Through our partnership with the North Wales Ambition Board and the five other local authorities within our Region, a new programme aimed at young people has been developed called TRAC.

Led by Denbighshire County Council and in partnership with all other North Wales local authorities and the Colleges, the aim will be to supporting young people aged 11-24 disengaging with education, and at risk of becoming NEET – Not in Education, Employment or Training. The TRAC project will run for three to five years has secured money from European Structural Funds (ESF).

TRAC will improve attainment and will support the development of an appropriately skilled, agile and resilient workforce. The project is consistent with the six aspects of the Youth Engagement and Progression Framework. The project will reach out to young people with the aim of raising individual attainment and enhancing the quality of the workforce of the future.

The project will include the following range of interventions at aged 11-24:

• Provision of an Enhanced Alternative Curriculum – Provision of targeted vocational courses and extended work placements for young people identified as being at risk of becoming NEET
• Enhanced Support Package – Wider Health and Wellbeing support for young people at risk of becoming NEET
• Supporting Transition –Targeted focus on key transition stages. Age 11 [primary/ secondary transition], Age 14 [key stage 3 to 4 transition], Age 16 [transition to 6th form, further education, employment or training], Age 18/19 [transition to higher education, further education, employment or training]
• Delivery – Regionally procured framework of quality assured bilingual providers, based on the identified needs of the Young Person.
• Early identification of those at risk of disengagement from Year 7 in order to manage the transition to secondary education. Development of regional data to ensure accurate monitoring and tracking of participants, to evaluate the impact of support being provided to young people.

16-24 Further Education Provision will include:

• Identification and Brokerage Support
• Working in conjunction with EPC’s, implementing appropriate brokerage support for those participants; this will include supporting participants to develop a personal development plan for upskilling for a career, supporting participants to
• Their first job opportunity, helping participants access the appropriate training.

Once live, this project will fall within our Prevention Section that is an integral part of our overall Community Wellbeing Service and wider Social Services and Education departments.

The Community and Wellbeing Service acts as the provider of services to Welsh Government and European funded projects with the aim of Tackling Poverty.

The Welsh Governments’ aims on tackling poverty include:

Reducing poverty, especially persistent poverty amongst some of our poorest people and communities, and reducing the likelihood that people will become poor

Conwy Council, alongside all other Welsh local authorities’ act as a local service provider to deliver a number of grant funded projects with the aim of tackling poverty. As with any project, we need to achieve a considerable number of performance indicators, which include:

• Tackling poverty and material deprivation
• Tackling worklessness and raising household income
• Improving the skills of young people and families
• Improving the health and educational outcomes of children, young people and families living in poverty

The grant funded projects we currently deliver in Conwy include:

• Flying Start
• Team Around the Family
• Let’s Get Working
• Rural Families First in Llanrwst

Over the last 12 months, we have driven the quality of our delivery forward through improved and increased training and development for our staff, improving our marketing plans to ensure we are reaching out to as many individuals who requires support as possible and also being the mechanism of support for early intervention and prevention alongside greater engagement with the citizens of Conwy to ensure what we are delivering is exactly what is required. We aim to continue with this method of approach to ensure our delivery is as outcome focused as possible.

Governance is continuously improving through greater involvement and collaboration with our internal audit teams, who ensure delivery and outcomes go hand in hand.

The aim of the Community and Wellbeing activities is to reduce the number of referrals into statutory services as the Wellbeing of Conwy citizens will continuously improve through a number of different approaches such as community integration, education on Wellbeing activities and building confidence.

In November 2015, we were successful in recruiting high calibre and community focused individuals through Intermediate Care Funding, which in turn strengthened our Community Wellbeing Team, led by Jayne Neal.

The focus has been to develop a summer, autumn, spring and winter programme of wellbeing activities in the refurbished Wellbeing Hub in Ty Llywelyn, Llandudno. Activities also reach out to other areas of the Borough which include Abergele, Llanfairfechan and Colwyn Bay and Llanrwst.

We engage with individuals and organisations to deliver these sessions across the borough, thus keeping the expenditure local to Conwy – we call these our providers. We aim to continue working in strong collaboration with these providers to sustain the programme of Wellbeing activities post March 2017, which is when the funding will end.

This project has gathered strong momentum and proved a success in reaching out to individuals with and without needs in improving their personal health & wellbeing across Conwy. We aim to engage with many more people over the next few months.

Some of the activities include:

• Therapeutic colouring
• Siarad a panad (a Welsh-language group aimed at learners and first language Welsh speakers within rural communities)
• Indian Head massage
• Tai Chi
• Sewing sessions

As part of the Social Care Transformation programme, a new Service Management Structure was established to drive through and implement the projects identified objectives, to bring about the required changes.

The transformation project focused on developing a new Wellbeing Service aimed at developing the strategies to support people to be part of their communities. The aim is to develop community services which will support the most vulnerable. This has required close working with the Third and Independent sector and as a result the service has the oversight of the grants that are used to respond to the commissioning strategy and needs assessment. The Service is also responsible for the first point of contact for adult services  Single Point of Access and has operational oversight of a range of prevention services.