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What is Commissioning in Children and Young People’s Services?

Commissioning is a process that starts with identifying the needs of the children, young people and their families. We then have to think about how much money we have and plan what services are needed. Once we know what service we want in Bucks we then usually advertise the service to different organisations who may want to run it. This is called tendering.

Tendering is like a competition to find out which organisation will best be able to run the service to meet your needs. They have to fill out lots of forms but also come along to do presentations. We like to involve children and young people in the presentations so that you have can have a choice over who runs a service.

When we choose an organisation to run a service it is then our job to make sure that the service is meeting your needs and providing a good service. We love to hear your feedback on services so please contact us if you have any comments.

Example:

The Bucks Activity Project run by Action for Children came to the end of its contract this year. This meant that we had to retender the service to make sure that we had the best people running the service for you. We had to read lots of application forms from different organisations then we picked the best ones to come along and do presentations for us so we could ask questions and hear about the service.

The best organisations did a presentation to some people from the council, but they also did a presentation to parents and another one to disabled young people. After all of this we added up the scores and found that Action for Children had won. So Action for Children will carry on running the Bucks Activity Project but they will also be running an extra service which will allow you to have one to one support at a time that suits you to enjoy activities in the community.

Click on the links to the left to meet staff working to improve short breaks.