This hour long programme available on the Egov TV website examines the opportunities and challenges presented by the Children’s Bill and the practical issues of establishing and operating a Children’s Services organisation. The programme provides Local Authority Chief Executives and managers and professionals across Social Care, Education and Health Services with up-to-date guidance and experience from those leading policy and advisory services, from key suppliers and from senior executives already running Pathfinder Children’s Trusts.The programme is available at: http://www.egovtv.tv/common_pages/main/

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Arrangements for quickening progress towards e-government are to be sharpened with the appointment of a Delivery Board in each local council. The Boards will be sponsored by the corporate management group and chaired by a full time programme manager reporting directly to the Chief Executive or Council Leader. The Board’s role will be to ensure that progress is made across the council in all service and activity areas. Funding for the new programmme manager post will come from the existing e-government grant made by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.The Boards will work alongside Member and officer e-champions who will continue to promote, encourage, challenge and drive. The e-champions will carry on the pursuit of customer focused e-delivery and engage with partners at the local and national level to improve joined up delivery. e-champions will also be responsible for developing an e-delivery plan with the Local Strategic Partnership members to ensure further joint delivery with other public and voluntary agencies including the police, health, probation, Citizens Advice Bureau and Help the Aged.

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The Department for Education and Skills launched an initiative in 2003 to bring about a culture change that would limit the burden of bureaucracy on schools, but it is struggling to survive. The initiative was based on Local Education Authorities assessing the burden on schools resulting from changes and setting up gateways to sift out correspondence and other material that was not essential for the school. The gateway was also to be used to co-ordinate requests for data to limit multiple calls on the time of school staff. For the guidelines to work effectively attitudes needed to shift to recognizing that bureaucracy is low in school priorities.A progress report on the initiative reveals that not much has changed. 19% of LEAs. could not trace any documents about the initiative. With one exception the remaining LEA’s in the survey had reviewed their systems, but the researchers found scant evidence of impact assessments to assess the burden of proposed changes. 60% of LEAs believed that their gateway filters for correspondence were successful, but formalized systems for monitoring effectiveness only operated in 38% of LEAs. Only half the LEAs operated the gateway for the whole of the local authority. For the remainder the extension of the gateway was ‘proving challenging’.

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