Samarbeid mellom tjenester.

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

Prof. Harry Daniels, University of Bath

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.

Multi-agency working for children’s well being

Harry Daniels

University of Bath

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

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

Theories of Work

Craft

Tacit Knowledge

Mass Production

Articulated knowledge

Process Enhancement

Practical Knowledge

Mass Customisation

Architectural knowledge

Co-configuration

Renewal

Development

Linking

Modularisation

Networking

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.

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.

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

Knotworking

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

Theories of Learning in New Forms of Work

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.

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.

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

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)

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)

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

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

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

New Contexts for Work and New Tools for the Job

BoundariesCrossingCommunicatingChangingVertical and horizontal

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

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?

Stage OneTheoretical Development

January - June 2004 Systematic Review and clarification of conceptual framework

Stage TwoAnalysing the National Situation

June - December 2004Identify local authority cases

Stage ThreeRefine Model Through Intervention in Two Settings

January - September 2005Development of Knowledge Tools and Preliminary Outcomes

Stage FourIntervention Study in Three Local Authorities

October 2005 - June 2007Testing of Feasibility of Models and Tools

Stage FiveExamining the Outcomes in a Broader Context

July - December 2007Knowledge Sharing

Five Stages of LIW Project

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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture and accountability Weak accountability Strong accountability

Underdeveloped sense of culturePermissiveindividualism

Corrosive individualism 

Culture imposed from above Contrived collegiality Performance training sects

Culture developed Collaborative cultures Professional learningcommunities 

 Professional learning communities Performance training

sects Transform knowledge Transfer knowledgeShared inquiry Imposed requirementsEvidence informed Results drivenSituated certainty False certaintyLocal solutions Standardized scriptsJoint responsibility Deference to authorityContinuous learning Intensive training

Communities of practice Sects of performance

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

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

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

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.

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

Outline

Key ideas in the model

Framework for examining the work of DCS

Working resourcefully to take forward strategy

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.

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

Outline

Key ideas in the model

Framework for examining the work of DCS

Working resourcefully to take forward strategy

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

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?

The data collection template

Levels of analysis Examples

1. The activities that DCS engage in: a focus on the kind of work that DCS undertake and how they relate to strategic purposes

2. The actions that DCS take in those activities: a focus on how and why they do what they do

3. The practice of strategic leadership: a focus on long and short-term purpose

The Strategies used to Promote Learning

Not a formulaic linear system of actions

DCS engage in deliberative action as they seek to lead different types of learning with different groups of individuals engaged in response to different types of problem / challenge

We identified the following types of leadership for learning action

Directing Translating Knitting Enabling Questioning Coaching Facilitating Collaborating

Key findings

Leadership for learning is intelligent leadership: it demands the intelligent use of leadership behaviours and strategies to address two fundamental learning challenges

Why intelligent leadership?

1. Focuses on intelligence not information

2. Intelligently connects the operational and the strategic

Learning

Challenges

Processes

for leading

learning

Behaviours

for leading

learning

The model of intelligent leadership

“The focus for IL”

“The strategy for IL”

“The practice of IL”

1. The learning challengesThe focus for intelligent leadership

Building capacity to support the

organisational priorities

Designing learning systems

Organisation and systemwide

learning to improve outcomes for

children

“Common Knowledge”

“Organisational narrative”

Promote the flow of learning

Responsive to tensions and contradictions

•What common knowledge exists between providers of children’s services in your area?•Where does this need to be developed further?

Building Capacity

•Do the systems in your context provide the time and space to share intelligence…•[a] across organisations?•[b] between practitioners and policymakers?

Designing learning systems

1. The learning challengesThe focus for intelligent leadership

2. The processes for leading learning The strategy for intelligent leadership

Learning

Challenges

Behaviours

for leading

learning

Processes

for leading

learning

Learning

Challenges

Behaviours

for leading

learning

“The strategy for IL”

Processes

for leading

learning

2. The processes for leading learningThe strategy for intelligent leadership

ResponseWhat leadership best

supports the resolution of the issue?

