Elizabeth Hartley, Assistant Director: Early Help and Prevention introduced the report of the Director for Children, Families and Education, which provided the Committee with an overview of the prevention approach recommended for adoption, including a Prevention Policy Statement and Prevention Framework. In addition, the report detailed the Breaking the Cycle programme, which sought to demonstrate how a collaboration of preventative activity could maximise opportunity and lead to better outcomes for people, services, and organisations.

It was reported that the Prevention Policy Statement was intended to make a clear commitment from the Council to early intervention and prevention, whilst the framework provided structure and guidance on taking preventative approaches, defining the different levels of prevention and setting out 6 foundations for preventative approaches, these were:

·  Strategic Leadership

·  Place-based Approach

·  Strengths-based Approach

·  Equity

·  Whole-system Approach

·  Co-production

The intention was to create a suite of preventative programmes, one of which was the Breaking the Cycle programme which was presented to the Committee. The programme intended to bring together a range of interventions working towards similar outcomes, and would work with people dealing with deprivation factors associated with deprivation such as drug abuse and risk of homelessness to give them priority access to catalyst projects, and eventually would be used to ask wider agencies to work differently with this cohort of people to provide support in a more suitable way.

Members expressed significant support for the approach and sought further clarity on the source of the funding. The Assistant Director: Early Help and Intervention informed the Committee that the Council had been successful in funding bids over a number of years, and that this workstream pulled together those different stands of work to maximise their effectiveness.

Resolved – That Policy and Resources be recommended to:

1)  Approve the Prevention Policy Statement and Prevention Framework.

2)  Endorse the Breaking the Cycle programme approach.