‘You're Just Treating Us as Informants!’ Roles,Responsibilities and Relationships in the Production of Children's Services Directories

Local authorities in England are required to make directories of services available to practitioners working with children and young people. This is against a background of continuing reforms intended to ensure that services are joined-up around the needs and choices of children, young people and their families. There are high expectations that more of these services will be delivered by organisations from theVoluntary and Community Sector (VCS), especially services for groups or communities that public sector agencies find hard to engage. This article reports and comments upon a regional study focusing on the production of children's service directories involving service providers and commissioners, as well as the producers of directories, in a series of facilitated workshop activities. The study highlights tensions between local authorities and service providers around how information about services is controlled, edited and accessed. We argue that current approaches to the provision ofdirectories are unlikely to have the transformational effects predicted by policy makers. This is partly because local authorities' traditional position (supported by the prevailing technologies) has meant that they have tended to monopolise the roles and responsibilities which in turn maintains their control of directory content. They do so in the face of increasing dissent from new and established providers. Moreover, current models of service directories fail to meet the emerging information needs of a range ofstakeholders including service providers, service commissioners and service users. Inconclusion we propose some questions to improve visibility and governance in the creation and maintenance of service directories.     

Leading and Managing at the Boundary: Perspectives Created by Joined Up Working

Based on a process of action inquiry, this article reflects on the capacities that chief executives need in order to engage effectively with ‘joined-up’ working. It begins by examining the paradoxical feelings that chief executives can hold about their roles – feeling both powerful and powerless at the same time, for example. By adopting the notion of boundary, it is possible to understand more about the complexities that chief executives need to work with. These boundaries are emotional as much as they are structural. They imply a duality in the role as the chief executive works with the shifting relationships between the organisation and its external world, between organisational and political leadership, and between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. To be able to work at the boundary, there is a premium on the capacities for sense-making through systemic analysis, for maintaining personal perspective and for seeing leadership as synonymous with learning. In the end, leading at the boundary challenges the chief executive to think from time to time about what he or she stands for as a person.