RecognitionWhat is the learning challenge? What knowledge is needed to

address this? Who needs to be involved?

ReflectionWhat’s working? What’s

not?Why?

Facilitating intelligent change

Learning

Challenges

Behaviours

for leading

learning

Processes

for leading

learning

3.The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

Learning Challenges

Processes

for leading

learning

“The practice of IL”

Behavioursfor leading

learning

3. The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

Behaviours

for leading

learning

Directing

Questioning

Pullingtogeth

er

Translating

Taking the standpoin

tof others

Enabling

Coaching

Facilitating

Collaboratin

g

Supporting

Individual learning

Directing

Questioning

Pulling

together

TranslatingTaking the

standpoint

of others

Enabling

Coaching

Facilitating

Collaboratin

gSupporting individuals

learning

I explored his leadership style – the activities he was comfortable with and those he was not. Considered how others perceived this. Discussed how certain problems might be handled differently if some of his behaviours were modified.

3. The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

I was there at the meeting as a safety net as it was the first time for them to chair it.

Supporting

cultural learning

Directing

Questioning

Pulling

together

TranslatingTaking the

standpoint

of others

Enabling

Coaching

Facilitating

Collaboratin

g

Supporting cultural learning

‘Risk’, ‘safe’ and ‘supervision’ mean different things. Sometimes vocabulary gets in the way. So I say ‘what is best for young people now and in the future’. In the future is important. Then I play it back to people and say, ‘Can you help me here?’ ‘What can you do?’.

I make a great play of listening skills and not being judgemental. I do deep listening and try to transpose myself into how others are listening… I try to understand where people are coming from – their agenda and motives.

3. The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

Supporting

system learning

Directing

Questioning

Pullingtogeth

er

TranslatingTaking the

standpointof others

Enabling

Coaching

Facilitating

Collaborati

ng Supporting systemlearning

In a meeting I might stand back and let the process work its way through. Find common ground and get things aligned and pull things together so we can come back to it again.

3. The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

I asked a series of challenging questions about the use of resources, budget profiling, monitoring and impact on outcomes.

• Think of an individual who you’ve helped improve professionally.

• What steps did you encourage them to take?• What more could you do in the future?

Supporting

Individual learning

• What blockers are there in the system which prevent professionals in your area from helping children and families?

• What can be done to reduce these?

Supporting

System learning

• What steps do you take to increase empathy and understanding of different professionals’ roles in your authority?

• How could you develop this further?

Supporting Cultural

learning

3. The behaviours for leading learningThe practice of intelligent leadership

In conclusion - the model of intelligent leadership

Individual learningFacilitatingCoachingEnabling

Collaborating

Cultural learningTaking the standpoint of others

Translating

System learningDirecting

QuestioningPulling together

Learning

Challenges

Behaviours

for leading

learning

Processes

for leading

learningRecognition

Questioning practiceExamining practice

ResponseFormulating & modelling solutions

Implementing solutions

ReflectionReflection and realigning purposes

LearningChallenges

Processesfor

leadinglearning

Behaviours

for leadinglearning

Designing learning systems

Building capacity

Reflection and Support

Reflection in Practice• Individual : Time is often set aside by DCS for

systematic reflection • Reflection with others: through inviting peer

challenge and shadowing opportunities.

Reflection on practice • Continuation of the action learning sets which

they encounter on their NCSL training. • Systematic use of peer reflection with other

DCS. • External professional coaches are employed

by LA for the DCS.

Leading Learning1. Recognition of the challenge• what type of problem does the service face • what kind of data are required if this problem is to be fully understood• what kind of learning does the DCS seek to lead in response to this problem.

2. Response – using a repertoire of resources• What kinds of leadership actions are best suited to this challenge? • Which of the actions in the DCS repertoire should be invoked?

3. Reflection and Support• Conscious reflection on whether the right decisions were made by the leader• Reflecting and arranging the kind of support that would:

- enhance the repertoire

- make responsive decision making more effective