Multiagency Collaborations to Support Well-Being Amongst Care-Experienced Children and Young People in School and During Transition to Further Education College: Stakeholder Perspectives on Facilitators, Challenges and Innovations

Multiagency collaboration to address care-experienced children and young people's mental well-being has been advocated as a way of attending to complex needs while avoiding fragmented support. Key sectors with a statutory role include education, mental health and social care, and there is increasing interest at a UK and global scale about stakeholder experiences of multiagency collaboration and how sectors work together when young people transition into further education settings. This paper considers interview reports from secondary schools, FE colleges, social care and mental health teams, drawing on a complex systems framework as a lens into organisational and agent-level interactions. Findings highlight mutual professional respect and a focus on shared outcomes as key facilitators for multiagency working. Challenges related to the flow of information between organisations and knowledge gaps around understanding childhood trauma. The findings also report boundary-spanning roles, which overcome some of the identified challenges. Policy and practice implications include the following: prioritising close-working between sectors; harnessing collaborations around a core set of goals, with schools as a focal point; and further developing innovative boundary-spanning roles. Research implications include exploring multiagency dynamics in other contexts and understanding how carers interact with education, mental health and social care subsystems.