By E Gray-King and D WilcoxPartnerships are about sharing creativity, risk and responsibility and streamlining tasks to those best suited to do them. If partnerships are established well, the productivity of a partnership is higher than if each partner worked separately as a result of each doing what they do best. The guide describes the advantages and definition of partnership, how to choose a partner and build a partnership. It also helps local authorities, private sector bodies, and voluntary organisations faced with tight timetables and firm guidelines to think through the complexities for partnership. The guide includes a worksheet and draft letter for partners to commit to.

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The Scottish executive is facing a call today to move away from the traditional idea of schools and towards the introduction of children and young people’s centres, which would encompass not just primary and secondary education but full-time pre-school services and out-of-school care and where at least half the staff would have a graduate or equivalent qualification.The call comes from Children in Scotland – a national agency for voluntary, statutory and professional organisations and individuals working with children and families. In oral evidence today to the Scottish Parliament Education Committee’s Early Years Enquiry, Bronwen Cohen, the chief executive of Children in Scotland, will call for more radical thinking around schools. She said the concept of a children and young people’s centre built on the idea of integrated community schools.

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A new report details ways in which local authority overview and scrutiny committees can work with the voluntary and community sector to improve service delivery and encourage civil renewal. The guide – ‘On the Radar’ – is published by the Centre for Public Scrutiny.It says joint working is mutually beneficial because the voluntary sector can strengthen the local government scrutiny function, by providing or facilitating more representative evidence for scrutiny reviews. At the same time scrutiny committees give voluntary and community groups the chance to work directly with elected councillors and to influence decision-making and policy development. The report says that for relationships between the two parties to reach their full potential they have to be mainstreamed in a council’s corporate strategy.

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