work of DCS Working resourcefully to take forward strategy

49. Phase III • Provision of a simple template to gather actions in activities in practices • Collection of two examples of actions in activities per week • c 16 examples for each DCS to support a telephone interview into their understandings of learning and what they do to create learning organisations. • Mapping of these examples onto the model of the learning demands

50. Questions: Two examples from each participant Very briefly describe one everyday activity this week where you were aware that you were promoting learning What did you do during the activity i.e. what actions did you take? What are the long term strategic goals behind how you worked with colleagues in this activity? How do your actions in this activity relate to these goals?