Management Information Sheet

Children's Centres remain a key priority for Norfolk County Council Children's Services and the level of funding ring fenced from the Early Intervention Grant reflects this - £14.8 million per year has been made available over the next 4 years to continue to run children's centres

This is why we are implementing a programme of radical change for our children's centres. We are looking to achieve a more effective system of service delivery which will be supported by a consistent geographical pattern and a single service specification enabling us to meet the future needs of Norfolk's children and families

To achieve this we have re-commissioned Children's centres to ensure sufficient high quality provision to meet local need, achieve better value for money through reducing management and administration costs, achieve greater consistency in approach through the new service specification and secure a strong and sustainable link with health services. It is not proposed to close any children's centre locations through the re-commissioning process

Children's Centres have been grouped into 36 Lots of which 10 Lots or school based centres have been commissioned through a robust application process and the remaining 26 Lots have been commissioned through a competitive tendering process. For all Lots the closing date was 5^th December 2011

The evaluation of all the 36 Lots has been completed. Contracts have been awarded to 8 of the school based centres, with new contracts being in place from 1^st April 2012. For the remaining 2 school based centres the LA will be working closely with these centres to enable them to re-submit their application in due course

The successful providers were Norfolk Community Health and Care (NCH&C), which will take on the running of 20 of the 26 lots; Action for Children, which won four of the lots and Great Yarmouth Community Trust, which will run two lots

Contracts will be awarded to the successful bidders for the 26 Lots that were competitively tendered it is planned that new contracts will be in place from 1^st July 2012 or earlier in agreement with existing providers.

A full report will be presented to Children's Services overview and scrutiny on 8^th March 2012, click here to view

Contract intentions are detailed in the following table.