Local Evaluation of Children's Services Learning from the Children's ...

and that in many localities, local authority agencies took the lead in programme setup, whilst voluntary and community organisations tended to be more active later intheir roles as service providers. Some reports note a degree of frustration amongvoluntary and community stakeholders who felt they had relatively limited influencecompared to some statutory agencies, although this was not the case across allpartnerships. In some partnerships voluntary and community organisations had ahigh profile in partnership board activities and the Children’s Fund was seen as bothraising the profile of the voluntary and community sector and as promoting productiverelations with statutory sector agencies.A number of more recent evaluation reports speculated on the ways the relationshipsbetween the statutory and voluntary and community sectors may play out aschildren’s trusts become established. A commonly-held anxiety is that gains madethrough Children’s Fund activity may be lost in the next phase of integratingchildren’s services as it was predicted that the voluntary and community sector wouldbe relatively marginal in decision making. Illustrating this point one report suggests:The Children’s Fund has assisted working relations between the statutory andvoluntary and community sectors, but some voluntary organisations seethemselves as being at risk of again being on the margins with the move to thelocal authority taking the lead in integrating children’s services through theChildren’s Trust.However, some local evaluation reports point to concerns among voluntary andcommunity sector stakeholders as closer relationships between themselves and thestatutory sector might undermine the distinctive skills and working practices that havebeen deemed valuable within Children’s Fund partnerships. For example, a WaveOne evaluation described how the ‘anti-managerial’ culture of voluntary andcommunity organisations and their independence had facilitated work with ‘hard-toreach’families: ‘… sometimes independence becomes necessary for voluntary andcommunity organisations to maintain a critical distance from mainstreamarrangements for the benefit of particular groups of children’.Some local evaluators identified links between partnership boards and other strategicgroups in the locality, and that board members were familiar with policy changes inother sectors that would impact on the Children’s Fund programme. Other reportsrecorded mixed experiences among strategic Children’s Fund stakeholders abouthow well connected they were to other strategic groups, with some board membersacross different programmes tending to feel relatively uninformed about widerChapter 4 57