Partnership Working and the Children's Services Agenda: Is it Feasible?

The modes of governance underpinning public sector services have been reshaped several times in the post‐war period, leaving a mixture of command and control, marketisation and partnership working. There is now a call for a new and ambitious phase that might be termed ‘whole systems working’, and the most ambitious focus for this phase is the Every Child Matters reforms being ushered in under the Children Act 2004. This article describes the whole‐systems nature of the changes and identifies a range of difficulties that need to be addressed.