Merton – Building a single outcomes spine across multiple national programmes

Merton’s story is about joining the dots. As a Transformation Fund (TF1) local authority, they’ve been expected to deliver multiple national programmes – Best Start for Life, family hubs, Families First Programme and children’s social care reform – each with its own guidance and metrics. Rather than treat these as separate, Merton used the detailed shared outcomes framework co-produced with other London boroughs as the spine running through all of them.

Working closely with programme leads, they took the  London shared outcomes framework’s three layers –

  1. Outcomes for babies, children and young people

  2. Outcomes for parents and carers

  3. System/service indicators and metrics

…and systematically mapped in:

  • The 10 Supporting Families outcomes

  • Public Health Outcomes Framework indicators

  • Start for Life and family hubs measures

  • Children’s social care dashboard measures (as a DfE pilot area)

  • Local Government Outcomes Framework indicators, including GLD and Merton’s new target to increase GLD by 9% by 2028

This created a single, common outcomes-structured view of what they care about: children being Safe, Healthy, Happy, Learning and Engaged, parents being supported and thriving, and systems behaving in ways that enable that. Instead of juggling five different frameworks, they now have one overarching common outcomes-based framework, into which all the others plug.

The team then went further and built this into their data infrastructure. Using LG Inform and their own “Insight to Innovation” data lake, they began to profile outcomes (for example GLD) against child poverty and other local risk factors, explicitly tagged to Common Outcomes Framework domains. They identified cohorts such as children with SEN/EHCP and summer-born children as priorities for the Learning domain, and are starting to look at child-level trajectories across Healthy and Safe outcomes, anticipating the development and implementation of the Government’s new Single Unique Identifier.

On the practice side, family hubs and the Families First Partnership are now being aligned around this same set of common outcomes. Service mapping against the core offer isn’t just a coverage exercise; it’s being used to ask: which parts of our offer contribute most to which outcomes, and where are the gaps?

Crucially, Merton has used the shared outcomes framework to argue for – and design – a single, shared approach to information sharing and needs assessment that serves all of these programmes. The aim is a system where:

  • Strategy, commissioning and transformation priorities are chosen by looking across outcomes;

  • Data and insight are structured using outcome domains and layers; and

  • Family hubs, Best Start in Life, Families First and children’s social care all see themselves as contributing to the same coherent outcomes picture.