August 2000
Birmingham City Council, one of the Partnership’s key members, recognised that other future developments will increasingly be carried forward through a range of partnership arrangements. As a result of this, they asked District Audit to look at existing ways of managing improvement through partnerships, and to identify the elements that made some partnerships successful and others less successful. The review aimed to assess the effectiveness of arrangements for partnership working using the Core Skills Development Partnership as one of 3 examples; to diagnose possible success levers and barriers to partnership working based on these examples and to identify learning points for future partnership working.

Their conclusions were that the Core Skills Development Partnership demonstrates a very effective and efficient alternative commissioning model. The Partnership has succeeded in establishing a clear and consistent vision which is shared by all partners.

 Integration and sustainability have been built in from the beginning. The time invested in early preparatory work helped to ensure a robust structure and delivery framework for the Partnership. Within this the Partnership has had to overcome traditional views of how best to use external funding and has found new ways of engaging wider networks effectively through a small, focused set of central mechanisms.

The Partnership’s ways of driving change strategically across a wide number of partners was recommended as a model for others. One key to our success was identified as our emphasis on outcomes, with activities being lined up behind shifts towards these outcomes. This contrasts heavily with former, unsuccessful approaches where partners focused too much on ‘small bid’ funding for their own processes, resulting in an array of disconnected, localised activities.