Building Social Capital across Local Area Partnerships

“Teachers think social workers are the hardest people in the world to work with and social workers think teachers are the hardest people in the world to work with and they are both right!!”

This was the wonderful quote we got from a senior social worker whilst working on a local area partnership leadership development programme in Hull. What she alluded to in a light hearted way was that multi-agency working has a number of challenges which are regularly rehearsed, but one which isn’t often widely acknowledged is that the participants in those partnerships come from different professional cultures.

The shared professional culture which is held implicitly and embedded in the ways in which professionals work together, also binds them together at times to the exclusion of ‘outsiders’. This is often described as ‘bonding social capital’. This is the social capital that develops within groups as they come to know and understand one another and build common purpose. While high levels of bonding social capital are really important to have within particular groups when the imperative is to work beyond the boundaries of your group it needs to be balanced by developing high levels of ‘bridging social capital’ with external partners.

We have recently engaged with the issue of building bridging social capital in their work with Leeds with an informal partnership called NEtWORKS. NEtWORKS is an informal pabrings together Schools, Children’s Centres and other local organisations in the area surrounding Meanwood, Moortown and Chapel Allerton in North East Leeds. This partnership is one of the 38 clusters created across Leeds to help deliver services to children and young people.

Enquire worked with the Local authority Extended Services Adviser and the leadership of the partnership to design and facilitate a work-shadowing programme for colleagues drawn from the various partners in the locality. This included colleagues from schools, children’s centres, careers, youth service, social care, police, integrated processes, attendance improvement service, youth offending service and the voluntary sector. Pairs of participants worked together for a day on designing a rich opportunity for one another to engage in reciprocal work-shadowing opportunities. On final day was one of conversation as they shared their experiences with the other members of the group.

The response from participants has been fantastic. One colleague told us that,

"This project has inspired me to pursue my aspiration to work in a more creative & innovative way to ensure an effective multi-agency approach to improving outcomes for families"
While another testified that,
"Integration of services and staff needs commitment of time, space and support at all levels. No effective work can be done until staff have 'integrated themselves together'. This should not be seen as a luxury, an ‘add on’ or something to be done incidentally.”
And another said that,
“the work has provided me an opportunity to enhance my knowledge of children’s services and the organisations which deliver across the North East Leeds cluster. I believe that the development of our ‘community of practice’ will lead to greater understanding and knowledge and a better service provision within this cluster.”

We know it’s made a difference to attitudes, to the quality of relationships and to common understandings of how the different professionals in the group work and the accountabilities they work to. What we don’t know, and its too early to say yet, is what difference engagement in the programme will make to practice and provision.

So the question those within the design and development team are asking themselves is;

“Does building social capital across services within a locality create the conditions for developing better services for young people and their families?


How are you meeting the challenge of building social capital across those traditional boundaries of organisation and professional culture?

Have you any experience of programmes which endeavour to build common understandings across services?

Can you share any powerful images of successful local area partnership working?

Also read http://www.enquirelearning.com/leaders.asp