I had never really been ‘up to speed’ on TEASC until stumbling across a reference to it in a recent online bulletin on local government. TEASC stands for Towards Excellence in Adult Social Care.
Full details can be found on this page from the Logal Government Association (LGA) website , which states:
“Towards Excellence in Adult Social Care is a programme to help councils improve their performance in adult social care. The programme is led a partnership board and is delivered by the sector on a regional basis.
The purpose of the programme is to support and challenge Local Government to deliver excellent Adult Social Care services. Through a local, regional and national partnership programme TEASC underpins the introduction of new policy and helps to sustain proven cost effective, high quality services tailored to individual need. It works with and for local government and its partners to enable them to take responsibility for their own improvement.“
In the current economic climate, with local government budgets under unprecedented pressure, it will be quite an achievement (a miracle?) to combine cost-effectiveness and high quality.
In the dim distant past, a panellist on the radio programme The Brains Trust prefaced every comment with the caution “It depends what you mean by…”. So I will just make two observations re TEASC. “It depends what you mean by Excellence” and “It depends what you mean by “Towards”. I fear ‘Towards’ refers to to a long and winding road ahead.
In a recent article on the website of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS), Sarah Mitchell, a Director of Towards Excellence in Adult Social Care (TEASC), herself admitted to a fear that some local authorities will ‘struggle’
“Expressions like `unprecedented times’ are overused but still absolutely true – never before have we faced such a challenging financial position, while implementing complex new legislative and policy change. Inevitably some authorities will struggle to deliver at some time in some aspects of their service.”
We will (inevitably) bring you more news and blog items on local authority spending policies during 2015…