The Leeds 100-day Community Mission Challenge (CMC) is a Health Mission. Working with the Cabinet office and DHSC, we are testing new and innovative ways to support our youngest and most vulnerable children and their families by enhancing teamwork across the system within communities.
Mariana Pexton – Deputy Chief Executive and Ben Finley – Acting Deputy Director of Children’s and Families at Leeds City Council share their reflections on the progress made:
As Leeds is home to the Health and Social Care Hub, a cross-government Places for Growth Thematic Campus, we have taken on a Health Mission that aligns with our Leeds Ambitions – creating a fairer, healthier city where we are reducing mental and physical health inequalities and ensuring children have the best start in life in our child-friendly city.
This focused, 100-day mission has brought together health, care, the wider public sector and community partners where the need is greatest. By focusing on babies aged 0–2 who are at risk of becoming children looked after in the East Leeds community, we have created an enabling environment for the system to collaborate more effectively. The CMC is focused on three specific tests:
- An Integrated Huddle: to create a small, trusted space where practitioners can work collaboratively to make collective, timely and proportionate decisions for families at the earliest possible point.
- A Single Lead Practitioner (SLP): to provide continuity and coordination around the family, ensuring decisions in the huddle translate into timely support.
- Shared Information: to improve earlier, joined-up decision making for practitioners by sharing professional judgement and available insights on families in need of proactive support.
By working together seamlessly around families, we’ve improved how we share insight, coordinate support, and understand holistic need. This integrated way of working is helping us step in earlier and more effectively, strengthening our shared ambition to give every child in Leeds the best possible start in life. The practitioner huddles are further creating real momentum, amplifying this progress by bringing the right people together at the right time, unlocking collective expertise to drive real impact.
Yasmin Johnson, an Advanced Practitioner, for Leeds City Council’s Children’s Social Work Service and Single Lead Practitioner (a role we are trialling as part of the Leeds Community Mission Challenge), shared her reflection on the work so far:
“Taking part in the testing has highlighted just how important integrated working truly is. Collaborating with colleagues across health, social care, policing, early years and community services has allowed us to build a clearer, collective understanding of the risks that children and families are facing. This shared insight has helped us sequence support more effectively, ensuring interventions are delivered in a coordinated order that meets families’ needs at the right time. It has also brought into focus the barriers that many families encounter when trying to access services, whether due to practical challenges, system complexity or confidence in navigating support. By recognising these obstacles together, we are better placed to design more accessible pathways. Ultimately, this joined-up approach enables earlier identification of risk, quicker action, and support that truly aligns with the lived experiences of children and their families.”
In this piece, we break down the Leeds Community Mission Challenge journey so far: our developing approach, the obstacles we worked through, the outcomes, and the next steps we are taking.
Test, Learn, Grow: Accelerating Integration Through Real-World Experimentation
Leeds is using the Test, Learn, Grow (TLG) methodology for the 100-day challenge. TLG encourages rapid experimentation, reflection and adaptation to drive progress at pace.
Rather than waiting for perfect solutions, TLG uses live practice as an opportunity to trial new ways of central and local government working together with frontline practitioners to improve public services. Within the CMC, this has enabled partners to test new approaches such as:
- Integrated, multi-agency huddles which enable the right need, right people, right decision and right support at the right time
- Earlier, proactive engagement with parents
- Identifying emerging risks sooner
- Trialling a Single Lead Practitioner model to bring coherence and relational continuity to multi-agency support
Each test is intentionally small and grounded in real practice. The purpose is not to produce polished models, but to generate insight to drive the next step of change and understand the opportunities to scale the work up.
A Whole-System Approach Wrapped Around Families
What makes the Leeds approach distinctive is its commitment to Think Family, where we recognise the need to connect the dots across health, social care, early years, housing, employment, welfare, policing and wider community partners.
Instead of responding to issues in isolation, practitioners have been live testing how best to explore holistic family strengths, pressures, routines, relationships and structural barriers across health and social care organisations. The wellbeing of the infant is inseparable from the wellbeing of their family, and the responsibility for that wellbeing belongs to the whole system, not any single service.
This is more than technical or procedural alignment – it’s a cultural shift. Through the 100-day challenge, Team Leeds partners have been developing high trust relationships and embracing a mindset that encourages curiosity, integrated thinking, and the confidence to challenge assumptions. Decisions are becoming sharper because they are made collectively, drawing on a broader and more nuanced understanding of risk and opportunity.
This collaborative way of working is directly supporting the wider Leeds Ambitions, particularly the commitments to early help, reducing health inequalities, strengthening communities, and improving outcomes for children and families.
What the System Is Learning: Data Sharing as a System Challenge requiring System Solutions
One of the most significant insights emerging from TLG relates to data sharing – a challenge recognised across local and national systems.
Through our Test–Learn–Grow cycles, we have seen that effective early support is not just about individual professional practice, it’s shaped by the wider conditions of our health and care system. These system-level factors ultimately determine whether emerging needs are caught early or only recognised once they reach crisis.
A major barrier is how data flows across a range of public sector organisations in Leeds such as health and policing. To spot families most at risk and coordinate the right preventative support, we need a shared, place-based approach to data sharing. Consistent, confident information sharing is essential to progressing our Leeds Ambitions, as well as for delivering future public sector reform programmes to shift services towards earlier intervention.
Leeds is turning this challenge into a structured test:
- What is actually preventing information from being shared?
- Which barriers are structural or perceived, which are organisational, and which are cultural?
- How do perceptions differ across professions and agencies?
This approach allowed the system to explore nuance rather than blame. It further highlights where clarity and joint interpretation is needed; insight which can be used to create practical, consistent solutions.
Growing the Learning Through Local and National Collaboration
A powerful aspect of this work is how local innovation is informing national thinking, and vice versa.
With support from the Cabinet Office, Department of Health and Social Care, and national partners, Leeds is feeding its learning into wider conversations about how data legislation is understood and applied across health and care and beyond. As well as the known legislative challenges, Leeds are also highlighting the cultural barriers to data sharing and are working closely with Cabinet Office to help shape national policy and unlock more consistent, confident information sharing across the country.
A System That Learns is a System That Transforms
At its heart, Test, Learn, Grow is simple:
- Testwhat you believe might help
- Learnfrom the result
- Growbased on evidence and partnership insight
Within the 100-day Community Mission Challenge, Leeds is showing what this can be in practice: integrating services, building shared understanding, and responding earlier and more effectively to the needs of vulnerable infants and their families.
By combining systems thinking, real-world testing, and deep collaboration across local and national partners, Leeds is demonstrating what becomes possible when a place commits to working as one integrated team.
The learning emerging now has the potential not just to improve local outcomes, but to shape how health and care systems across the country understand and support families at the earliest and most critical stage of life.